Greg Hansen: For true student-athlete Stone Gettings, coming to Arizona was a 'no-brainer'

Stone Gettings had a 3.81 GPA while earning a degree in applied economics and management at Cornell. Do you know what he says about his Ivy League GPA now?

“I must’ve been slacking.”

He smiles broadly, but you can tell that he considers the B-plus he got in macroeconomics as a Cornell freshman one of the rare “losses” of his academic career.

Arizona’s senior center may not remember his scoring average while a basketball standout at Los Angeles Loyola High School, but he does remember the B he got, in advanced world history. “It gave me a 3.97 GPA, but with my honors and AP classes my overall GPA was weighted at 4.6 or so,” he says.

A few weeks ago, a crew from the UA’s prestigious Eller College of Management attended a workout at McKale Center to do a photo shoot of Gettings, one of the most high-profile graduate students in school history.

Student-athlete? The term applies to Gettings like few others.

He’s the guy who scored 32 points on Arizona’s recent road sweep at Washington and WSU; the guy who has scored 80 points since becoming Sean Miller’s starting center nine games ago; the guy who has redefined the term one-and-done in the UA basketball program.

John Stonewall Gettings of Calabasas, California, has the same goals as his UA basketball teammates: a Pac-12 championship and a berth in the Final Four. But he’s also working toward a higher calling.

He is working on becoming the valedictorian at the Eller College of Management, an All-American in the academic world.

“I don’t know how they pick it, but straight A’s have to help,” says Gettings.

College basketball here and everywhere has changed so dramatically in the last decade that elite programs like Arizona hire someone to oversee analytics and data research. The game is more sophisticated. There are a lot of firsts.

So maybe it’s not much of a surprise to learn that Gettings is one of the few, possibly the first, college basketball players to have his own LinkedIn profile.

This is an unusually smart young man who, while in high school, was a teachers assistant at the Holy Name of Jesuit School, volunteering to teach math, science and history to third graders. He is also a certified lifeguard. More? Gettings, a 6-foot-8-inch shooter with 3-point range, co-founded a business — Freshkicksla — while in high school.

Gettings’ startup business was based on a computer program with a developer from Bangladesh — “we met at random in an online chat,” he says — to buy limited-edition sneakers and resell them for profit.

“It was pretty crazy,” he remembers. “I was getting five or six pairs of $200 shoes and selling them for $150 over what I bought them for. I bought some for $250 and sold them for $3,600.”

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Gettings estimates he and his partner grossed about $25,000 in eBay and Craigslist sales before he began to concentrate on his Ivy League education and playing basketball. How good was Gettings at Cornell? He had back-to-back games of 30 and 39 points as a Big Red junior.

But because the Ivy League does not permit graduate students to play varsity sports, Gettings put his mind to finding a perfect spot to complete his education and athletic eligibility. He had offers from Big Ten, SEC and Big 12 schools, as well as Stanford and Cal, but once Sean Miller convinced Gettings that he would be more than just another face on the bench, Arizona became an easy choice.

Easy? He played high school basketball at Loyola with fellow UA grad transfer Max Hazzard at the school of former UA guards Parker Jackson-Cartwright and Trey Mason.

“I dreamed about Arizona when I was in high school,” Gettings says. “I remember Arizona really going at it with T.J. McConnell’s teams, an upper-echelon program. When Sean said he could use me, it was a no-brainer.”

Actually, “no-brainer” doesn’t apply to Gettings.

“When you look at him you stereotype him as a Cornell grad, Ivy League student, growing up in Malibu,” says Miller. “You say, ‘man, he’s a really smart kid, great kid, skilled basketball player, but how tough is he?’

“And you know, he’s one of our toughest guys. One of the things that I admire the most about him is that he works incredibly hard. He’s got a lot of gas left in the tank.”

And did you know that Stone Gettings holds the Arizona basketball record for the fastest mile run, 5 minutes 14 seconds, in the Miller years?

The son of John and Anne Gettings is part of one of the most accomplished sports/academic families in the Pac-12 footprint. His younger sister, Franesca, is a beach volleyball player for the Cal Bears. His older sister, Alexandra, was on the varsity rowing team at George Washington University; she now works as a solutions consultant for Google. His younger brother, Trumann, a 6-8 sophomore, is an emerging college basketball prospect at Harvard-Westlake High School near Malibu.

If you think breaking into the Arizona lineup is difficult, Gettings probably had a more imposing challenge breaking into his study groups in the Alpha Kappa Psi fraternity at Cornell.

“My fraternity brothers are all a lot smarter than me,” he says, exaggerating. “At a school so focused on academics like Cornell, athletes are sometimes looked down on. It’s the ‘he’s just a jock’ thing. So you have to prove yourself, work your butt off with people who might not think you’re as smart as they are. You have to work in group projects with them, gain their confidence, and I was determined to prove I belonged.”

He belonged. He gave a PowerPoint presentation to his Alpha Kappa brothers on several entrepreneurial projects. He recommended stocks in which to invest. Even now, working toward his master’s degree in the Eller College, Gettings says he spends time studying the stock market.

Ultimately, Gettings sees himself working in wealth management or as a venture capitalist, or maybe in the hedge-fund industry. But before he gets to work on repaying about $30,000 in student loans accrued at Cornell, he will stay in basketball as long as possible, in the EuroLeague or wherever he can get a roster spot.

“My approach is to grind now and see the results later,” he says. “I don’t want to limit myself.”