Grant Nelson could find a user for every ticket he could get his hands on.
“I could still use tons,” the Alabama basketball forward said ahead of the Crimson Tide’s trip back to his home state of North Dakota. “There’s people asking my parents, there’s people asking everybody, but they treated me well. They gave me tons, so I think I have enough for close family, and a lot of people from my hometown town.”
Nelson hails from Devils Lake, 88 miles from the University of North Dakota. Less than an hour after the Crimson Tide’s press conference, the team was getting on a plane to face the Fighting Hawks on Wednesday.
It’s a team the 6-foot-11, 230-pound Nelson knows well. Before transferring to Alabama ahead of the 2023-23 season, he played for UND’s in-state rival, North Dakota State, once dropping 36 points on the Fighting Hawks, who were his only other Division I offer out of high school.
After his first season in Tuscaloosa, UA head coach Nate Oats and staff did their best to help Nelson out, scheduling Wednesday’s homecoming trip. Hence the demand for tickets.
“I’ve got nine siblings and they all got family,” Nelson said. “It’s crazy the amount of people. They gave me a link of my own tickets to send to them, so thankful for that.”
For the rest of the Crimson Tide, the day in North Dakota could be a change of pace. When the flight to the game was scheduled to leave, it was 71 degrees in Tuscaloosa.
In Grand Forks, it was 24 degrees, with Wednesday’s predicted high topping out at 16, with a low of 2. Ahead of the trip, Oats received a text from Nelson’s father, Nels, showing the ice depth at a nearby lake, thick enough to park vehicles on top.
“That’s kind of going back to where I grew up, you get some ice-fishing,” Oats, a Wisconsin native, said. “Drive your truck right out on the lake in winter and drill a hole down through all the ice and do some ice fishing up there. I don’t mind being up there for a little bit, I’m not planning on moving back up north.”
Nelson advised his teammates to pack gloves. For Alabama, the game comes following a brutal stretch of the schedule, where it played seven non-conference games against potential NCAA tournament teams, including the Players Era Festival in Las Vegas.
The Crimson Tide faces the Fighting Hawks Wednesday, then Kent State and South Dakota State in Tuscaloosa, before a historically tough SEC schedule begins with Oklahoma on Jan. 4.
“The SEC’s the best conference in, it looks like college basketball history from some of the stuff I’m reading,” Oats said. “So, no easy games. We got three games to get better at a lot of things and this will be the first one of those three.”
Alabama and North Dakota are scheduled to tip off at 8 p.m. CT Wednesday. The game will be aired on the CBS Sports Network.
