Excerpt from the Dayton Daily News
Before sitting down at his court-side seat to reminisce about some of the good times from his Wright State past, he wanted to stand and relish the glories of the Raiders’ basketball present.
“Let me do this first,” Dr. Drew Burleson said as turned toward the oncoming WSU players and raised his left hand to take part in the postgame ritual.
Next to him his wife, Noelle, three weeks away from giving birth to their second daughter, did the same, as did their 3-year-old daughter Sloane and two young nephews and a niece.
Wright State has just fended off Oakland, 83-71, at the Nutter Center on Saturday night and now the Raiders’ players were making their way single file around the court, giving high fives to the fans.
And when little Sloane touched palms with WSU’s 6-foot-6 freshman Tanner Holden, you knew things had come full circle in Burleson’s life.
He and Holden are from Wheelersburg, a town of just over 6,400 on the Ohio River east of Portsmouth. Both were basketball stars there, albeit 16 years apart.
Holden grew up idolizing Burleson, whose mother, Lannie, was his first grade teacher.
“I remember one time she was handing out some pictures he had autographed and I snagged one,” Holden said. “When I was little I looked up to a lot of the guys who played at our high school. I wanted to be like them.”
