Traralgon, Victoria, is a coal town in the Latrobe Valley about 100 miles east of Melbourne. Population: roughly 25,000. The kind of place where Australian basketball isn't supposed to start — most of the country's NBA pipeline runs through Sydney, Melbourne, Perth, or the Australian Institute of Sport in Canberra, not the Gippsland hill country. But Jackson Thomas White, born August 5, 1997 to Jeff and Rachel White, grew up in Traralgon playing for the Latrobe City Energy, and it was where his basketball career began.
He outgrew the local junior leagues fast. At the 2014 Australian U18 Junior Championships, playing for Vic Country, White averaged 22.5 points and 8.4 rebounds per game shooting 57% from the field, posted four double-doubles in a week, and on Day 1 of the tournament against New Zealand he went for 38 points and 13 rebounds. The Vic Country team won bronze. White won Player of the Day. And almost immediately after that performance, he was offered a scholarship to the Australian Institute of Sport in Canberra — the federally funded high-performance program that has produced Andrew Bogut, Patty Mills, Joe Ingles, Dante Exum, Ben Simmons, and a generation of Australian NBA players.
White spent the next two years at AIS in Canberra, attending Lake Ginninderra College for his secondary schooling and playing for the Centre of Excellence in Australia's South East Australian Basketball League against grown men. In 2014 he won silver with Australia's U17 team at the FIBA U17 World Championship in Dubai. In 2015 he averaged 8.3 points and 3.9 rebounds at the U19 Worlds in Heraklion, Greece. In 2016 he was named Basketball Victoria's Male Junior Player of the Year. He had also signed up for a one-game stint with the Cairns Taipans in the NBL — Australia's top professional league — as a development player, becoming an NBL pro before he ever played a college game.
This was the point at which the recruiting battle started. Boise State came hard. So did Hawaii and Temple. Boise State, in particular, had built an Australian pipeline — Anthony Drmic, Nick Duncan, and Igor Hadziomerovic had all suited up for the Broncos — and on a basketball level it made sense for a long, lean Aussie wing to land there and play significant minutes from day one. White himself has said he was on the verge. "It was hard to say no to Boise [but] I knew that if I want to go to college [Duke] is the place to be," he later told ESPN. "While I was at Cairns, Duke came, a few other schools came — really good schools — and I was still considering staying home and playing pro in Australia. Once my time at Cairns ended, I was clueless. I was on the phone to my coach at the [AIS] every day just trying to work out what I wanted to do."
Duke wasn't recruiting him to be a one-and-done. Coach K was recruiting him to be a four-year role player, a glue guy, the kind of long, physical, smart wing who could check the best player on the other team and not need the ball on offense. White wanted exactly that. "I wanted to really challenge myself to get better, and playing against future NBA players every day [helps me do that]," he said. He committed to Duke. He left Australia at 18, flew across the Pacific to Durham, North Carolina, and walked into a locker room where the marquee freshman was Jayson Tatum.