Up and under: Australian basketball players find success at Inland Northwest schools
A dream is a powerful thing. It can make you leave your family behind and chase that dream halfway around the world – all the way to Coeur d’Alene.
That’s where Australian basketball player Georgia Stirton found herself in the fall of 2012. Desperate to prove herself in the American game, Stirton became her own recruiting agent.
She sent emails to 200 schools; the first reply came from North Idaho College.
Properly flattered, “I signed with them,” said Stirton, whose impulsiveness has been rewarded ever since: Now she’s playing in front of 6,000 fans as the starting point guard at Gonzaga.
“It’s amazing how much you can do when you get pushed out of your comfort zone,” Stirton said.
For decades, young Australian basketball players have taken a leap of faith by leaping over the big pond to chase their dreams. At first they lapped our shores in small waves. There was John Rillie at GU and later, Brock Motum and Aron Baynes at Washington State.
Lately it’s been steady tide, a warm current that’s enriched the game on both ends of the Pacific. Last spring, Australians watched on the “tele” a first-time event: two of their own playing each other in the NBA Finals.
Matthew Dellavedova of the Cleveland Cavaliers and Andrew Bogut of the Golden State Warriors are just two of a record eight “Boomers” playing this year in the NBA.
All eight are products of the Center of Excellence, a publically-funded, year-round school with a serious athletic bent. Top-tier youths in all sports are sent to the center, located in the capital of Canberra, and top coaches hone their talents with an eye toward the Olympic podium.
But what about the hundreds of others, the ones whose talent isn’t quite “excellent” enough?
They have dreams too; so do American college coaches. Through emails, film and a little networking with local coaches, they’ve found each other across the ocean.
Apart from their accents, they hardly draw a notice from fans. This season, 204 Australian men and 74 women are playing collegiate basketball in the United States.
Fourteen of them compete in the Inland Northwest. For the first time, at least one Aussie is starting at every four-year college in the region.
Says Venky Jois, a four-year starter at Eastern Washington: “More American colleges are starting to look at Australians as a pipeline for basketball.”
Why have so many settled here? Perhaps because the region is one plane connection closer to home. More likely it’s because some of the region’s coaches have gone out of their way to find them – 8,000 miles out of their way.
Idaho women’s coach Jon Newlee has been doing this long enough to earn frequent-flier miles with Qantas. As an assistant at SMU in the early 1990s – he toured Australia with a college all-star team.
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“I got to know some of the coaches, and I kept in contact with them,” said Newlee, who got closer to the action as an assistant at Hawaii. The pipeline followed him to Idaho State and lately to Idaho, where he has four Aussies on his roster.
“You get a couple of them, and as long as they’ve had a good experience and then they tell everyone.”
“And now they call me,” Newlee said.
Feeding the dream
In Australia, as in most countries outside the United States, athletes compete for clubs or national teams instead of schools. Their coaches are the main conduits between the players and American programs who cultivate them.
Said WSU women’s coach June Daugherty, whose roster includes Aussie Louise Brown and Krystle McKenzie, “We made it a point to watch the young kids play, and we’ve really done a good job of networking with the national team coaches.”
“Through them, we’ve identified the kids they feel could play at this high level,” Daugherty said.
Finding the top players became harder as tens of thousands of youngsters gravitated away from the traditional favorites of rugby and Australian Rules Football. On the other hand, it’s made easier thanks to technology: film can be sent with the push of a button.
Or with a phone call to an old friend.
Eastern Washington men’s coach Jim Hayford has five Australians on his roster thanks partly to Timm Rapp, a former coach at Cal Poly Pomona who now works in finance in Melbourne.
“The first one he sent was Venky – it’s a gift that has kept giving,” Hayford said.
Jois is a two-time All-Big Sky Conference player and a major reason Eastern is coming off an appearance in the NCAA tournament. Felix Von Hofe followed a year later.
“The success of Venky was big,” Von Hofe said. “You want to go to a place where you can see that Australians are being taken care of.”
No looking back
Chasing a dream can be tough on the ones you love, even if they won’t admit it.
When Hayford offered a scholarship to Jois, he turned to his mother, Jennifer.
“He said, ‘This is my dream, mum,’ ” she recalled.
“And I said, ‘Well, you have to take it,’” Jennifer Jois said during a visit to Cheney last season.
With no trace of a tear, she added, “I mentioned it to someone and they said, ‘And you’re going to let him go?’ How could you not? Because if you deny a child chasing their dream, they never know if it would have worked out.”
Once here, the Aussies are quick to adjust. With their return flights months away, they can’t generate much sympathy for the Spokane kid who gets homesick halfway through his first fall term at U-Dub.
When it comes to fast music and fast food, the culture is the same. The hemispheric flip of the seasons is another matter.
“I miss summer so bad – I’ve had four straight years of winter,” said Stirton, echoing a common complaint.
The other petty nuisance is Americans’ fascination with the Aussie accent. “I tried to set up my phone, and I had to repeat myself four or five times,” said Von Hofe, who also said he thinks Americans work too hard.
“They need to play a little more,” he said.
Then again, the Aussies have toiled hard at the game they love to play. All agree that the American game is faster, and hours longer than they expected.
On the other hand, the work has paid off, and Aussies have been difference-makers for their teams. Last year, Stirton helped Gonzaga reach the Sweet 16 and Jois and Von Hofe have taken the Eagles to new heights. At Whitworth, Christian Jurlina is the leading scorer on a team that’s ranked fifth in the nation, and Newlee’s four Aussie Vandals are the surprise of the Big Sky Conference.
Of course, winning isn’t everything.
“The life experience, that was the major factor – it’s definitely exceeded my expectations,” Von Hofe said.
