how to put Post title in a variable and call in Sidebar?

http://codex.wordpress.org/Template_Tags/get_the_title

if called in the loop, it will get the title of the cuurent post

$post_title_test = get_the_title();

seems to need the global – in sidebar:
global $post_title_test; echo $post_title_test;

I’m trying to get information from a data table that I have inside my WP database onto a page. I use this on other sites, but I’m not getting it to work on this one. The datatable/database query works on another file, and I obviously swapped out the actual names.

In this case, page titles are names of basketball players. I’m getting the following error:

Fatal error: Call to undefined function get_the_title() in /home/jwrbloom/public_html/spieceselect.org/resources/2011/profile.php on line 3

Here is the code:

<?php

$playerName = get_the_title($post->post_title );  

$con = mysql_connect("localhost","username","pa$$word");

 mysql_select_db("name-of-database", $con);	

$query = 'SELECT * FROM team2011 ORDER BY uniform ASC';
$results = mysql_query($query);

while($line = mysql_fetch_assoc($results)) {

	if ($playerName == $line['nameFirst'].'-'.$line['nameLast']) {

	echo '<div>' . $line['nameFirst'].' '.$line['nameLast'] . '</div>';

	}
}
?>

Keep in mind, the echo is just a test output.