How a lunch at Sweetgreen got Ethan Okwuosa back on track
The adjustment to D1, and to BU men's basketball, was far harder than expected. Then Joe Jones asked him to get lunch.
BOSTON — The details are a little hazy, but sometime in late February, the head coach of BU men’s basketball texted his 20-year-old junior transfer and asked him to get lunch. The team had departed Washington D.C., where it dismantled American the night before, at around five in the morning and had finally returned to campus. It was an off-day. Ethan Okwuosa had an exam.
But Joe Jones wanted to get lunch. And as he and Okwuosa would eventually laugh about, a one-on-one was long overdue.
About three weeks earlier, in a dramatic win over Lehigh to start the month, Okwuosa played a season-low 13 minutes. He started — which he always did — but almost immediately, a backdoor cut snuck behind him that Jones couldn’t stand for. Ethan, he recalls Jones declaring, is not ready to play. So, for the majority of the next 40 minutes, one of only seven transfers Jones had ever signed in 13 years on the job watched from the bench. Okwuosa sat there, literally, on the edge of his seat. “I was out of it,” he’d later admit.
And he couldn't get back in it. Over the next five games, the last of which that win over American, BU’s starting shooting guard made only 10 shots. The team enjoyed a stunning turnaround to a season that was once nosediving. Okwuosa, meanwhile, called his parents, explaining he’d never gone so long without scoring more than 10 points.
“I genuinely was just overwhelmed,” he says. “And I didn’t understand what I was doing wrong.”
His coach knew he was being really hard on him. “When you’re a starter,” Jones says, “I expect a lot.” But Jones also saw said starter struggling, and his gut told him he needed to do something about it. He figured he needed to humanize everything and learn how to coach Okwuosa, specifically, in the most impactful way. Ultimately, Jones says, “I just wanted to handle his mistakes better.”
And so, on that late-February off-day, Joe Jones asked Ethan Okwuosa where he wanted to go. There’s a Sweetgreen at the corner of Brookline Avenue and Kilmarnock Street, a couple hundred feet down the road from Fenway Park. Jones picked up Okwuosa outside of class, and there they went, for their very first 1-on-1 meeting since the season began.
“That’s the hard part about being a transfer,” Okwuosa says now, sitting in a lobby below Case Gym exactly three weeks before the start of his senior year. “He knows you on film. He knows you on paper. He knows you from word of mouth. But he doesn’t know you.”
Ethan Okwuosa, of North Haven, Conn. via Manchester, N.H., is described as an extremely thoughtful young man. He’s calm, he prefers the peace and quiet of the suburbs to the bustling metropolis of a big city and he’s as well-spoken as they come.
But try asking him about COVID-19.
The nicer response, which he gives Case In Point, calls it “a cascade of events.”
As a junior at Cheshire Academy, Okwuosa was destined for Division 1. He had offers from programs in the MAAC, the CAA, America East and the Patriot League. Then a pandemic ripped across the globe and, as far as recruiting in the NCAA was concerned, changed everything. All existing student-athletes were granted an extra year of eligibility. Suddenly, the need for incoming freshmen dwindled, as players staying for a fifth year — or, of course, players transferring in for a fifth year — could fill those spots.
Okwuosa, still uncommitted by his senior year of high school, was, as he puts it, “kind of left in the dark.” So he called and texted, and coaches that only a year earlier had offered him a full scholarship suddenly kept giving him a dreaded response: I don’t know. An abstain, but a clear indication that an offer was about to be lost. “It went without saying,” Okwuosa says.
Scrambling, he posted his film on Twitter and reached out to D1 coaches at schools he’d never considered attending, some as far away as North Texas. At the same time, D2 coaches closer to home realized an athletic guard who was never a realistic target still hadn’t signed anywhere. They offered full rides and implored Okwuosa to take a visit.
In the end, there were still D1 offers out there. But a teenager who says he values relationships and honesty was left to decide between D1 opportunities that popped up last minute or D2 schools that “were treating me like a celebrity.”
And with that, Ethan Okwuosa wound up at Southern New Hampshire University.
The plan, of course, was never to stay for four years. Okwuosa knew he wanted to transfer into D1 as soon as possible. He played angry his freshman year, hurling pressure on himself to ball his way out of a place he felt he didn’t belong. “I just thought I had to do everything, every single game, every single practice, to prove myself,” Okwuosa says. He relaxed as the year went on and finally started his first game in late January. He scored a career-high 15 points that day, only to find out he broke his hand in the process, an injury that, as he says, “derailed everything.”
So, he buckled down in D2 for another season. And after averaging 12.4 points per game as a sophomore and earning second-team all-conference honors, Okwuosa finally entered the portal in early April of 2023.
Joe Jones called quickly. His roster was bare after a significant senior class had graduated the previous season and he was already familiar with Okwuosa, whose head coach at SNHU, Jack Perri, was an assistant on Jones’ staff at BU in 2017. There was an initial weariness about stepping on an old friend’s toes, according to Okwuosa. But sooner than later, Jones extended an offer over the phone. If I knew you were okay with coming to BU, Jones told him, I would have offered you two weeks ago. He was enthusiastic and he needed to be.
After visiting BU and his other finalist, Columbia (ironically enough, Jones’ former employer), Okwuosa returned home to Connecticut in May, still uncommitted. One day, Jones and his entire staff, decked out in red BU apparel, showed up to Cheshire Academy to watch Okwuosa put shots up. “I tried to remind them, like, it’s not a workout, it’s just me shooting,” Okwuosa says. “They were like, ‘It doesn’t matter, man. We want you.’”
A day later, Okwuosa called assistant coach Mike Quinn, who was to be his positional coach at BU. I’m ready to be a Terrier, he told him. Jones then called right away. “I think they were like, celebrating or something,” Okwuosa says. “Because, like, a second after, he called me.”
Whatever was going on in Boston, Okwuosa was simply walking around in his backyard. “Chilling,” in his words. At long last, he would be a Division 1 college basketball player.
“This is a level I always wanted to be at,” he says. “So I assumed it would be smooth sailing.”
Case In Point sat in on several BU men’s basketball practices before the start of this 2024-25 season. They are treated like playoff games. Intense is the word. Urgent, too. And Loud. Definitely Loud.
Joe Jones demands it be this way. Communication is mandatory. “We can’t play unless you’re going to open your mouth,” he tells his players during one practice. Other times, he’s a bit less proper, like later in that session, when BU is repping transition moments and the gym, apparently, is a little too quiet. He stops the drill and throws the paper he’s holding onto the floor in about the most theatrical way possible. “Point!” Jones bellows at his team, “and talk!” It’s worth noting the gym was already at a can’t-hear-yourself-think decibel, but the standards are high. They need to be.
Jones is also undeniably tough on his players. Mistakes are pointed out constantly, sometimes politely, sometimes with, well, less patience. It extends from full five-on-five scrimmages all the way down to before full-contact practice even begins. Jones stops the dynamic stretches before one practice, presumably because the team is giggling a tad too much, and wonders if the gym is “getting anything done.”
“Ask yourselves that,” he tells them. “Everything we do needs to have a fundamental purpose.”
Ethan Okwuosa, for his part, appreciates this style. “I love hard coaching,” he says. But last season, he was simultaneously a junior starting every game and a rookie to both D1 and the program.
And the realities of the D1 game tend to hit new players like a train. Even the 20-year-olds with two years of college basketball under their belt. “The speed of the game,” Okwuosa says, “is very, very fast here.” Not necessarily the physical speed of the players — that, Okwuosa maintains, is actually fairly comparable to D2 — but rather the speed with which information is processed and decisions are made.
“I felt my athleticism here,” Okwuosa says. “But in this conference in particular, you need to be really strategic and you need to out-think your opponents. That’s the thing that took me a while to get used to. Like, ‘Why can’t, if I’m better than this guy, why can’t I just continue scoring on him?’”
It’s a weird thing to wrap one’s head around, needing to think faster and harder on the court, because basketball players specifically don’t want to be thinking. Okwuosa says “the overthinker always loses,” and Jones said before the beginning of last season he wanted Okwuosa “thinking less and playing more.” So it is, at the end of the day, two instructions fighting against each other.
When Okwuosa is asked how he goes about solving that inherent contradiction, he talks about the necessity of playing with confidence. And it is precisely here where everything started to crumble.
Because “confidence,” Okwuosa says, “is a funny thing. It’s so hard to build up and so easy to get stripped away.”
The first domino to fall was rather simple: Ethan Okwuosa did not know what BU men’s basketball wanted him to do. He knew his role wasn’t the ball-dominant shot creator it was his last year at SNHU, but that was about it. In a year of immense roster turnover — the Terriers welcomed eight new players last season, and the returning players didn’t have much experience, either — Jones started the season mostly in the dark, and no doubt a few square pegs were shoved into round holes. “Yeah,” Jones says, “that was wild.”
This was, of course, the reality of last season. There was no avoiding it. Still, Okwuosa was starting every game. He knew he was important, and he didn’t know why.
So a self-proclaimed overthinker tried to do everything. He learned all the concepts. He worked to understand the plays, to master what BU was trying to do as a team so he could help out everywhere. He was, as he says, “putting in the effort.”
But when you’re trying to be everywhere, you open yourself up to mistakes anywhere. “After some little mistakes I would get subbed out,” Okwuosa says. “And that would lead to the overthinker in me trying to answer the question of why I got subbed out. And all this is happening during the course of a 40-minute game.”
It didn’t help that Jones, as he admitted in a press conference towards the end of the season, was coaching Okwuosa as if he was an upperclassman. He kind of needed to, because outside of then-senior Miles Brewster, Okwuosa was the only upperclassman in the backcourt. But Okwuosa was not an elder in the same way as Brewster, who was in his fourth year with the program and clearly understood the standards. “My expectations were really high for Ethan,” Jones says. “And I had a hard time handling that, to be honest with you.” The tough love was and is consistent for everyone on the roster, but someone like Brewster probably didn’t need as many words of affirmation to balance it out, because, after all, he’d been around long enough to know what was good and what was bad. Okwuosa hadn’t.
“I felt like I wasn’t being verbally rewarded, or affirmed, or given that confidence booster that I would need sometimes,” Okwuosa says.
And that’s how a starting shooting guard made only 10 shots in five games. It’s also why Joe Jones and Ethan Okwuosa went to Sweetgreen during an off-day in the middle of the most important stretch of the season.
“It’s hard,” Jones says, “when you come to play for a guy, and you’re jumping into the fire with him, and you haven’t really spent a lot of time getting to know him.”
So they broke down everything. They simply needed to understand each other. Jones learned how much Okwuosa was truly trying, the effort and the intentionality he was playing with even if the mistakes were piling up. “He’s a very thoughtful young man,” Jones says. “And he wants to do the right things.”
Okwuosa realized that his head coach wasn’t just a screaming head. “Although what he may say on the court you could take one way, he really processes a lot of things,” Okwuosa says. “He was able to see that I was not mentally good. So he processed that and he admitted it to me, and ever since then, I knew he’s a smart guy. He’s emotionally aware. And he understands how hard it is.”
In the end, they just needed to meet in the middle. Jones has his style, and Okwuosa has the things that make him go. It was just about finding a balance between the two.
Says Okwuosa: “I told him, ‘The yelling is okay. But I just need to know what I’m doing well.’”
Exactly four weeks before BU’s season-opener at home against Northeastern, the Terriers are engaged in a full-court, five-on-five scrimmage towards the end of a Monday practice. Ethan Okwuosa is on the red team with mostly freshmen and reserve players. He’s the leader of the group and he’s playing like it.
He anticipates a pass at the top of the key, clicks and closes without hesitation and intercepts it easily. He catches a pass on the wing, immediately pulls up for a contested three-pointer and drains it. On the very next possession, he begs for the basketball at the top of the key, and when he finally gets his wish, he instantly fires a pass to a wide-open teammate for a corner triple. Later, as the shot clock winds down on the red team, he calmly comes around a ball-screen and nails a jumper from the elbow.
He looks like he’s playing free. Like he isn't thinking. And he’s yet to miss a shot during this scrimmage.
A week later, in that lobby below the gym, Okwuosa is asked if he feels like the game is slowing down. “A thousand percent,” he says. “Coach and I joke about that. It was always there. It’s just that I was overthinking.”
For his part, Jones pushes back on the notion there was ever a riff or a misunderstanding between the two. They both were simply going through an adjustment while under the natural pressure to win. “It’s no one’s fault,” Jones says. “It’s just the reality of what we were dealing with.”
The very next game after their meeting at Sweetgreen, Okwuosa scored 12 points on 6-of-11 shooting, including a cathartic dunk late in the fourth quarter. The game after that, on the road at Lehigh — the same opponent against which his big slump began — Okwuosa made the game-winning, buzzer-beating layup in overtime.
“That really just shows,” Okwuosa said at the time, “the relationship between coach and player.”
Now, here they are. Okwuosa is headed into his final year of college basketball. He’s a senior co-captain. There’s a clearer understanding of his role — which, as it turns out, is to kind of do everything — but there’s also a clearer understanding, on Jones’ part, of what’s needed to get the best out of one of BU’s most important players.
Okwuosa isn’t immune to criticism. Not by a long shot. Even during that scrimmage, which he dominates, the whistle is blown while the red team is on defense. Jones sees something he doesn’t like, and he walks over to Okwuosa. He explains his critique. The entire gym listens.
As Jones is speaking, Okwuosa’s face brightens. He smiles a little and nods vigorously. He clearly gets it. Eventually, the whistle blows again, and play continues.
Later, when the red team is back on offense and the shot clock is again running out, the ball is in Okwuosa’s hands. There’s no panic. He drives down the lane. The defense quickly constricts around him, so he dumps it off to a wide-open teammate. An easy bucket follows.
The whistle blows again.
Joe Jones has something to declare inside Case Gym.
“Hey Ethan. Outstanding.”