It’s the last Sunday of October. The first game of the season is over and Brett Hollins steps out from the tunnel at Gill Coliseum for one more look at the old arena at Oregon State University in Corvallis. The pep band is gone. His Southern Oregon teammates are already on the bus.

A few people linger in the far corner of the gym. A man sweeps the floor.

Orange and black pennants on one end of the building show Oregon State basketball legends Gary Payton and A.C. Green. Banners hanging over center court honor a pair of Final Four appearances and eight national quarterfinals.

“This,” Hollins says, “was just a special game.”

Hollins’ stepfather, Elishama Wheeler, flew in from San Antonio, Texas, to attend.

For several years, Hollins’ only basketball arena was a concrete box. A prison cafeteria with a cement floor that was roughly the length of half a standard court. After pleading guilty in 2017 to stabbing two men at a college party in Ashland, he was sentenced to five years and 10 months in prison before receiving a conditional commutation in March 2021 from then-Gov. Kate Brown.

Now 29, Hollins is likely the oldest college basketball player in the country.

And in this moment, Gill Coliseum is a cathedral.

“These are the colors I saw every morning when I woke up,” Hollins says as he looks up at the banners.

In his final two years at the Snake River Correctional Institution near Ontario, Hollins wrote letters to college basketball coaches, telling his story and hoping to build relationships for after his release. The response he cherished most was on OSU letterhead, written by Beavers coach Wayne Tinkle. Hollins made it the centerpiece of the collage he taped to the bottom of the bunk above him.

The Beavers scheduled an exhibition game for this night against NAIA Southern Oregon after Raiders coach Matt Zosel told Tinkle that Hollins was playing at SOU. They met briefly before tipoff when Tinkle spotted Hollins on Southern Oregon’s bench and wrapped the 6-foot-4 player in a hug. He told Hollins he was proud of him and to have fun in the game.

Hollins was introduced as a starting guard, but shot poorly in 19 minutes and scored just five points. Late in the game, however, he disrupted the dribble of Oregon State guard Christian Wright, bodying up to him and forcing a shot clock violation, causing the SOU coaches to leap off the bench in celebration.

It is only after the Beavers’ 84-61 victory that Hollins and Tinkle have their first opportunity to really talk.

Tinkle, 58, appears from another corner of the gym. He is out of breath when he reaches Hollins. He is 6-foot-10, a former center at the University of Montana with a glacier-white crew cut.

“I’m sorry,” he says, “they told me the bus was already gone.”

The two quickly pick up the conversation that began in the mail more than three years earlier.

“Those letters, man,” the Beavers coach says. “I told the team after the game, it wasn’t about me. It’s about how I was inspired by you.”

Tinkle tells Hollins he could have been bitter or blamed others for his situation. Instead, he took full accountability for his actions. He had a clear vision for what he wanted to do next.

Hollins had been moved that Tinkle called him “a man of character.”

“You didn’t talk about basketball at all,” Hollins says. “You talked about life as a man. That was all I needed to hear.”

The group from the far end of the court joins them under the basket. Among them are Tinkle’s wife, Lisa, and daughter Elle. Tinkle has told them the story and they also want to meet Hollins.

Hollins’ stepfather asks Tinkle if he can take a photo of the two of them. Then Wheeler joins for one.

Tinkle and Hollins hug again.

“I’m going to be following you,” Tinkle says. “I would love to help give you your start.”

“Everbody’s got a blank slate”

When Hollins was released from Snake River on March 17, 2021, there was only one place he knew to go. He couldn’t leave the state as part of his post-prison supervision. He moved in with the same friend he had been visiting when he attended the 2016 party in Ashland that changed his life.

In the year between his arrest and sentencing, he had played a year of junior college basketball in California. Following his release, he received permission to travel to Atlanta for a junior college recruiting showcase. He played well and picked up offers from small schools like Texas A&M-Texarkana, West Virginia State and Union College in Kentucky.

But in his time back in southern Oregon, he had made connections with people at SOU. By chance, he’d met an assistant coach on the women’s basketball team who invited him to play in a pickup game at 5:30 a.m. three days a week.

A member of the men’s basketball team was also a regular in that morning run. He asked for a copy of Hollins’ highlight tape so he could show the Raiders’ longtime men’s basketball coach, Brian McDermott.

The man known as “Coach Mac” already knew of Hollins. He had recruited him when Hollins played at MiraCosta College in 2016-17 and McDermott had been among the coaches Hollins wrote to from prison. By 2021, McDermott had been the coach at SOU for 25 years.

Josh McDermott played for his dad at SOU and is now the school’s sports information director. He is not sure the coach would have taken on a player with Hollins’ background earlier in his career. But by the time he’d reached his 60s, his perspective had shifted.

“I think my dad admired his willingness to be so open about his experiences,” the younger McDermott says, “found him to be genuine and was impressed by the steps he’d made. He thought he could help the team, too, but this wasn’t like a program-changing talent. He just believed Brett could succeed here.”

Hollins considered his options. Leaving the state to play would be complicated. When he first told his mother about his dilemma and that he was considering SOU, Patrice Wheeler asked, “Why would we go back there?”

But then she called him a few days later. She had prayed about it and now believed her son had a duty to return to Ashland so he could meaningfully contribute to the community he had harmed.

Hollins faced a “no trespass” order from the campus after his arrest.

Before that could be reversed, he was required to meet with both the head of campus security and the dean of students.

The dean, Carrie Vath, asked him about his goals and why he wanted to enroll at SOU.

“We were very impressed and felt very confident in allowing Brett to return,” Vath says.

That decision cleared his way to becoming a college basketball player at 27 years old. Just like he had dreamed about during all those months in a cell when he woke up at 5 a.m. for workouts.

That call with campus administrators validated that work.

“He didn’t just come back here to play basketball,” his stepfather says. “He had to fight to come back here.”

But five days before the start of Hollins’ first season, McDermott, the man who had believed in him, was diagnosed with a brain tumor. He stepped down from coaching immediately. The interim coach, Zac Olson, did not connect with his oldest player in the same way.

Hollins was frustrated that he was not playing. Following a tournament game at Oregon Tech in which he did not leave the bench, Hollins punched a picture on the wall near the team’s locker room, shattering it.

A couple of games later, the Raiders won by 20 and every player on the roster got in the game except for Hollins. He quit the team after that night.

“When you have this dream that carried you through difficult times,” Hollins says, “and now you’re living the dream, but the dream is nothing like you thought … that’s devastating.”

He now says he was not ready for the opportunity. Being a college athlete carried more responsibility than he was prepared for after being in the prison system for four years. He suddenly had so much freedom. He drank a lot.

Hollins considered leaving Ashland. Giving up on SOU. But again his mother encouraged him to stay. To finish what he had started and get his degree.

“We told him to think about leaving Oregon with something tangible besides this tragedy,” Patrice Wheeler says.

He remained in school. And he stayed close to the basketball team. Hollins showed up at away games, driving hundreds of miles to support the team. He sat in on practices.

He paid Coach Mac weekly visits until his death in March 2022.

“That was really hard on Brett,” says Matt Sayre, SOU’s athletics director, “because Brett had connected really tightly with Coach McDermott.”

When SOU hired Lane Community College’s coach, Zosel, as McDermott’s replacement for the following season, Hollins felt ready to try again.

Zosel, a graduate assistant at the University of Oregon when the Ducks reached the Final Four in 2017, is not a typical coach. He spent eight years in the Army, including four with the Army Rangers 75th Battalion.

In his first year back at Southern Oregon, where he played both football and basketball, Zosel didn’t bother getting a house. He just slept in the locker room. He served as a special agent in the Diplomatic Security Service and speaks fluent Arabic. He implements his offense based on Noam Chomsky’s theory of linguistics.

When Hollins showed up in his office and told him McDermott gave him a chance the year before, Zosel said, “Well, everybody’s got a blank slate, so we’re good to go.”

Some of the veteran players on the team were opposed to bringing Hollins back for the 2022-23 season. But Tre Carlisle, then a senior from Camas, advocated for him.

They sat together at the end of the bench the previous season and Hollins was always building him up.

“Be ready, dude,” he would say. “Your time will come.”

Carlisle is now a graduate assistant at SOU.

“Brett kept me in it,” he says, “and I wanted the same thing for him.”

Zosel asked Carlisle what he thought about Hollins playing a second season. Carlisle told the new coach Hollins would help the team.

“With his journey and everything,” Carlisle says, “I wanted something for him to go right. So I wanted him to stick around.”

“Right on time”

It’s the first Friday in February. Southern Oregon is playing at Warner Pacific in Southeast Portland. A large man in a maroon sweatsuit and a backward hat sits on the first row of the bleachers.

As he watches Hollins warm up while sporting a black No. 11 jersey, he says, “This is literally everything we talked about every time we worked out.”

The man is Drew Dukeshire, a former inmate at Snake River who helped train Hollins every morning in prison. Dukeshire was released last year and this is the first time he is seeing his friend play college basketball.

Hollins gets a steal on the first possession and Dukeshire leaps up from his seat.

“This is crazy!” he says.

Last season, whenever Dukeshire would call his family from prison, he would ask them to pull up Southern Oregon’s box scores. Armed with information, he would then call Hollins.

“All we talked about was how aggressive you’re going to be,” he remembers saying, “and you have five points and two rebounds?”

Hollins is in the midst of his second full season with the Raiders. There were times a year ago, when opposing fans would discover his past and yell things. Once at an away game, a person in the stands displayed a sign that said Hollins was “a slasher on the court and in real life.”

This year, he ranks sixth on the team in scoring at 7.2 points per game. Many games he starts at guard, depending on the matchup. Hollins, who does not receive an athletic scholarship, has emerged as a leader and serves as the team’s captain.

But following a frustrating loss in November, Zosel was switching up his lineup in practice. Playing “mind games” like his players say the former State Department agent is known to do. Hollins threw the ball into the bleachers out of frustration. Zosel made the team run sprints. On the next play, Hollins stole the ball and went the length of the court. He took his anger out on the dunk, and fractured the radius in his right arm. He underwent surgery and missed five weeks, including SOU’s upset win over the defending NAIA champion College of Idaho in Ashland on Dec. 5.

In January, Yahoo Sports published a story about a 28-year-old player at Division II Lane College in Tennessee with the headline, “Meet college basketball’s oldest player.” Hollins will turn 30 in July. He texted the story to a reporter.

“Inaccurate lol,” he wrote.

Late in the first half at Warner Pacific, Hollins drops into a defensive stance. His hands shadow his opponents’ movements and his eyes flicker with intensity. He spots an opening and swipes at the ball, dislodging it from the opposing guard. Hollins chases after the loose ball, grabs it and realizes suddenly he is alone in the frontcourt.

He has time to consider his move. He glances over at Dukeshire.

He smirks.

“Gimme that!” Dukeshire shouts.

Hollins refocuses. He dribbles once more, then takes two powerful steps, elevating and swinging his arm like a pinwheel.

Dukeshire jumps out of his front row seat and sprints down the sideline, jubilant.

“That was right on time,” he says once he sits back down. “I’ve seen that dunk probably, no exaggeration, 100 times when we played pickup basketball.”

There are others at the game who know Hollins from prison. One man, Casey Cooper, drove from Bend before heading back over the Cascades after halftime.

He stands at the corner of the court, near the door. He met Hollins at the Warner Creek Correctional Facility near Lakeview. Hollins was one of the few people Cooper says he encountered who tried to help him through his sentence.

“In there,” Cooper says, “that’s not really how it goes.”

Hollins suggested Cooper, who had never been incarcerated before being sentenced to 13 months on a count of identity theft in 2018, write out a plan for the first month after his release, then the first six months.

“It was something I needed in there,” Cooper says, “because I was really just keeping my head down. It was good to have somebody I could spend time with, especially talking basketball.”

Cooper, 48, says he played ball himself at Clackamas Community College and Western Oregon. He and Hollins bonded over the game.

“I could see how good he was,” he says.

Hollins loses his defender with a crossover and scores a layup. He finishes with 12 points, six rebounds, three steals and two blocks as the Raiders pull away for an 88-62 win.

It’s remarkable that he ended up here, he knows that. To think back to that night in 2016, his first time in Ashland and his first time on campus at Southern Oregon University, it feels like a different life. A different person. When he first came to Ashland he was a lost soul, searching. Now he’s a man with a purpose.

“We were all so young”

Hollins is on course to graduate in June with a communications degree. His parents have already purchased their airline tickets to attend the commencement.

“He’s going to have a piece of paper in his hand,” Patrice Wheeler says, “and it’s not just a degree. It’s more than that. It’s finishing something that you started.”

The day she received the phone call that her son had been arrested, Hollins’ mother was pulled by many emotions. She remembers thinking, ‘’Oh my God, there are two mothers getting another type of phone call.”

She still wrestles with those feelings.

“I’m happy that our son is on the mend and going to do great things,” she says. “At the same time, I want those mothers to know that they were a part of my thoughts and prayers as much as Brett was a part of my thoughts and prayers.”

One condition of Hollins’ sentencing agreement was a requirement that he not contact his victims, and he has honored that. But he says he would love to speak with both of the men he hurt. He thinks he would give them a hug.

“We were all so young,” he says.

Hollins remains on post-prison supervision and continues to pay restitution.

Ultimately, he is grateful for that night, as strange as that sounds.

“It put me in the place to shape the character that I was meant to have,” he says.

According to the Oregon Criminal Justice Commission’s latest recidivism analysis, more than half of people on parole or post-prison supervision are rearrested within three years.

Hollins is adamant he will not reoffend.

“It will never happen again,” he says.

Zosel views Hollins as a source of inspiration for his team. Hollins gives to them and they, in turn, give something valuable back to him.

“This actually is how it’s supposed to work,” the coach says. “You do something terrible, you come to terms with it, and you do your time and you come out way better. That’s kind of my thing. That there is always hope.”

The Southern Oregon basketball season ends on March 2 in the second round of the Cascade Conference tournament. The College of Idaho gets revenge on the Raiders for their December upset and pulls away for a double-digit win. The student section taunts Hollins throughout the game. A contingent of fans chants, “Four more years!” — a reference to his prison sentence — as he finishes with 10 points and eight rebounds in his final game.

The unlikely college basketball career of Brett Hollins comes to a close in Caldwell, Idaho, barely half an hour from the gates of the prison where he served most of his sentence.

In early February, though, he was still a determined captain trying to lead his team as far as it can possibly go.

“Build off yesterday”

The small college athletics schedule is grueling. After the blowout win at Warner Pacific, the Raiders play a game the next afternoon at Multnomah University.

The gym of the tiny school in Northeast Portland is unglamorous. Multnomah’s enrollment is a tenth of that of SOU, and roughly half the students on campus are athletes. There are bleachers on only one side of the gym and they aren’t half-full. In the locker room, Zosel implores his team not to overlook the opponent. Hollins stretches on the floor while his coach speaks.

“Don’t start slow,” Zosel says.

Hollins slaps hands with teammate Elijah Jackson.

“You can miss shots,” Zosel says, “you can’t turn the ball over.”

He looks intently at his team. “You can miss shots,” he says, “you can’t be dead on defense. That make sense?”

Players nod.

Zosel and the assistant coaches leave the cramped locker room.

It’s now just the team. Hollins stands up.

“Stay here, stay here, stay here,” he says. “Remember what we talked about yesterday. What type of team do you want to be?”

Their blowout win the night before will not mean as much, he says, if they don’t back it up here.

“Right now,” he says, “today is the biggest game of the year.”

His teammates murmur in agreement.

“Let’s build off of yesterday and let’s go out there and dominate.”

Players clap. The captain raises his arm to the center of the huddle.

“Greatness on three, family on six,” Hollins says loudly.

”One, two, three …“

”GREATNESS!”

“Four, five, six …“

”FAMILY!”

The team breaks its huddle. The Raiders high-five. Hollins pulls on a red jersey and jogs through the swinging door to the court.

It’s time to play.