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60 IllustrateD volume 24, issue 4 f my parents would make me take some time off. But I was a gym rat when I was a little kid and still am. I just loved being out there. It doesn't seem like work to me. "I missed some meals and wouldn't eat. They'd pull me out and tell me to relax a little bit. I was obsessed." Always has been. Still is. It's not as much about the 500 jumpers Mathias is known to of- ten take before practices or the grueling ball-handling drills he'll put himself through. It's not about how he practices basketball as much as how he pro- cesses it. Mathias doesn't watch basketball as much as he absorbs it. Since signing with Purdue, he's shown up at practices. With a notebook. When he first took a recruiting visit to West Lafayette, Mathias asked Purdue's coaches for pointers on his game. When those coaches visited him in Elida for a follow-up meeting, those very tips were written on a dry-erase board in his in-home gym, serving as a standing reminder. Mathias watched on TV on the evening of Jan. 28 when Creighton beat St. John's 63-60 on Doug McDermott's three-pointer with 2.8 seconds left. The next day, he came to practice with that play in mind and suggested to his coach, Denny Thompson, that Eli- da make it part of its game plan for an upcoming game against Kenton High School. (Elida beat Kenton behind Mathias' 25 points and seven assists; had a screen held up properly on that play, it might have worked.) Mathias was the same way years earlier when his father was his coach and he'd come off the floor during timeouts suggesting plays to run. He was an eighth-grader. Such anecdotes illustrate how consumed with basket- ball Mathias is and always has been, perpetually looking to learn something new about the game or add something new to his uncommonly well-rounded array of offensive skills, with a laboratory of sorts to cultivate such skills built right into his home. Watch Mathias play, with his ability to make a wide range of jump shots, and you see the end result of many years of him watching a lot of players make a lot of different shots, then putting in time trying to learn those very shots himself. One example would be Dirk Nowitzki, maybe the most funda- mentally unsound elite shooter in the history of the game. Dan Mathias remembers the time his son put in to tinkering with some of the Dallas Maver- icks star's unconventional tricks, the all-wrist fade-away jumpers or the double-pump bank shots thrown in high off the glass. Dakota Mathias' own reper- toire is significant, advanced well beyond most his age. He's a "shooter," per se, a long-range bomber who shoots equally effectively off the dribble or the catch, curling off picks or dribbling off them. He can make pull-up mid-range jumpers, driving leaners and his favor- ite shot, the turnaround jumper out of post-ups. Though Mathias starts off games in a point guard role for his high school and sees significant time playing on the wing, he also frequently rolls into the post to generate shots with his back to the basket. But his game is well rounded beyond his shooting, as he's just as well suited to run pick-and-roll as a passer as he is to play without the ball looking for shots. Years of watching and learning and the feel for the game and anticipation that have come with it have shaped Mathias into not only a prolific shooter but a proficient ball-handler and decision-maker. For the type of player he is, Mathias is an outstanding — and, for a scorer of his wiring, willing — passer. Dan Mathias admired Larry Bird in the '80s and '90s and wound up with a son sometimes referred to by friends and teammates as "Magic." "He has a very high IQ and that makes him unselfish," Brian Neubert The gym, built into the Mathias home, where Dakota Mathias has spent so much time working on his game.