EUROPEAN ADVENTURE
DESPITE CHALLENGES, ALUMNI ENJOY PLAYING BASKETBALL IN EUROPE
By David Hein | Illustration By Toby Maynard
Winston Davis ’04, Rob Dill ’04, Andrew Pleick ’04, and Sean
Knitter ’05 have quite a bit in common.
All four played for Coach Fran O’Hanlon.
All four are still playing basketball, earning a decent living in leagues throughout Europe.
And all four have encountered some of the
usual problems that go along with playing
on the Old Continent.
“A lot of people know difficult things can happen. If you don’t play for the love of the game, you shouldn’t play,” says Davis, who spent his first professional season in Germany on two different teams. Davis left his first team, COOCOON Baskets Weiden, after it ran into financial problems.
“I tried to not let it demotivate me and
just take it in stride. I tried to make it as small a deal as I could,” says Davis, who finished this past season with BG Rotenburg of the German Regional League.
Dill, his teammate at Weiden, also dealt
with the situation. A Portuguese club still
owes money to Pleick from 2003. And Knitter
is still owed money from a Portuguese team
that stopped competing because it couldn’t
pay its players.
“It’s really like Russian roulette when you
get out of college. You really don’t know,”
says Knitter. “I figure it can’t get any worse. In between tears you have to try to laugh,” he jokes. On the court, the players discovered they were well prepared by O’Hanlon.
“Coach makes you play an all-around game; you have to do everything that comes along.
Because of that, I’ve been able to fill different holes on different teams depending on what
they need,” says Pleick, who has played in
Portugal, France, Switzerland, Austria, and Sweden.
Dill adds, “Coach made a big deal about
playing the right way and making right
decisions. And I’ve definitely come to find
that coaches are happy about me having
those skills.”
Playing basketball abroad usually means loads of free time that the players themselves had to figure out how to fill.
“The time management I learned at Lafayette gave me the ability to realize when it’s necessary to give your priorities to some things over others,” says Dill.
“But it’s definitely been an adjustment.
I’ve found the less you have to do, the even less you get done,” says Dill, who reads a lot and tries to make electronic music.
Knitter says the free-time issue gets worse
if you live in a small town—as he does in central Portugal. “There’s one movie theater and one McDonald’s. It’s not like Lisbon or some of the other big cities. I’ve watched millions of DVDs and hang around on the Internet all the time,” he says. “I’ve been here about seven months and I’m ready to get home and see my family. And see some more civilization.”
And while Dill, who was born in Germany and lived there before going to high school in the United States, loves the fact that he can play professional basketball, he has some concern about not yet using his Lafayette degree.
“Every year I don’t do something with my engineering degree, the more I lessen [its value],” he says. Dill doesn’t know yet how
he wants to solve the problem—especially since he loves playing hoops.
In true Lafayette fashion, the quartet of players looks out for fellow Leopards. For example, Pleick answered many questions by Knitter about playing and living in Europe before he came over for the season.
And Knitter offers a bit of advice to future Lafayette grads thinking of playing abroad.
“Do your research. Find a couple of people whom you respect and who know the business. And find a good agent,” he says. “That’s hard. You’ll have agents contacting you from different parts of the country. But it will help if you put
in the time and effort.”
It may help an athlete have one fewer thing in common with Pleick, Davis, Knitter, and Dill.
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