Italy. . . Serbia. . . Montenegro. . . Portugal. . . the Netherlands.
No, that’s not a roll call vote at the United Nations General Assembly. That’s the men’s basketball roster for the University of Tennessee at Martin. Counting two redshirts, the Skyhawks have 13 players born in other lands. Leading scorer Josue Grullon is from the Dominican Republic, top rebounder Vladimer Salaridze from the Republic of Georgia and leading assists dispenser Afan Trnka from Bosnia and Herzegovina.
So it goes on World Basketball Day this weekend, where to see the international impact on the college game you only need look. . . well, just about anywhere. Eight other teams listed at least eight international players on their rosters. There were more than 800 in Division I men’s basketball last season. This year there are just over 2,000 for men and women in Divisions I and II. That number is higher than the entire enrollment of Davidson.
We have seen it for years, right into the Final Four. The first leg of Connecticut’s current repeat title run was helped along by Mali’s Adama Sanogo, voted the Most Outstanding Player. Does anyone here remember Houston’s Akeem (now Hakeem) Olajuwon from Nigeria, the last player from a losing team to be named Final Four MOP in 1983? Georgetown’s Patrick Ewing, his journey originating in Jamaica? Florida’s Joakim Noah, born in New York but spending most of his early years in France with his father and French tennis star Yannick Noah? Buddy Hield, from the Bahamas, carrying Oklahoma? Germany’s Moe Wagner leading Michigan to the 2018 title game? To make Wagner a Wolverine, coach John Beilein flew to Berlin one day, had dinner with the family, and returned to Ann Arbor the next morning. The result was a future star and a nasty case of jet lag.
Consider the current Associated Press top 25. There are 49 international players represented on the list. The only team without at least one is Iowa State. Duke has three, Gonzaga four and Florida has played five. Tennessee has rolled to No. 1 with no small help from Igor Milicic Jr., a Croatian who also holds Polish citizenship. He had 14 rebounds, a steal and a dunk that put the Vols ahead in their tight struggle with Illinois.
Speaking of the Illini, their top two scorers are Kasparas Jakucionis from Lithuania and Tomislav Ivisic from Croatia. Ivisic’s twin brother Zvonmir plays for Arkansas, and the Ivisic boys faced one another earlier this season.
At Duke, that was Australian-born Tyrese Proctor burying five 3-pointers against Kansas, and 7-2 Khaman Maluach from South Sudan roaming the paint with his 9-foot-8 standing reach.
Saint Mary’s is having a good season. Again. The Gaels are 10-2 and pancaked USC 71-36, and their top two scorers, Augustas Marciulionis and Paulius Murauskas, are from Lithuania. Randy Bennett has made a perennial power at Saint Mary’s with a heavy overseas flavor. His roster has sometimes been so Australian, the team should have flown on Qantas. Bennett has recruited 25 Aussies in all.
Consider the individual stat leaders. The top shooter in percentage in the land is Louisiana Tech’s Daniel Batcho. He was born in Paris and can speak three languages – English, French and Russian. The national leader in assists is Canadian-born Ryan Nembhard from Gonzaga. Nobody has more double-doubles than Stanford’s Maxime Raynaud, who attended the most prestigious high school in Paris. Right behind him is South Dakota State’s Oscar Cluff, who hails from the Sunshine Coast in Australia. Raynaud is the leading scorer among all international Division I players at 21.5.
READ MORE: UConn re-enters Andy Katz’s latest power rankings
Consider recent national players of the year. Oscar Tshiebwe’s journey to the Bluegrass of Kentucky began in the Congo. Before Purdue’s Zach Edey became the first repeat winner of the award in more than four decades, he was a youth league hockey player in Toronto, standing head and shoulders above his teammates.
But nobody has imported like Jeremy Shulman in his first season at UT Martin. He had to create nearly an entirely new roster and he knew just where to look. International players had been a key component of his majestic run in junior college at Eastern Florida State College, where he won 11 conference titles over the past 12 years. He explained why having 13 international Skyhawks is no accident.
“A couple of things. One, my wife is from Latvia in northwestern Europe, and 10 years ago I made my first trip to Latvia to see her family and when we were out there there’s no ESPN, but the Euro League games are on TV. I started watching and just fell in love with the game. The coaching, the players, the unselfishness, the connectedness with the players, I thought it was just beautiful.
“The last couple of years we went all in.”
And No 2?
“We’re in a unique situation at UT Martin. We’re in a small town and not a traditional power and so our thought was we could try to be better than anyone we’re playing against by recruiting the same way, or we could be different. We thought it’s such a small town and a unique situation, let’s do something different.”
It’s not always easy. Take road games with the other team’s fans and pep ban blaring in their ears.
“I didn’t realize just how loud Division I games on the road are. So In the huddle, even though we have guys who speak fluent English because it’s their second language, sometimes it has been a little bit difficult to convey our message when you have a Dominican Republic player who’s right there, a Serbian player right there, a player from the Republic of Georgia right here.”
Such is the world when your roster reads like an Olympic Opening Ceremony march of nations.
“In some ways it’s a little more of a challenge than I anticipated. In some ways it makes things easy,” Shulman said. “They’re all here for a collective purpose. They’ve from a long, long ways away because they all want to win basketball games, they all want to come the best player they can because they eventually want to become pros. Obviously they’re not in Martin, Tennessee for the Las Vegas-style party life. But on the flip side, you do have a lot of guys who speak different languages, a lot of guys who are not used to American basketball, and a lot of guys who struggle at time with being homesick.
“Generally international players are extremely humble. Unfortunately, in the social media age, I have found that American players have become a little more entitled and tougher to coach over the years. These guys are very hungry because they have sacrificed and come from so far away and left their families.”
And they’re motivated to do well in anything they do. UT Martin’s team grade point average this semester was 3.35.
This rainbow coalition has had to endure some early bumps and an arduous schedule. The Skyhawks’ first 10 games against Division I opponents are on the road. They took a 4-8 record to Southern Indiana Saturday and four of those defeats were punch-in-the-gut varieties. Longwood came from 12 points down in the final 6 1/2 minutes to beat them 64-62, leading only the final three seconds. UT Martin lost in overtime to Alabama State, by four at Texas A&M-Corpus Christi and by one point Thursday to Morehead State after leading by five with 1:03 left in overtime.
“We’re 360th in the country in experience,” Shulman said. “We’re young and inexperienced so we knew we’d lose together within the locker room before we could win together. These losses that we’ve had in heartbreaking fashion, this is such a connected group, they don’t throw stones at someone else. We cry together and we get better and we move forward together.”
The team had a players’ only meeting recently and the decision was that only English would be spoken in the locker room. One team, one language on the job. “You’d have three or four guys over speaking Serbian, two guys over here speaking Spanish, a couple of guys over here speaking French, with their teammates not knowing what they’re saying,” said Shulman, who added, “I can only dabble in a few other languages.”
Most of his players can speak multiple languages, which is how it works in many places. In the US, not so much. Shulman mentioned a joke that goes around: “What do you call someone who can speak two languages? They’re bilingual. What do you call someone who speaks three languages? They’re trilingual. What do you call someone who speaks one language? American.”
Not American college basketball, though. It has become a truly global enterprise and at the head of the parade is the UT Martin team bus.
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