COLUMBUS, Ohio — Justice Sueing felt like he was home the first time he came to Ohio State.

The program reminded him of high school at Mater Dei in Santa Ana, Calif.: this openness and honesty, this emphasis on culture that permeated every hall of the the Schottenstein Center ever since Chris Holtmann and his staff took over two years prior.

It was family-oriented, something Sueing saw himself thriving in.

“They made it as welcoming as you can make it,” he said.

This all came flooding back to Sueing, now a redshirt senior heading into his third year with the program; a starter, a captain.

Now it's part of his job, the responsibility placed on the shoulders of a former transfer. But this is nothing new in the Holtmann era.

His utilization of transfers is not reinventing the wheel. It’s following the trend of college basketball, especially after the NCAA declared in April that all athletes are allowed one transfer without sitting out a year before becoming eligible — something Sueing had to do during the 2019-20 season.

It’s something Holtmann has taken advantage of since he arrived at Ohio State in 2017, adding 12 transfers in the past five seasons, including guard Cedric Russell from Louisiana, guard Jamari Wheeler from Penn State and center Joey Brunk from Indiana prior to the start of the upcoming 2021-22 season.

But Holtmann made it clear: he's not going to just take anyone looking for a change of scenery.

“We’ve really tried to be selective about the ones we take," Holtmann said. "Do they fit our culture and our environment?"

Brunk knew Ohio State's culture firsthand before he made the choice to transfer.

Yes, he saw it while sitting on the bench for Indiana, recovering from back surgery: a team that competed, that wanted to win, that cared about one another.

But it was something Brunk had experienced himself, signing with Holtmann in 2016 when he was the head coach at Butler, playing for the Bulldogs for his first three seasons of college.

With one season left, Brunk had a gut feeling: he wanted to play for Holtmann again, something a conversation with his mother only validated.

“‘You love Coach Holt,’” Brunk remembers his mother telling him. “‘Why not make that decision? Let’s do it.’”

Once Brunk got to Columbus, he joined a roster filled with experience, one of nine players on Ohio State’s roster with more than four years of experience. It was a locker room filled with players who knew what college basketball was about and knew what it took to get to the top.

“I think across the board we are all on a similar page of what we want,” Brunk said of the Ohio State roster. “We’ve all been through things that have gotten us to this point and I think, collectively, it makes us better off as a group because it always hasn’t been smooth sailing.”

For transfers, that transition to Ohio State isn’t always a smooth one.

Sueing remembers conversations in the Ohio State locker room in his first year of eligibility, shaking his head, thinking, “Look, Big Ten play is not a joke.”

“You are going day in and day out, leaving to go play Penn State, coming back, playing Iowa at home,” Sueing said. “It’s a fight. It’s a physical battle.”

It’s something Wheeler is used to, having played 127 career games across four years for Penn State, leading the conference in steals per game in each of the past two seasons with a career assist-to-turnover ratio of nearly two-to-one.

But it's something that will be new for Russell, the first-team All-Sun Belt honoree, who accumulated 266 makes from 3 in his four seasons with the Ragin Cajuns.

Even without experience in Big Ten play, Russell knows college basketball.

The teams may be different, the arenas and the jerseys may look different. But the approach to winning doesn't change.

“There’s no shortcuts in this. With us being in college that long, we know that,” Russell said. “Everyday we’re coming in bringing that energy, ready to get better, trying to get one percent better every day because we know it’s going to pay off in the long run.”

Wheeler didn’t need to experience Ohio State’s first-round NCAA Tournament exit to Oral Roberts to know what the Buckeyes needed to do this offseason.

To him, it’s the same approach of his multiple offseasons with the Nittany Lions.

“This is where you win your championships: in the summer, in the preseason,” Wheeler said.

“Regardless of whether I was here last year or not, at the end of the day, I still want to win. I’m going to bring a winner’s mentality to my workouts and that’s each and every day whether I feel like it or not.”

This is the veteran’s mentality that’s seeping through the Ohio State locker room, bringing younger guys along, even guys that were with the Buckeyes last year.

Sophomore forward Zed Key said he’s spent the offseason learning from these older players, hearing different stories of the ins and outs of what made them successful at their previous stops and how it applies to this new group.

To Key, it’s also helped the young players: guards Meechie Johnson and Malachi Branham, along with freshman forward Kalen Etzler — to be brought along faster, to understand the expectation from a veteran’s point of view.

“Everyone’s been a freshman, so they know what to expect, know what to do when practice actually starts,” Key said. “It’s going to be tough, going from drill to drill. You are going to get tired, so we tell them, ‘Look, this is what to expect.’”

Redshirt senior Kyle Young said the older players on the roster have already begun to impact the team chemistry, knowing what to expect from one another because they have done it before, even if it was not at Ohio State.

It’s not one player shouldering that responsibility. It's the whole roster: from the transfers to the Buckeyes' four captains: Young, Sueing, forward Justin Ahrens and forward E.J. Liddell.

“What I like about this group is that everyone is willing to help each other, everybody’s willing to speak up,” Young said. “Having that experience with a lot of guys makes it easier to communicate to the younger guys: ‘This is how we need to do things, this is how we need to work.’”

It’s the family atmosphere Sueing experienced when he first arrived at Ohio State, the atmosphere that reminded him of his high school days at Mater Dei.

It’s something the redshirt senior and captain believes will be continued even when he’s long gone from the program

“I did not expect to come all the way out here to the Midwest, but it’s something where I’m really glad I did,” Sueing said.