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East Marshall’s Leedom makes it official with Graceland

T-R PHOTO BY THORN COMPTON • East Marshall senior Zaine Leedom, middle, signs his National Letter of Intent with Graceland University on Wednesday. Joining Leedom at the table was his mom Teah, left, his AAU coach Chris Hansen from Iowa Intensity, right, and Mustangs head coach Adam Bauder.

LE GRAND — It’s been known for nearly two months that East Marshall senior Zaine Leedom will be continuing his basketball career at Graceland University next season, but on Wednesday it was made official with Leedom signing his National Letter of Intent.

“It’s a pretty neat deal I guess, I’ve been committed for a while now but to finally get these paper signed is pretty cool,” Leedom said after the signing.

The 6-foot-4 forward was a big part of the Mustangs reaching the substate final for a second-straight season and finishing 22-1 this year. East Marshall head coach Adam Bauder said having Leedom got to an NAIA powerhouse like Graceland, who just won the Division I national title this year, is great exposure for the program.

“Whenever somebody goes and plays college ball and you see them in the program and it says ‘East Marshall,’ that kind of makes you look important,” Bauder said. “You are producing players and doing some of the right stuff coaching-wise that makes you feel like you are on the right track that way and it makes you proud of the effort the kid put in and the stuff that he’s done and then going to a program that just won a national title, that makes it even more special.”

Since joining the Mustangs in the second half of the 2016-17 season, Leedom has averaged 16.6 points per game and helped East Marshall to some of its best seasons on the court. Now that he’s moving on to the next level, he said it will be difficult to break into the starting rotation given how talented the Yellowjackets currently are, but he looks forward to getting out and mixing it up with the defending NAIA champs.

“It’d be nice to actually see the floor in the first year but I am looking forward to learning from all those guys because obviously they are national champs now so it will be cool experience to get to learn from those guys and to be coached by a guy who’s won a couple national championships now,” Leedom said.

Even before Leedom transfered from Grinnell his junior year, Bauder said he knew what kind of athlete he had on his hands and it doesn’t surprise him that he’s moving on with his career.

“I first saw him the summer before his junior year, he started coming to some of our open gyms, and I saw him in some of the AAU stuff so we knew he had potential and we knew he was going to be very good so if we developed him some more he had college basketball potential,” Bauder said. “He put in the time and that’s what he wanted to do, and when he sets his mind to something he’s going to do it. I think it was a bit of a self-fulfilling prophecy, he wanted to get it done and he got it done.”

As for why he specifically chose Graceland, Leedom said it wasn’t just the winning culture and the great coaching staff, headed by Craig Doty who recently was named the Don Meyer Award recipient for best NAIA coach in the nation, it was also because the campus had a familiar feeling.

“I went down there last October and I met a couple of the guys and the way they talked about the atmosphere there and the sense of community kind of reminded me of here too, so that was probably what did it for me,” Leedom said.

This year’s Mustang squad was likely an inspiration for quite a few young basketball players in east Marshall County, and Leedom now making the jump to the college ranks is sure to continue that inspiration. He said his message for anyone looking to follow in his footsteps is a simple one: put in the work.

“It’s doable, you just have to keep working hard,” he said. “You have to put a lot of time in, it’s not something that you have to be in the gym 100 percent of your time 24/7 but it’s definitely something you have to take seriously.”

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