by Van Coleman, special to the HOOP SCOOP

One of my best friends in basketball, as well as life, recently passed away. That friend was Brick Oettinger, one of America’s greatest high school talent evaluators and more importantly, one of the best human beings to ever grace the game of basketball, period.

Most fans of the game may remember Brick from his columns in the “The Poop Sheet, ACC Sports Journal, and Prep Stars Magazine”, enjoying his amazingly thorough and accurate player profiles, but not realizing that basketball wasn’t his primary vocation. It was a vocation for his love of the game. Brick’s main vocation over most of the thirty plus years that I knew him was as a “UNC Correctional Education Director in the Division of Continuing Education” which he developed and held from 1974 until his retirement in 2014.

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