Community Corner

Decatur Coach To Play Pro Basketball In Europe

Omar Collington came home and started a mentoring group, Over and Beyond Basketball. Now he has another chance to play pro ball overseas.

By Bill Banks

If Webster’s ever approves “gym rat” as an official entry, it should include an accompanying photo of Omar Collington, dreadlocks and all.

The Renfore Middle School coach and 2002 graduate of Decatur High admits the sport likely saved his life.

Collington is the last DHS athlete to play Division I men's basketball, spending four years at the University of North Carolina-Asheville. He played five years of professional ball in Spain, Luxembourg and Germany, speaks “2½ languages” (“my Spanish,” he said, “needs work”), and knows more esoteric German beers than most kids who grew up at Gateway Manor apartments near the Marta train tracks.

This week he leaves his hometown to move back to Germany and reunite with his 5-year-old daughter DeAndra and Polish-born wife, Anette. She'll give birth next month to their second daughter in Cologne.

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He has a contract to play two more years of pro ball in Ibbenbueren, 98 miles from Cologne. He’s convinced that returning to Europe as an active player is an opportunity to grow his company, Over and Beyond Basketball, a training and mentoring organization he drew up last fall on his mother’s living room table.

In truth, however, he’s been heading in this direction a long time.

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When only 14 Omar was often seen taking care of his 10-year-old cousin Coolidge White, making sure he got to practices and games on time. He spent hours working with Coolidge on his jumper, his moves, his ball handling or just talking with him about how to behave and speak to adults.

”I think it’s definitely my calling,” Omar said recently. “I want to teach basketball skills, I want to help develop players. But this is more than just about basketball.

“I want help every kid I work with find a direction,” he added, “ to find opportunities -- which may have nothing to do with basketball -- because when I was coming up there were people who helped me.”

Omar was born in Georgetown, S.C., but his family, including mother Corenthia, sisters Ebony Collington and Juana Drayton, and brother Josh Collington, moved to Decatur when he was 11. 

His father Eugene Collington was in and out of the home but mostly out, and is now serving a 10-year prison term. In an email several days ago Omar simply wrote, “My dad never saw me play. I’m sure he wished he had of.”

Surprisingly Omar never played basketball at Renfroe, the school where he coached. His greatest claim to fame at the middle school came during the eighth grade when a teacher named William Faulkner busted him for selling marijuana on school grounds.

“When my mother came down to DeKalb County to bail me out,” Omar said, “and I saw the tears running down her face, I knew I had to change. Selling drugs, that was just about image, about money and pleasing your peers, stuff that doesn’t mean anything. I realized then, the only people I needed to please were those who cared about me.”

This included Linda and Haywood Curry (Haywood’s a longtime Commissioner on the Decatur Housing Authority Board), and it was Linda who talked Omar into trying out for basketball at Decatur High.

But his main obstacle was Faulkner, the jayvee coach. On the first day of tryouts the coach bellowed, “Collington, what are you doing here! I don’t want you wasting your time, and I sure don’t want you wasting mine!”

Those words had a thunderous effect. Over the next four years, when he couldn’t sleep at night, or the Marta tracks rattled a little too incessantly, he’d walk across East Trinity and shoot all night on the outdoor Ebster court behind the police station.

Faulkner, who today is the head coach at Washington High and regarded as one of the metro area’s best teachers of basketball fundamentals, gradually became the most important person in Omar’s life.  

He brought him along slowly. The pure-shooting though raw beginner averaged one minute a game his freshman year, then finally squeezed into the starting lineup as a sophomore. He didn’t even make varsity until his junior year when the head coach was Carter Wilson (now the school’s Athletics Director), while Faulkner had moved on to become an assistant at Jacksonville University.

Omar exploded his senior year, averaging 21 points while making second team all-state and leading Decatur to the AA championship game against Wilkinson County. Because he’d developed so late, however, Omar wasn’t highly recruited, and besides he was reluctant to attend UNC-Asheville, one of his few suitors.

He was worried about leaving his younger brother Josh who was then entering middle school. But Haywood Curry told Omar, “Don’t you worry about Josh. We’ll watch out for him. You go on and play ball in Asheville.”  

A 6-1, 185-pound shooting guard, Omar started three years at Asheville. As a senior he averaged 11.8 points, 3.4 rebounds 2.0 assists, made 42.4 percent beyond the three-point line, a stat line that helped him gain entry into the European hoop scene.

Now, one month shy of his 30th birthday, he again prepares to move half a globe away.

Omar’s plan isn’t to abandon Decatur altogether. He’ll live in Europe about eight months out of the year, with his playing season beginning in September. He plans on returning here to live May through August to train and mentor local athletes, many of whom played for him on Renfroe’s eighth-grade team last season.

“I can see myself coaching [a European] a pro team when I’m finished playing,” he said. “But I can also see myself moving back to Decatur sometime down the road. I do know that wherever I live I’ll be [dedicating myself to] the next generation, helping them find and reach goals, something I see myself doing the rest of my life.”

 





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