Derrick Gordon, a green amateur for the University of Massachusetts' basketball team, appear Wednesday that he is gay, acceptable the aboriginal aboveboard gay amateur in Division I men's hoops.
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Gordon, 22, came out to his family, coaches and teammates at the alpha of April afore chief to go accessible afterward UMass' accident in the NCAA basketball clash endure month, cogent ESPN that he "didn't wish to adumbrate anymore, in any way."
"I didn't wish to accept to lie or sneak," Gordon said. "I've been cat-and-mouse and watching for the endure few months, apprehensive if a Division I amateur would appear out, and assuredly I just said, 'Why not me?'"
Gordon said that he took afflatus from Jason Collins, who came out in April 2013 and became the aboriginal aboveboard gay amateur in NBA history if he took the cloister for the Brooklyn Nets this season."That was so important to me, alive that female didn't matter, that the NBA was accept with it," Gordon said.
Collins tweeted his abutment for Gordon on Wednesday, calling him "another adventurous adolescent man who is traveling to accomplish it easier for so abounding others to reside an accurate life."
During his aboriginal division at UMass, Gordon started all 33 of the Minutemen's amateur and helped the aggregation acquire its aboriginal NCAA clash bid back 1998. In a statement, his coach, Derek Kellogg, declared him as "a agitating competitor," and said he had "the a lot of abstruse respect" for his accommodation to appear out.
"We apperceive his accommodation advised heavily on him for some time, but as a aggregation and a family, we fatigued to him that we abutment him in every way possible," Kellogg said. "Derrick is a capital adumbrative of this university and this program. . . and we are all actual appreciative of him."
Gordon's advertisement follows in the footsteps of University of Missouri football brilliant Michael Sam, who came out as gay in February, and is accepted to be called in next month's NFL Draft, which would accomplish him that league's aboriginal out athlete.
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