Kansas Jayhawks will face college hoops’ oldest player in Monday night’s opener
AI-generated summary reviewed by our newsroom.
- Ramel Bethea, 29, joins Green Bay and will start against Kansas in 2025 opener.
- Green Bay recruited Bethea from MiraCosta for elite shot blocking and size.
- Coach Gottlieb built roster around toughness and retention to improve 4-28 record.
At age 29, Ramel Bethea of the Green Bay Phoenix enters Monday’s 2025-26 season opener against Kansas as the oldest player in college basketball.
The 6-foot-9, 190-pound sophomore from Fort Washington, Maryland, who did not play hoops in high school, was introduced to the sport during his five years in the Navy. By playing for a Navy intramural team while enrolled in the service, he transformed himself into a forward talented enough to land a scholarship at MiraCosta College in Oceanside, California.
After averaging 12.7 points and 9.7 rebounds per game at the juco a year ago, he signed with Doug Gottlieb’s Phoenix. And now he will play in his first major-college game when Green Bay of the Horizon League takes on the Jayhawks in a game set to tip off at 7 p.m. inside Allen Fieldhouse.
“I did tell my staff competitiveness, character, toughness, that’s it,” said second-year Green Bay coach Gottlieb, who’s also the host of a popular Fox Sports Radio show. “But I also told them that we’re a nightclub … 21 and over. If they don’t have a working ID, we don’t want them.”
Gottlieb made the comment jokingly at the Horizon League’s men’s basketball media day event, in reference to his recruiting philosophy at the mid-major program.
The game’s elder statesman
Of course, 29 is much older than 21 — especially in college hoops.
“Well, I don’t know the situation. He’s in the Navy, isn’t he?” KU coach Bill Self said Friday when asked about facing a player five years older than fourth-year NBA veteran (and former Jayhawk) Christian Braun. “First of all, kudos to him for serving our country. I mean, that’s probably the coolest thing about it, from my standpoint.
“The other thing I think about collectively,” Self continued, “(is) if he and Gee (Ngala, KU’s 26-year-old senior guard) go to dinner, you’ve got 55 years of age basically eating food together, so, breaking bread together. I didn’t know he (Bethea) was the oldest in college basketball. But anybody that serves our country in the manner which he did, I think anybody would be good with allowing him to play at that age.”
Gottlieb explained the circumstances surrounding the signing of Bethea, who will turn 30 next July.
One of Gottlieb’s assistant coaches, Aerick Sanders, li,ke Gottlieb hails from California. Sanders scouted a game last January between Fullerton and MiraCosta, with the intent of recruiting a center at Fullerton. Instead, it was Bethea who — in scoring 20 points with 11 rebounds and nine blocked shots — caught the assistant coach’s eye.
“He (Sanders) was like, ‘Coach, there is this kid who I think he’s 27, but he was in the military,’” Gottlieb told the Green Bay Press-Gazette. “He’s like, ‘He’s a (expletive) freak.’”
Stiff competition for Bethea
Green Bay beat out approximately 25 other suitor-schools for the late-blooming Bethea, who did not even try out for the basketball team at Friendly High School in Fort Washington.
“When the transfer portal opened up, a lot of schools that reached out to me might have picked from the transfer portal and forgot about me,” Bethea told the Press-Gazette. “Green Bay was one of those schools that pretty much didn’t forget about me. I went on a visit with Eastern Kentucky, but it was my first visit, and I didn’t want to make a decision then. Once I made a visit with them, a lot of schools that kind of forgot about me were like, ‘Oh, snap, that guy again.’
“A lot of schools reached out to me again, but Green Bay came to one of my games. I started to become more knowledgeable about the politics of basketball throughout the season and started to learn why certain things happen. One season and a good recruiting class, that’s all it takes to turn a program around.”
Gottlieb says Bethea is special
Gottlieb has found Bethea to be an outstanding prospect.
“He’s an unbelievable shot-blocker, unbelievable. It cannot be taught,” Gottlieb said. “He has great feel, good hands. There’s a lot he has to learn. But if you’re teaching him something, it’s like somebody woke up from a coma or came from another planet.
“You say, ‘Hey remember that game?’ He is like, ‘No, I didn’t watch basketball.’ If it didn’t happen on 2K or didn’t happen in the last four or five years he’s got nothing about it. So it’s refreshing,” Gottlieb stated, referring to coaching a player whose contract with the Navy expired in 2024.
“But you literally have to teach all those different phrases and things that we just take for granted. You know, ‘Hedge, drop, hey, we’re tagging here, like Ramel, what is the midline? Ramel, what is that?’
“All these things, you have to kind of go through it. I have a lot of respect for him, because he’s vulnerable around the rest of the guys, because he doesn’t know these things. And I was like, ‘Look, it’s OK to say ‘I don’t know, but if you do know, tell me, and I’ll get through it. But if you don’t know, tell me.’ He’s going to be an interesting one because he has his one unique, specific skill (shot blocking), and the rest we’re trying to build around it, but Ramel Bethea is an amazing, I’d like to say young man, but he’s not. He’s older than my director of basketball ops. So that part has been unique.”
Bethea first experienced competing for something besides an intramural team last year at MiraCosta.
“I thought I was good, but when I got to juco, it was a reality check,” Bethea told the Press-Gazette. “I just started hooping and my experience is very low, to the point that my athleticism and height is carrying me most of the way.
“I used to struggle with confidence a lot,” Bethea added. “It’s not hard to see my potential when you see me hoop, but you can see the youth in my game.”
A closer look at Green Bay’s roster
Bethea is one of 10 new players (to go with six returnees) on Green Bay’s roster. Gottlieb’s team, picked last in the Horizon League preseason poll, hopes to improve on last year’s disastrous 4-28 campaign.
Marcus Hall, a 6-6 junior, leads the group of returnees. He averaged 13.9 points and 4.2 rebounds per game last year. The team also has former Valparaiso player Preston Ruedinger, who averaged 8.0 points and 2.7 rebounds a game a year ago.
“Each player we pursued (in recruiting) had to check three additional boxes,” Gottlieb, a former starting point guard at Oklahoma State, told the Press-Gazette. “One, they had to be tough. Two, they had to come from a winning program, and three, they had to fit our culture.
“We didn’t want guys who routinely miss practice, or smoke weed, or don’t take school seriously. As former Green Bay coach Dick Bennett told me, ‘The better the kid, the more they’ll improve.’ He’s absolutely right.
“My belief at a place like Green Bay, we have to lead the league in retention in order to be successful. It’s too expensive to add new players every year and too difficult to build cohesion and culture with heavy roster turnover. Our two top returnees, Preston Ruedinger and sophomore forward Marcus Hall, came into their exit interviews (after the 2024-25 season) and all they wanted to know was, ‘What are we going to do to get better?’ Preston even declined an NIL raise and told me to use the money to help get other players. Marcus probably could have made more on the open market, but he was just super excited about coming back.”
Add to the mix Bethea, who is happy about coming aboard what Green Bay hopes is a program on the rise.
“He has so much potential,” Gottlieb told the Press-Gazette. “It’s crazy.”
