Could Kentucky walk-ons someday earn scholarships from a sportswriter?
Basketball writer Mark Titus wants to start a scholarship program for walk-ons.
Titus, a former walk-on at Ohio State University who now writes for The Ringer, wrote in a tweet Wednesday that he is “in the final stages of developing a scholarship for Division I basketball walk-ons around the country.”
“There are still some administrative details to be ironed out and NCAA hoops to jump through, but I’m optimistic that we will make it work,” Titus wrote. He said that a formal announcement introducing the Club Trillion Foundation Scholarship will come “in the next month or so.”
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-lang="en"><p lang="en" dir="ltr">I started a blog called Club Trillion 10 years ago. It's been a wild ride. But it has only just begun. <a href="https://t.co/7mqPNgbxSg">pic.twitter.com/7mqPNgbxSg</a></p>— Mark Titus (@clubtrillion) <a href="https://twitter.com/clubtrillion/status/1055123109500481536?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">October 24, 2018</a></blockquote> <script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>
Titus gained popularity as a basketball personality through Club Trillion, a blog he started while at Ohio State. It was named after what he and fellow OSU teammates Kyle Madsen and Danny Peters called a “trillion” in the box score.
“When the time came for us to get in, there would usually only be 1 minute remaining in the game and after sitting down for 39 minutes, we really had no interest in trying to be all that productive,” Titus wrote in 2008. “So we devised the plan of trying to get the ‘trillion’ which occurs when we play 1 minute and do absolutely nothing that would appear in the box score, thus making our stat line say 1 minute played followed by a bunch of zeroes.”
The University of Kentucky’s 2018-19 men’s basketball roster has three walk-ons: senior Jonny David, junior Brad Calipari and freshman Zan Payne. David has nine total “trillions” to date — six as a freshman, one as a sophomore and two as a junior — while Calipari has eight in his two seasons with the program (six his freshman year, two last season).
This story was originally published October 24, 2018 at 3:06 PM.