Inside HOKIE SPORTS | Vol. 13 No. 2 | October 2020

inside.hokiesports.com 17 M ost ACC basketball players pick up the sport before they enter kindergarten. In fact, many start as toddlers, tossing plastic balls in the garbage can or socks in the laundry basket. Keve Aluma began playing basketball only when he started attending Stephen Decatur High School in his hometown of Berlin, Maryland. And he hated it. “I tried it when I was like 12 or 13, but I just didn’t really like it,” he said. “I didn’t get fouls and stuff. I still don’t really get fouls. That was my first time—my freshman year.” Times certainly have changed for the 6-foot-9 Aluma, who figures to start for Mike Young and the Virginia Tech men’s basketball team this season and provide the post presence that the Hokies lacked a season ago. He played soccer as a kid and continued with that sport through his sophomore year at Decatur, but a growth spurt pushed him to 6-7 as freshman, and basketball coach Byron Johnson noticed, seeing a raw, but potential star player every time the kid walked through the school’s hallways. Johnson decided to invite Aluma to the gym just for a test spin. After seeing him grab the rim with two hands and virtually no effort, he went to work, selling Aluma and his mother on the possibilities of a future scholarship in basketball. It eventually happened, of course, but the process to get to that point took some time. Kicking a ball into a net and throwing one through a cylinder are drastically different, as Aluma found out. “Yes, it was terrible,” Aluma said. “I had zero clue what I was doing. I just basically ran around and played defense. I didn’t get the ball that much. Didn’t really want the ball, actually. But it was hard. I didn’t think I was that good at basketball, even going into my first year of playing college. I didn’t really get it, and it was still kind of weird.” Hard work, persistence, and quality coaching all helped make Aluma a Division I player. Quality genes also worked in his favor. Aluma is the son of former Liberty University star Peter Aluma, who played for the Flames in the early 1990s and earned MVP honors at the Big South Tournament in each of his final two seasons. Keve and his father were not close, and the younger Aluma considers his stepfather, Bruce Copeland, as his true dad. Still, he inherited his father’s natural skills, including his height and athleticism. His work ethic aided in his efforts, and he became better as a player—and others started noticing. College coaches started Googling the town of Berlin—a small spot on Maryland’s Eastern Shore that sits roughly 20 minutes from the beaches of the more popular Ocean City. The summer before his senior season, Aluma received his first scholarship offer. “I don’t know if I was surprised,” Aluma said. “After I got the first one, then all of the sudden, I started getting calls, and it was interesting. I didn’t really think it was real. But I was definitely interested and taken aback. “My AAU coach, he was always telling me that he thought I could play at the next level. He was setting up coaches coming to watch me play and stuff like that, but I didn’t really expect it. Then once they came in, that changed my mindset a little bit.” Aluma took an official visit to Loyola University Maryland, but Young—a terrific evaluator of talent—and his staff invited him for a visit to Wofford, where Young coached before taking the Virginia Tech job. Young’s personable demeanor, the school’s academics, and Wofford’s tradition of winning sold Aluma, who committed on the visit. “It was the basketball and an academic school,” Aluma agreed. “That combination of both gave me the best of both worlds. “The drive was terrible—it was 9.5 hours [from Berlin]. But that didn’t really play that much of a factor. I kind of knew that, at Wofford, they won a lot of games. I definitely liked that aspect of it.” HIS FUTURE Keve Aluma once thought soccer was his future, but now he’s completely bought in to basketball, and after two seasons of playing for Mike Young at Wofford, he’s ready to make a name for himself as a Hokie in the ACC by Jimmy Robertson Continued on page 18 men’s basketball spotlight keve aluma