Huibregtse is off to hot start for Wright State

FORMER GRAFTON STAR Alex Huibregtse is now a leading offensive option for Wright State and is averaging 16.1 points per game this season. Photo by Joe Craven/Wright State Athletics
It has been a long road that involved paying his dues and rehabbing from back surgery, but now Alex Huibregtse is one of the premier scorers on the Division 1 Wright State basketball team.
The 2020 Grafton High School graduate is second on the Raiders, averaging 16.1 points per game as the team has split the season’s first eight games. Huibregtse is shooting 53.7%, including 20-for-50 (40%)on three-pointers. He also has 30 rebounds and 25 assists.
“The trust that my coaches have for me and all the offseason work that I and the rest of the team have put in is starting to pay off a little bit,” Huibregtse said.
Huibregtse is a 6 foot, 3-inch shooting guard who sometimes plays the point. He and 6-8 forward Brandon Noel, who leads the team with 20.8 points per game and is shooting 54.5%, have the inside-out game going.
It took Huibregtse a while to be a top offensive option at the Dayton, Ohio, school. He was fourth last season with 12.3 points per game, and he missed nearly all of the 2022-23 season with a back injury that led to surgery.
Now, he said, his back flares up on occasion but “I’m blessed to have pretty good health after surgery.”
At Grafton, Huibregtse scored 1,312 career points and was named the North Shore Conference Player of the Year as a senior in 2020 when he averaged 24.2 per game and made 47% of his three-pointers.
“When I was a senior in high school I probably thought I could come into college and right away be a top scorer. You kind of get humbled as a freshman, especially at Wright State, a winning program,” Huibregtse said.
But Huibregste kept working.
“It’s definitely a grind. There’s not really much of an offseason. There are two to three months off throughout the whole calendar year,” he said.
Team camaraderie has helped. Huibregtse has roomed with Noel and Andrew Welage since freshman year.
“It’s awesome. Nowadays in college sports, that’s super rare,” he said.
Huibregtse is a redshirt senior and has one year of eligibility left next season. The 22-year-old is undecided if he will play.
“I’m getting pretty old. It’s weird talking to some of the freshmen,” he said. “It’s not hard to relate to them at all, but ‘You guys were freshmen in high school when I was a freshman in college,’” he said.
Huibregtse graduated in spring with a degree in business management. Now, he’s working in a two-year program toward a master’s degree in sports management. He said he isn’t sure what he wants to do, but coaching or being an agent are possibilities.
“Coaching opens my eyes to the impact you can have on kids and young adults,” he said, adding he still talks to Grafton High coach Damon James.
“I think he played a part in that,” he said.
Huibregtse is taking two classes — current issues in American sports, which he said is interesting given debates over the name, image and likeness (NIL) initiative and conference realignment, and a class on children with disabilities in sports.
The classes are hard enough; the basketball travel schedule makes for more of a challenge.
“You miss a decent amount of class, which doesn’t help. You kind of master the time management element of it,” Huibregtse said.
Huibregtse comes home during summers and breaks. Wright State, plays at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee on Feb. 14. Both teams are in the Horizon League.
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