The San Diego State Aztecs had only won four games during the 1998/99 season when Steve Fisher was hired as their new head coach. At the time, Fisher was not only the coach who won the 1989 NCAA championship at Michigan, he was also the coach who had recruited and led one of the most famous groups of players in college basketball history, the Michigan Fab Five. They wore long pants, black shoes, and black socks, they were all freshmen and played the kind of basketball famous in the urban areas of the U.S. Two of them wouldn’t have done much as professionals, but Chris Webber, Juwan Howard and Jalen Rose eventually became NBA stars, multimillion dollar players. And before all this happened, they were the stars of two NCAA championship games, however lost, with the Wolverines of Michigan. Steve Fisher was their coach, their mentor, even if a trail of controversy and alleged irregularities made him eventually lose his job and so he was forced to move to the west coast, accepting a job at the time considered as low profile as it can get. San Diego State
But California is a land of great athletes and in basketball it has never been as true as in the last twenty years. From Paul Pierce onwards, a generation of stars have exploded onto the world stage. In particular, the Los Angeles area has produced Russell Westbrook, Paul George, James Harden, DeMar DeRozan up to the Ball brothers and Kawhi Leonard. “There must be something in the air or the food we eat that provides some extra ability, but whatever it is California has a lot of talent for sure,” Trey Kell, the latest Olimpia newcomer, also from California, says. He is from the southern part of the state, San Diego, close to the Mexican border and near Los Angeles.
Before he was born, the Clippers used to play in San Diego, then they moved to Los Angeles and that’s why he grew up cheering for the Lakers. But in his personal story, the most important Californian player is Kawhi Leonard for a very simple reason: when it came time to choose a college, Leonard decided to enroll to San Diego State. His presence changed the perception of the school.
Steve Fisher has won a lot with the Aztecs. His team has played eight times in the NCAA Tournament and in 2010/11 made it up to the number 4 in the national rankings. It was Kawhi Leonard’s second year at SDSU. Malcolm Thomas, who later played in the EuroLeague, was on his side. During those years, San Diego State was a program on the rise, with a coach very good at recruiting stars. Those were also the years when Trey Kell developed his skills. “I fell in love with the game at a very young age, basically because my dad was a basketball fan. I watched the Lakers growing up, basketball was always on, to this day, on my tv. My mom, my sister, my girlfriend cannot stand it, because it is basketball 24 hours for seven days a week. This is what my life is since I was a young kid,” he says.
Kell was still in second year of high school, at St. Augustine, a few miles down the road from the San Diego State campus, when Steve Fisher and his assistants began to recruit him. They had home court advantage, but Kell was still little known at the time. During his third year he exploded leading his team to the state title, becoming overnight an interesting prospect nationwide. Gonzaga, Oregon, and Vanderbilt traveled all the way down to San Diego to recruit him. Then it was Arizona’s turn to show up. But San Diego State was way ahead of everybody else. “It was big for me to stay on the West Coast, not necessarily staying in San Diego, but that gave the opportunity to my family, my parents to come to all the games and also from the basketball side it made a lot of sense for me because of the relationships with the coaches. The team and the program were doing really well, and I wanted to help building it and be part of that culture,” he explains.
Every now and then, Steve Fisher mentioned Juwan Howard, every now and then it was Jalen Rose and maybe Chris Webber. “But he doesn’t like talking about himself or the past, he preferred to focus on the present and what our team had to accomplish. He will always be known for the Fab Five because they have been so iconic for college basketball and basketball in general,” recalls Kell. In his second year, Kell started 38 times out of 38 averaging 12.6 points per game and was named to the All-Mountain West Conference first team. In his third year he averaged 13.2 points per game and was included in the All-conference third team. Everything seemed ready for a big senior season. But not everything went according to the plan.
First, Steve Fisher decided to retire, giving way to Brian Dutcher, who was his trusted assistant, he still coaches SDSU and was one of the main characters in Kell’s recruitment process. Then in January, during a loss to Nevada Las Vegas, Kell injured his ankle. That evening he remained on the court for only three minutes. “I was playing really well. I felt good. When injuries happen in the middle of the season, finding the balance between being health and returning to play to help the team is hard, especially since I was an important piece of that team.” Jalen McDaniels, a small forward who went on to join the NBA and has been in Charlotte for last three years, was another key component of that team. When Kell returned, the Aztecs won nine straight games, beating Gonzaga among others and New Mexico in the championship game of the conference tournament. In that game, Kell scored 28 points and won the MVP award. “I’m proud of how I finished the season, it helped me get noticed again by the NBA teams, even though being undrafte didn’t surprise me,” he says.
His first professional experience should have been in Bosnia, at Igokea, but a knee injury forced him to leave early. It was then that he received the odd call from the Canadian League’s Moncton Magic. “I was looking for a job, and my agent told me that in the Canadian league a team reached out. I didn’t know there was a Canadian league at the time,” he admits. But Kevin Zabo, his college teammate, is a Canadian who went to play for the St. John’s Edge at the time. He encouraged Trey to accept the offer. Moncton is a small town in New Brunswick, with about 100,000 residents. “It was a pretty good experience; I did my best to help the team win the championship. I had good relationships with the coach and some teammates, so I guess it is a big part of where I am today,” says Trey who was MVP of the Canadian league. In addition, it was then that he met coach Joe Salerno.
Salerno is an American coach who has worked in Canada for years. After winning the Canadian championship with Kell on the team, he also got the coaching job with the Syrian national team. “He reached out to me and said that he was getting that job. How he got that job I don’t know to this day, but he told me they were looking for an American to bring in,” he says. “I was on a team, but broke my thumb, so I had to go back home and do my rehab. I was at home for a while, waiting for a job, Covid hit, and I was out to prove that I was healthy again. It was a no-brainer to me, a great experience.”
Kell has played two games and averaged 34.5 points per game with Syria. Perhaps also thanks to those games, he convinced Coach Igor Milicic to take him to Stal Ostrow, a good team in the Polish league. “My first European experience didn’t work out for me, and everyone knew me for that, but Coach Milicic gave me a chance. He was the first to see me as a high-level player in Europe, the first to see something that no one had seen, including myself. My experience in Poland was everything for me, we won the championship and certainly we were not among the favorites to win it.”
As a fact, Kell won in high school, won his conference in college, won in Canada, and won in Poland. For a 25-year-old guy, that’s not bad. “I’m not the kind of player who looks for attention. I am one who works quietly and wants to get a job done. In this type of business, getting the job means winning games. I don’t care about scoring, if we win scoring zero points or twenty points is the same thing. I tried to bring this kind of mentality to whatever level I played,” he explains. After Poland, there was the brief experience in Varese, where he had a season high of 28 points in one game. Then the leap to Milan and to the EuroLeague. A surprising debut too. Surprised? “Yes and no. I thought it would take some time to adjust, coming to a very good team and in a tough competition, I thought I had to feel it, learn everything, getting comfortable. And that’s still true, but the coaches, the team, my teammates have been great, they made sure that I was comfortable, that I was myself. They told me to go out and play, that missing a shot wouldn’t be important, a turnover would happen, but it was important to go out and play as hard as possible and the rest would take care of itself. The first games went well, we hope to continue.”
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