March Madness comes to Olney
As a student at Olney Elementary through Olney High School, I had a classmate named Jerry Bishop. Many Olney residents will remember Jerry Bishop, the high school quarterback who led the Cubs to victory in the 1959 and 1960 playoff seasons. These teams produced numerous awards and record-breaking college scholarships. Jerry showed his leadership abilities, which seem to have been passed to his grandson, Drew Timme. Drew has been showing his leadership abilities for the Gonzaga Bulldogs. His team during the NCAA Selection is #1 overall out of a field of 68 NCAA teams. The Zags have been to every NCAA Tournament held since 1999, where they made a Cinderella run to the Elite Eight and have appeared in every final AP poll since the 2008-09 season.
Drew Timme’s mother, Megan Bishop Timme, played collegiate tennis and his father, Matt Timme, played SMU basketball and played in Europe. His dad worked with Drew to develop his basketball skills at an early age. As a result, drew has been asked how he developed such great footwork. He always attributes this ability to “just trying to get past my dad to score. It took a while.” After Drew’s career at J.J. Peace High School—Richardson ISD, where he was a five-star recruit in 2019, he announced he would be going to Spokane, Washington, to play for the Gonzaga Bulldogs.
As a freshman (2019- 20), Timme was named to the East Coast Conference (WCC) All-freshman Team and WCC All-Tournament Team. Drew had an outstanding year going into his Sophomore year (2020-21), where he was named Preseason ALL-WCC Player of the Week three times. Among other awards, he was named to the Lute Olson Award Midseason Watch List, to late-season Top 20 List, to Naismith Trophy List and was a Karl Malone Award Finalist. Drew has that personality that causes people to gravitate toward him; This could be why he was chosen to represent Gonzaga in accepting the ESPY award this past July in New York City when the team won the award Best Game of the Year--the UCLA-Gonzaga game that led the Zags to the Final Two. On a side note, Gonzaga helped make history for the largest basketball crowd in Nevada in 2021. The Zags-Duke game had 2,79 million viewers, and the Zags-UCLA game had 1.58 million viewers.
Starting his Junior year, Drew was named #1 on the Top 10 Players in NCAA College Basketball for 2021-22. Early on, he made the 1,000 Point Club, a Top 5 finalist in Kareem Abdul-Jabbar Award, and has won the West Coast Conference “Player of the Year” when the Zags won the West Coast Conference title for the eighth time in nine years. His grandmother, Marny Bishop, said his fame was happening so fast that it was hard to take in. Now he is making commercials and being interviewed quite often.
March Madness has started. Hopefully, Drew’s picture will be on the side of a building in New Orleans for the Final Four in 2022 as it was in the Final Four in Las Vegas in 2021.