City of Basketball Love

Jeff Griffith (@Jeff_Griffith21)
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(Ed. Note: This article is part of our 2016-17 season coverage, which will run for the six weeks preceding the first official games of the year on Nov. 11. To access all of our high school and college preview content for this season, click here.)

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Miles Overton’s last time in a college basketball game--an ACC tournament opening round loss--took place almost 600 days ago.

Back in his hometown of Philadelphia, though, the St. Joe’s Prep grad and former Wake Forest Demon Deacon is gearing up for his first season at Drexel, as part of a large amount of transition within the Dragons’ program entering the 2016-17 campaign.

With new head coach Zach Spiker at the helm and multiple players having transferred out of the program--Terrell Allen, Rashann London, and Ahmad Fields all left this offseason--there’s a clean slate for a transition-heavy Drexel team that has been in need of just that after three of their last four seasons ended in sub-.500 records.

As seems to be the theme for everyone within the program, the changes provide optimism for Overton entering his redshirt junior year.

“It’s been great,” he said. “I think everybody is on board one hundred percent, everybody is fully ready to attack the season, Spiker is giving everybody confidence telling us his style of play, and I’m really looking forward to it.”

In his second season at Wake Forest, Overton--the son of La Salle alum, former NBA player and current head coach at Division II Lincoln University Doug Overton--averaged 5.1 points per game in seven games before transferring midway through the season.

Instead of enrolling at Drexel right away and then sitting out the spring semester and 2015 fall semester before playing his redshirt junior year last spring, he elected to wait until last fall before enrolling so that he could have two full years of eligibility remaining.

Bringing that experience from a high-major program and being familiar with the city--he grew up just fifteen minutes from Drexel in Overbrook Park--Overton sees himself having an important impact on his new team in the season ahead.

“I mean, it’s hard to say, but I think I’ll be a big part of it, we talk all the time,” he said. “Just with my experience and coming where I’ve come from as far as Wake Forest, and being in the city, I think we’re going to use my experiences a lot, and I think I should be a big part of the team.”

Being away from the game of basketball for a year after deciding to transfer to Drexel at the end of his sophomore season at Wake Forest, Overton gained a new perspective and appreciation for the game.

Now, the details he noticed while viewing the sport he loves through a different lens should provide a more well-rounded view of game as a whole for the 6-foot-4 guard who enters an upperclassman leadership role this year.

“You see everything,” he said. “Being able to step away from it, you see the little things, how people react, tendencies of people, just like the little things that go into the game as far as how the coach reacts, how the players react to certain people talking towards them. The game is a lot slower on the sideline than being in it, so you get to appreciate it a lot more, that was the biggest thing for me, appreciating it and missing how much I like playing basketball and having fun just playing basketball. I’m just eager to get out there for that.”

The year off also gave Overton a chance to get ahead in his studies and move closer to graduation, and he continued both his workouts and his academics while staying on campus this summer along with seniors Rodney Williams and Mohamed Bah.

It may have been difficult to cut out the distractions with friends and family nearby, but according to Overton, his summer’s discipline is already paying dividends.

“I just felt it was necessary to stay and show my face since I sat out all of last year, I wanted them to know I was taking it 100 percent seriously,I was going to be as prepared as possible," he said. "And I think it’s definitely shown when we’ve been having positioning things and me Rodney and Mohamed have been leading the way.”

Now, in order to write something respectable and memorable on the clean slate that Drexel has been afforded with its new look and new feel, Overton and his new head coach believe the way to build that winning culture isn’t going to be about one guy trying to play hero, but about the entire roster buying into Spiker’s message.

“You can’t do too much, you just have to be yourself,” he said. “I think Coach Spiker has said that if we do the things he asks us to do, and we do it his way, then that winning culture will come. I think, as long as everybody stays together, we’re going to have some rough times this season, but that’s every team.”

Even though the Dragons are coming off of its worst years of the last decade, their goal for the end of this season is no different than any other year.

And a Philadelphia native from one of the city’s most consistent high school programs like Overton should be well-equipped to help lead this program back in the direction of success.

“We’re not going to cut ourselves short, because we think that we can win a championship,” he said. “Winning the championship is our ultimate goal and not winning the championship would be sad, but just being contenders, being someone that’s at least on the bubble I guess, that’s a winning season for us.”