| | By Pat Forde
Special to ESPN.com
In 30 years at the University of Louisville, the hometown has always been Ground Zero in recruiting for Denny Crum.
His best teams found their backbone in homegrown players. Phillip Bond, Wesley Cox, all-time leading scorer Darrell Griffith, Jerry Eaves, Herbert Crook, Tony Kimbro, Felton Spencer, Dwayne Morton and No. 2 career scorer DeJuan Wheat are just some of the homies who made Louisville perhaps second only to Memphis in longterm reliance on local talent.
|  | | For the first time in his 30 years at Louisville, Denny Crum's roster has an international flavor to it. |
But by the mid-1990s the pipeline was drying up. Louisville was producing fewer blue-chip recruits, and the only two future pros of recent vintage -- Derek Anderson and Scott Padgett -- starred at arch-rival Kentucky. Ouch.
Slow reaction to the shifting recruiting map has left scars. The Cardinals haven't won 20 games in a season, won an NCAA Tournament game or beaten Conference USA kingpin Cincinnati since Wheat was a senior in 1997.
Now Louisville's recruiting response to hard times has been a seismic shift from provincial to international. A program that used to make hay inside the city limits has gone through customs in attempting a return to glory.
The first four foreign scholarship players of Crum's career are on the current Louisville roster, hailing from Bulgaria (Simeon Naydenov), Mali (Daouda Cisse), Nigeria (Muhammed Lasege) and France (Joseph N'Sima). They're all frontcourt players, which the Cards desperately need. But three of the four have eligibility issues that likely will keep them from playing when the team tips off in Hawaii on Nov. 19. And all four are far from ready-made impact players.
Nevertheless, times are changing at this musty old program. Permanently, it would seem.
Next year's recruiting class could feature Daouda Cisse's brother, the lavishly talented Ousmane, a ferocious shot-blocker some call the No. 1 high-school senior in America (the Cisses now call Montgomery, Ala., home).
The foreign legion has landed in Louisville in large part through the efforts of the Cards' international affairs expert, assistant coach Vince Taylor, who played ball for 13 years overseas. He's helped make Crum a late, but enthusiastic, convert to the worldwide recruiting world.
"They are not spoiled by the process," Crum said of his foreign players. "They're happy being here and having the opportunity."
But now an adjustment period is in order. Fans are trying to wrap their tongues around the proper pronunciations of Naydenov, Cisse, Lasege and N'Sima. Players aren't just learning Crum's switching man-to-man defense and high-post offense; they're learning how to mesh cultures as well.
Toward that end, assistant coach Scott Davenport called a team meeting three days before the start of practice. He asked each player to take 15 minutes and present his own "life story" to his new teammates. The four foreigners are joined by three other newcomers on a radically rebuilt roster.
"It was interesting to see how we all got here," said senior guard Marques Maybin, who has found himself giving a few Intro To American College Culture lessons this fall. "I think it's going to help us get along better. You learn to recognize when guys need help adjusting."
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“ |
Maybe all the complaining we do, we
shouldn't really do. It's been a great learning
experience. (The foreign players) teach you things, and you teach them
things. ” |
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— Luke Whitehead, Louisville freshman forward
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Maybin already considers himself "a little more cultural" than some of his American teammates, given the three years he lived in Germany and one in Italy as the son of a serviceman. But he's learning from guys like Lasege and N'Sima, who speak several languages.
And all the American Cardinals are learning some newfound appreciation for the things they've had in this country from the crib. Some of their foreign teammates did without much that we're accustomed to.
"Maybe all the complaining we do, we shouldn't really do," said freshman forward Luke Whitehead. "It's been a great learning experience. They teach you things, and you teach them things."
Lasege alone could give an entire seminar on patience. At 6-foot-11, he is the lone center-sized player on a threadbare and green Louisville team, making him the MVF (Most Valuable Foreigner). But nobody knows when he'll take the court for his first game.
He's the one unknown out there. Cisse will sit out the season as a partial qualifier. Naydenov must miss the first three games under NCAA amateurism guidelines. N'Sima is fully eligible.
But Lasege sits in limbo.
It's been more than 500 days since Lasege and fellow Nigerian Ben Eze Ndbuisi signed letters-of-intent with the Cardinals. When academic hurdles arose, Ndbuisi chose the junior-college route. Lasege enrolled at Louisville and began the never-ending wait for a ruling on his eligibility.
The first problem was acquiring transcripts and academic information from Nigeria. That was finally overcome, and Lasege was an honor-roll student while sitting out last season.
The current issue is his amateur status, which was compromised by a brief stint in a Russian pro league during a Byzantine, Nigeria-to-Russia-to-Canada-to-Louisville odyssey.
Louisville had hoped for a ruling before the school year started, but associate athletic director for compliance Neil Brooks said the Wisconsin shoe-store caper shoved back the NCAA Enforcement staff's timetable on Lasege and several other cases. Now Brooks is hoping to hear something before games are played -- including the number of games Lasege must sit out. There are no reliable estimates on that number.
Whenever Lasege becomes eligible, Louisville will become a more complete team. But with its new foreign legion roster, the Cardinals already are a completely different team from years past. | |
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