Athletes - OJ Mayo

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	Athletes - OJ Mayo

OJ Mayo (born November 5, 1987 in Huntington, West Virginia, United States) is a student at North College Hill High School in Cincinnati, Ohio. His full name is Ovinton J'Anthony Mayo. He is scheduled to graduate in May 2007.

Early years

The first public mention of Mayo occurred in the Ashland, Kentucky, Kentucky Daily Independent newspaper in an article called 'Phenom' in the paper's January 21, 2001 edition. when Mayo was just a sixth grader. In that article he was listed as being a "6-foot-1½ point guard with size 14 shoe". The article also mentioned that he had repeated a grade and therefore was ineligible to play varsity high school basketball as of yet.

Mayo commuted from Huntington to Rose Hill Christian, a private school in Ashland, since student athletes can play high school varsity sports as seventh graders in Kentucky. In the seventh grade, he put up numbers that dwarfed the production of players five years his senior. In his first game for his varsity team he scored 27 points, had seven rebounds and three steals. He was a seventh grader playing against juniors and seniors in high school.

During his seventh grade year in January of 2002, Mayo was mentioned in Sports Illustrated Magazine and on CBS Sportsline.com. There were also full articles in the Louisville Courier-Journal, the Huntington, West Virginia Herald-Dispatch and USA Today.

After the completion of the basketball season during his eigth grade year, he moved to Cincinnati with his grandfather in order to attend North College Hill high school near Cincinnati, and test his mettle in a more competitive environment.

The phenom

In 2005, the 6' 5" 205 lbs. 17-year old sophomore point guard was selected as Mr. Basketball of Ohio, in addition to being named Associated Press Division III Player of the Year for the second consecutive season. He averaged nearly 30 points, six rebounds, and seven assists per game. He also led his team to consecutive AP poll titles and garnered much attention from the media, appearing in the pages of Sports Illustrated among other publications. Much like another Ohio high school star, Lebron James, Mayo has drawn large enough crowds to force his team into seeking larger venues to support the growing crowds, and often attracts National Basketball Association stars such as James and Carmelo Anthony to watch his games.

When his team played a game in Huntington, 3,500 fans packed the Veteran's Memorial Fieldhouse in order to watch him play. When his team played a game at Cerritos College, 6,500 fans filled a moderately sized arena to watch him play. On Martin Luther King Day in 2006, more than 10,000 fans came to Xavier University's Cintas Center to watch Mayo and North College Hill play Cincinnati Taft. In February, the largest crowd to ever see a high school game in Cincinnati, more than 16,000, watched North College Hill fall to the nation's number one rated team, Oak Hill Academy. Mayo had been considered a lock to make the leap straight from high school to the NBA, but the recent Collective Bargaining Agreement between the NBA and its players has instituted a rule making 19 years-old the minimum age at which a player can enter the NBA, thus curtailing those plans. He is currently considering recruitment offers from most every major college, although in recent articles (during his junior season), he purposely does not name any.

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Athletes - OJ Mayo

Early years

The phenom

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