It's hard to believe Andrew Sischo's now one of the best college basketball players in Division II, considering he wasn't much of a basketball player at all not too long ago.

"Back in high school, I never really played basketball much," Sischo said. "I was more of a baseball player."

Sischo did take the court in youth leagues and other recreational settings such as CYO play, but the majority of his time was on the diamond.

"Baseball was one of those things where it was fun," Sischo said. "I was on a competitive baseball team. It was one of those things that once I got on that team we kind of just went along with it. We traveled everywhere. I've been to Florida, Michigan. I've been to Puerto Rico. I've been all over the east coast for baseball. So it's just something that I kind of fell in love with and was running with."

Sischo remembers playing 85 baseball games a summer.

Things changed his junior year at Guilderland high school outside of Albany.

The varsity baseball team was already set at the two positions Sischo played, pitcher and catcher. With playing time seemingly limited, Sischo made the switch to fully focusing on hoops.

That's around the time Daemen head coach Mike MacDonald first saw Sischo. The Wildcats were about to lose a lot of their biggest players and Sischo stood around 6'9" and 300 pounds.

"The thing that I noticed right away was I thought his feet were very good," MacDonald said. "For a guy who was bigger, his feet are huge, but his feet were always in the right place. They were always underneath him. He wasn't tripping. He was always able to keep his balance pretty good. And then his hands were good too and he had some skills. I had people from Albany tell me 'Well, he likes to shoot jump shots. He shoots 15 footers. He's not really much of a big guy.' Not many people are right away and it usually develops over time."

Sischo ultimately chose Daemen over other Division III offers. 

The first step in his development was to lose weight. 

Nearly immediately after his senior basketball season ended, Sischo started shedding pounds. By the time he stepped onto campus in Amherst that following August, he had dropped about 75 pounds.

"I was embarrassed of my weight," Sischo said. "I was embarrassed as a kid. He said he wanted me to get down to 240. As time started going I said let me think about this. I'm going to get on campus, I know I'm embarrassed, but I'm going to get on campus and they're going to see how much more I weigh. Let me get down as much as I can. Let me just try to help them out and be more of a man of my word. And once it just started going off it kind of just kept coming off."

"All credit to him," MacDonald said. "He lost the weight. Usually when you recruit someone who has to lose weight, they come in and they're spending all their time getting themselves in shape. He'd already done that. He got himself in shape on his own, which is tremendous and you don't find many 17-18 year olds doing that right out of the shoot. So that made his development progress even faster because he was in shape, we didn't have to worry about that as much. Then we could work on skill stuff."

Sischo's skill now has him in the conversation as the nation's top D-II player. He's currently 2nd in the country in scoring at 27.4 points per game and tops in the nation with 13.8 rebounds per game.

This season he became Daemen's all-time leading scorer, the first player to ever eclipse 2,000 career points. He also recently grabbed his 1,000th career rebound, just the third player in program history to accomplish that feat. Sischo is just the 15th player in D-II East Region history to total 2,000+ career points and 1,000+ career rebounds.

Clearly Sischo has shown he can dominate at the D-II level, which made it surprising that he didn't pursue a D-I shot for his senior season like some other players did.

"I was in a place where winning a lot of games, competing for national recognition every year, I was comfortable here, let me keep going here," Sischo said. "See if we can get a regional championship, a conference championship, stuff like that. It was a no-brainer for me, to be honest."

Sischo's also played himself into a potential pro basketball career, though he plans on weighing those options a little later down the road.

Options all available because he doesn't weight what he used to.