Tamin Lipsey’s versatility is growing as he enters second season at Iowa State

AMES — He’ll pry, poke and propel himself upward just to get a hand on the basketball.

Or maybe merely a finger tip.

Iowa State's Tamin Lipsey is one of the top rebounding guards in the Big 12 and it’s an inherent strength.

The 6-foot, 200-pound sophomore-to-be averaged four boards last season and affected many more rebounds on both ends of the floor. It’s one of the areas Lipsey stands — and leaps — out.

“He’s got some really unique outlier strengths like getting offensive rebounds and 50-50 balls (to) go his way,” Cyclones head coach T.J. Otzelberger said Tuesday of Lipsey, who helped his team reach the NCAA tournament for the second consecutive season. “He’s very fast to the basketball, very quick to make plays, but to me, the most impressive thing is when you look at the stretch of a long season as a freshman and you’re logging 30 minutes every night, and you’re in a tough environment, it’s the mental fortitude and mental toughness to do what he did throughout the entire season.”

Lipsey emerged as a leader for ISU last season after former Big 12 freshman of the year Tyrese Hunter transferred to Texas. He shined as one of two players in the country to average at least 7.3 points, 4.4 assists, 4.0 rebounds, 2.2 steals and 2.45 or fewer turnovers last season — and got immediate backcourt help this spring in transfer guards Jackson Paveletzke, Keshon Gilbert and Curtis Jones.

All three of those newcomers shot 36 percent or better from 3-point range last season and contributed greatly on the glass as well as facilitating at a high clip for their former teams.

“Just having other guys that can make plays, that are playmakers, that can dribble the ball — I don’t have to worry about doing that every time down the floor,” said Lipsey, who shot 77 percent from the free-throw line, but just 20 percent from long range as a freshman. “If they get it, they can push it. If I get it, I can push it. It just makes the game easier.”

That word — easy — is rarely ascribed to anything related to Otzelberger’s hard-nosed and defense-driven brand of basketball. Success begins and ends with effort-based habits for veterans and newcomers alike. It’s an approach to the game that came naturally for Lipsey, who starred for hometown Ames High School before joining the Cyclones as a top-30 point guard recruit last summer.

“Last year at this time, I was just working as hard as I could every day just to get noticed,” Lipsey said. “Doing whatever I could by the coaches, coming in as a freshman, you don’t really know what to expect, so I just played as hard as I could, but now I’ve got a year under my belt.

“The coaches know what I can do. I know what they want from me, so that makes it easier and then just helping the new guys out with how we run things over here and what’s our culture and stuff like that.”

So while Lipsey’s still a young player learning to maximize his potential, he’s also being leaned upon for leadership. That also comes naturally for the lifelong Cyclone fan who now stands front and center for a resurgent program that looks to make noise on the national level again in 2023-24.

“You can sense a greater sense of confidence from an offensive standpoint in being vocal, running his team and the ability to knock down a shot or just make the play that presents itself,” Otzelberger said. “In your first year, you almost play like, ‘I don’t want to make a mistake,’ and now his level of aggressiveness offensively and doing all those things has been so good.”

And he’s poised to be even better.

“Even though he was a freshman, he didn’t play like it,” senior forward Tre King said. “I couldn’t be more proud of him.”

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