All Travis Bader did was hesitate. Once. Maybe twice. At most, three times.

A sophomore in high school playing for Camp Darryl Basketball Academy, Bader was defending, boxing out and moving to get open. But for a player who had spent countless hours in the gym perfecting his jump shot, something was missing.

He wasn’t shooting the ball, and it prompted head coach Darryl Matthews to call a timeout and lay the foundation for an indelible basketball journey.

“You’re a shooter! When you get it, just shoot the ball, that’s what you do!” Matthews yelled.

Just shoot the ball. They immediately became words to live by.

“Now when I watch him, I sometimes laugh,” Matthews said. “Because when I see him lighting teams up, I think, ‘I’ve seen this game before.’”

Coming out of Okemos (Mich.) High School, Bader had one Division I scholarship offer, which led him to Oakland University in Rochester, Mich. Now a fifth-year senior, he’s established himself as one of the most prolific sharpshooters in college basketball history.

On Feb. 2 against Milwaukee, he passed former Duke guard J.J. Redick to the set the NCAA all-time record for 3-pointers made.

Bader closed out his final regular season Saturday and Oakland (12-19, 7-9 Horizon) isn’t primed to make a deep postseason run. His last collegiate game could be Tuesday when the Golden Grizzles face Youngstown State in the first round of the Horizon League tournament, and he’ll put the final touches on a collegiate career highlighted by numbers and accented by the story behind them.

“I just want to show how hard I’ve worked and my dedication to this game,” Bader said. “I came in and had just one scholarship offer and to have just one scholarship offer and be mentioned in the same category as someone like J.J. Redick is pretty unbelievable.”

At the beginning of high school, Bader wasn’t the 6-foot-5, 190-pound guard he is now, and was still ironing a hitch out of his shooting form.

He spent hours in the gym and it translated to games on both the high school and AAU platform. Still, colleges weren’t interested in a gangly guard whose size could hinder success at the next level.

Bader’s father works in the Michigan State athletic department — walking on to the Spartans basketball team was always a feasible backup plan but never something Bader wanted to pursue.

“He wanted to pave his own way, do it himself,” Matthews said.

At the end of his senior season, Bader was named player of the year in Lansing, an area that Oakland heavily recruits. Johnathon Jones — who also attended Okemos — was a junior on the Golden Grizzlies’ roster at the time, and told head coach Greg Kampe that Bader was a player he had to look at.

A year later he redshirted with Oakland and used the entire season to refine his craft.

“Redshirting was a little frustrating because I wanted to play,” Bader said. “But it was necessary and gave me a lot of time to work on my game.”

If Oakland was on the road, that meant the gym was wide open. It meant running around chairs. Shooting five shots from one spot. Then five from another. Then 10 on the other side of the floor. And so on.

Bader’s time as a redshirt allowed him to develop a work ethic that has only increased. It led to 10.5 points per game as a redshirt freshman, 15.9 as a sophomore, 22.1 as a junior and 18.2 this season, which has placed him at the top of scouting reports across the Horizon League.

“Every time he steps on the floor, he is guarded like he’s Michael Jordan,” Kampe said. “It’s like that every game, he’s held and beaten up and he just has to work with it. It’s different than 99 percent of the great scorers are guarded in this game.”

That was no different when the Golden Grizzlies visited Milwaukee a month ago. Bader knew he needed just three 3s to pass Redick going into the game, and came out forcing shots.

Eight years prior Matthews used a timeout to tell Bader to shoot more. Now Kampe took one to tell his star that the one shot he needed would come to him.

“You’re going to get it, just let it happen,” Kampe told Bader.

And a few plays later he did, on a shot that felt no different than the 457 other makes that came before it.

With limited time left, he’s now six 3s away from 500, and every make from here on out will only push him deeper and deeper into the record books.

Said Bader: “I just like shooting and scoring. Doesn’t everybody?”

Published on March 3, 2014 at 11:52 pm

Contact Jesse: jcdoug01@syr.edu | @dougherty_jesse