Oumar Ballo readies mentally, physically to build on All-Pac-12 nod for Arizona in 2023-24

All-America teams may be littered with 7-footers this preseason, but it isn’t easy to find Oumar Ballo among them.

More often, you see names such as Purdue’s Zach Edey, Duke’s Kyle Filipowski, North Carolina’s Armando Bacot, Michigan’s Hunter Dickinson, Creighton’s Ryan Kalbrenner and … wait.

Ryan Kalkbrenner? Isn’t that who faced off against Ballo in the Maui Invitational final last season, when Ballo collected 30 points and 13 rebounds while making 14 of 17 shots?

That game early last season was the third time in three days that the Wildcats’ big man from Mali was playing like an all-American.

Formerly a lightly used reserve at Gonzaga who followed coach Tommy Lloyd to Arizona in 2021, then an understudy to Christian Koloko in 2021-22, Ballo left Maui with an MVP trophy and lei after leading UA to the championship of the prestigious multi-team event.

Over three games on the Hawaiian island, Ballo collected 63 points and 32 rebounds while shooting 79.4% (27 of 34) from the field.

That game against Creighton, and earlier Maui games against Cincinnati and San Diego State, is where Ballo the all-American could be found.

Every now and then, he’ll take a look at that guy, too.

“I watch some of those games, for sure,” Ballo says now. “That motivates me to get to that spot and even get better than where I was.”

So does the way the latter half of last season played out. Ballo continued rolling through December last season, helping UA pick up big wins against Indiana (15 points and 12 rebounds) and Tennessee (18 and 8), and then posting another 12 points and 12 rebounds at ASU on New Year’s Eve day before it all got weird.

Ballo spent New Year’s Day in a hospital emergency room, making the first of three visits that week related to a bacterial infection. While he never missed a game — drawing praise for a 34-minute effort on Jan. 4 against Washington — Ballo’s relative lack of effectiveness two days later was one reason behind what became UA’s shocking homecourt loss to Washington State.

Ballo wound up losing about 12 pounds from the illness and, although he never missed a game, his dominance was less consistent the rest of the way. As much as anyone, he personified how the Wildcats wore down toward the end of the season and eventually flatlined against 15th-seeded Princeton in an embarrassing first-round NCAA tournament upset loss.

“I’m not gonna let that happen to me ever again,” Ballo said last May, even though he had an obvious excuse: Ballo had been playing the Princeton game with a wrapped-up left hand that he broke just six days earlier in the Pac-12 Tournament.

“I was not mentally ready to play that game,” Ballo said. “I was not.”

So while Lloyd has talked about how the Princeton game will be a coaching lesson he will take with him for the long term, Ballo is using the memory to drive him on the court. He spent the offseason working on his game and his body, making a brief trip back to Mali to help run a youth clinic, then joining the Wildcats for their three-game Middle East exhibition trip.

Ballo wasn’t always dominant in Israel and the United Arab Emirates, playing mostly against much smaller big men, but he flashed his old look with 18 points and 10 rebounds in a 23-minute Red-Blue Showcase appearance before sitting out the Wildcats’ Oct. 20 exhibition game with Lewis-Clark State because of an undisclosed injury.

In between, he gave interviews at Pac-12 media day and in a McKale Center media session, vowing, again, that he would never play with less than everything he had.

“Trust me, I am 100% confident that regardless how much my stats show, I’m gonna come in every day and give my best,” Ballo said. “Nothing’s gonna change that. One thing I can control is my effort, which I want to be giving every day.”

It’s hardly the first time in Ballo’s career that he’s flashed that sort of determination. It just wasn’t visible for most of it.

Having left Mali at age 13 to enroll at a Canary Islands prep school, Ballo eventually moved on to play with former UA guard Bennedict Mathurin at the NBA Academy Latin America in Mexico City, where he said he sat out toward the end of his final season so he could focus on academics and become eligible to play collegiately.

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Ballo enrolled at Gonzaga in the fall of 2019 but was still relatively unprepared to get on the floor for a team that already had frontcourt standouts in Filip Petrusev, Killian Tillie and a promising freshman named Drew Timme.

Ballo sat out 2019-20 as a redshirt and, the next season, played behind Timme while Ben Gregg eventually slipped past him in the Zags’ rotation. Ballo appeared only sparingly in 24 games that year.

After that season, he joined Lloyd, a longtime Gonzaga assistant coach who took over the Wildcats in April 2021. While Christian Koloko and Azuolas Tubelis stood in front of Ballo for playing time his first season with the Wildcats, Ballo showed flashes off improvement off the bench as the 2021-22 season went on.

Then last season, with Koloko off to the Toronto Raptors, Arizona received a payoff right away. Ballo collected the Maui Invitational MVP trophy over Thanksgiving week and, despite his mid- and late-season setbacks, became a first-team all-Pac-12 pick.

For the season, Ballo averaged 14.2 points and 8.6 rebounds while shooting 64.7% from the field, often from powerful scores around the rim.

“Oumar is a dominant big,” wing Pelle Larsson said. “We say ‘baby Shaq’ sometimes.”

That’s what they called Ballo back in Mali, when he was leading his country’s youth teams to FIBA success, well before he came to Mexico City, Gonzaga or Arizona. The slow and steady climb he’s made, Lloyd says, gives Ballo a valuable sort of perspective he can share.

“The leadership … he has so much potential there,” Lloyd said. “His leadership can be grounded in the fact that he’s dealt with struggle and come through it. I think all these guys, these young players, struggle as part of their growth process. So to have somebody who’s done it, come through the other side, I think he can be a great example for others, especially within our program.”

At the same time, Lloyd says he’s hoping the UA program can help Ballo. One reason so many elite 7-footers remain in the college game, after all, is that the NBA that prefers more mobile centers in today’s game.

At 7-0 and 260 pounds, excessive mobility isn’t natural for Ballo. But the Wildcats’ big man said offseason work already has him feeling better about his body and the “so much easier and smoother” way that he’s moving.

Lloyd indicated he’s aiming to stretch Ballo’s skills within his free-flowing offense, potentially making him more marketable in the future, wherever he lands.

“For me, it’s not so much statistical growth or anything like that,” Lloyd says. “I’m sure he wants to add a three-point shot, but that’s not as important to me.

“I just want to see him continue to grow as a basketball player in modern basketball, so he can be successful outside of an Arizona setting and have a long, good career. Because the game has changed for players like him. Maybe we’re a little bit old school in the way we play, where we really value and reward guys like him.”

One thing’s for sure: After a long journey from Mali to the Canary Islands to Mexico City to Gonzaga and Arizona, there may not be a place Ballo feels more valued or rewarded.

Ballo says he’s “nothing but grateful” for fans who have embraced him in Tucson, giving him a rousing ovation at his Red-Blue introduction, and the same goes for the staff around him.

“This program gave me a second chance,” Ballo said. “They believe in me, give me the opportunity to have a new, fresh start. So anything I can do for this program, I’ll do.”