While they claim "the world is our campus" at BYU, a similar slogan could be used to describe the NCAA basketball program some 80 miles to the north in Ogden.
"The world is our roster" should be considered as the official motto for the Weber State Wildcats.
  Map: Weber State's basketball rosterRequires Adobe Acrobat. | |
Put it this way: If a statistic for diversity of players were to be tracked by the NCAA, the Wildcats probably would lead the nation in the category.
The 11 eligible players on Weber State's varsity roster migrated to the melting pot that is the Dee Events Center from four different countries, three separate states and two continents.
"I would venture to say in the NCAA this is the most diverse team out there," said Weber State coach Joe Cravens. "It just kinda happened."
From Europe, the Wildcats dug up three players: Switzerland's Stephan Bachmann (Dietlikon) and Marc Thurig (Zurich), and Ivan Gatto of Treviso, Italy.
Gatto, one of only two Italian natives in a Division I program, played junior college ball in the U.S. (at Midland, Texas, the same school as Harold Arceneaux) after being a foreign exchange student in South Carolina. The Swiss standouts were recruited at a summer camp Cravens helped direct a couple of years ago in the European mecca of chocolate and cheese.
"He likes to go on holidays in Switzerland," joked Bachmann, a former Swiss national team member, about why he was recruited by Cravens.
From Canada and originally from Jamaica, the Wildcats found Stevie Morrison (Toronto, Ontario). His connection to Weber State is that he went to the same high school, Bathhurst Heights Secondary, as former Ute Phil Dixon. Cravens knew Dixon well from when Craven was an assistant of Rick Majerus' at the U., so he gave Morrison a shot.
From the home of hoops and Hoosiers, the Wildcats snatched four Indianians: Jermaine Boyette (Hammond), John Hamilton (Greenfield), Chris Woods (East Chicago) and Patrick Danley (Gary). Cravens has found success and many excellent if not overlooked players in Indiana for the past 25 years, so it has now become a talent pipeline for Weber State.
Also from the Midwest, the Wildcats grabbed Damon King. Assistant coach Kirk Earlywine was impressed with the former Blinn (Texas) JC player when he saw him playing street ball in Milwaukee, Wis., so he convinced him to come play in Ogden.
And from Utah? Only two active guys on the depth chart claim the Beehive State as their home, though several more are redshirting this season. The only ones who log any playing time are Quynn Tebbs and Jake Shoff, and, like their teammates, they are no strangers to being in strange places.
Tebbs, a Salt Lake City native and Bingham High alumnus who began his collegiate career at the University of Arizona, served an LDS mission in Sao Paulo, Brazil. Shoff, who hails from Alpine where he played for American Fork High, returned from his two-year mission in Honduras last June.
None of the Wildcats is from Harlem, but this is as much a group of globetrotters as any. For these young student-athletes, it's a daily foreign relations 101 classroom on and off the court.
"I think Pat Danley benefits from being around Stephan Bachmann, and Stephan benefits from being around Pat (and so on)," Cravens said. "They all benefit from those vast differences in background."
While they have a wide variety of styles of passports and driver's licenses, Cravens said his players must share two things to be given a serious look by him. For starters, they have to be good basketball players. He also has to like them as individuals.
"I try to recruit good kids who are talented. I'll essentially go anywhere (to find them)," said the second-year Weber coach. "The common thread amongst this whole team is that we really have nice kids."
An airplane flight attendant even complimented the Wildcats on their politeness while they were traveling last week. "That means a lot. They have high character," Cravens said. "Nobody can say we have bad representatives of Weber State."
Having a squad chock-full of foreigners doesn't come without some minor problems and adjustments.
For instance, Morrison claims his teammates "make fun of me being from Canada. They say I speak different." (He did, however, refrain from saying "eh" in this interview.) He also thinks hoops is taken much more seriously in the U.S. than it is in his hockey haven of a homeland.
"Down here you take basketball so serious. Here everyone likes it," he said. "There, I was the only in my neighborhood who could play."
The competitive nature was the biggest difference between basketball players in Italy and the United States, according to Gatto.
"The kids play with passion here. They play to win," he said. "There, we play to screw around."
Then, of course, there are some cultural inconveniences the internationalists have to deal with.
Thurig misses the warm baguettes baked daily in the "patisserie" in his village where "everybody knows your name." Gatto jokingly says he prefers "European chicks" over American girls because they are more romantic. Bachmann said the night life in Utah, which he equates to renting a video and staying at home, isn't quite what it was in Switzerland, where he and his friends would party hearty all the time. "But it's not that bad here," he quickly added.
Though Weber State's situation is a bit extreme compared to many, having an international flavor to a college basketball team is hardly an anomaly anymore. There are more than 300 players in the D-1 ranks — about one per program — who immigrated here to play basketball.
"The big goal (in Canada) was to play college basketball in America," Morrison said. "When you get down here it's like living a dream. Whatever happens after that is like gravy."
"Everybody (in Italy) would love to do it," Gatto said. "I feel lucky."
Bottom line is, as long as the players can somehow throw the ball in the basket or play a lick of defense and pass class on top of that, it doesn't matter where they call home. And at 11-7 overall and tied atop the Big Sky Conference standings, going into tomorrow's showdown at co-leader Northridge, the "We are the World" Wildcats are proof that talent has no boundaries.
"If you win, you could have kids from Mars and no one would care," Cravens joked.
And by now, he just might have enough frequent flyer miles to go to the Red Planet on a recruiting trip.
E-mail: jody@desnews.com