Trey Kell: My Basketball journey brought me to Canada, Syria and Poland. Now I’m happy to be here

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.

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."