A look at the five international players currently on the Rice roster:
Here is the story that appeared in Wednesday’s Chronicle.
• Hometown: Brampton, Ontario.
• Class: Freshman.
• Position: Point guard.
• 2011-12 stats: 8.6 ppg | 4.3 rebounds | 112 assists | 43.7 percent shooting | 22 starts
• Road to Rice: Ennis grew up outside Toronto before moving to New York with his uncle when he was 14 years old. He attended Wings Academy in the Bronx, but the long daily commute eventually took its toll and he eventually transferred to Lake Forest Academy, a prep school in Chicago, for his final two years of high school. He gave a verbal commitment to Akron (the first school to offer him a scholarship) before switching to the Owls during his junior season.
• Quote: “I didn’t want to just be another player who came through a program. Even though Rice hadn’t had great years in the past, I think if a player can come in with a good freshmen class and good supporting cast and can change a whole program, people will remember that more than they remember the guy who was just at a big school.”
• Hometown: Beirut, Lebanon.
• Class: Freshman.
• Position: Forward.
• 2011-12 stats: 6.0 ppg | 2.1 rebounds | 8 starts
• Road to Rice: Ibrahim moved around prep schools on the East Coast, playing one season with current teammate Arsalan Kazemi at The Patterson School in North Carolina.
“The first day I saw Arsalan was one of the hardest days of my life,” he said. Why? “First of all he doesn’t speak Arabic and he couldn’t speak English. So we used signs to do things. After awhile we got to know each other better.”
Ibrahim spent his junior season at Mountain State Academy in Beckley, W. Va., before moving to Humble Christian Life Academy as a senior. Ibrahim first began to draw interest on the international scene while playing at the FIBA Asia Championship. He scored 49 points against Kazakhstan before posting 34 points in consecutive games against China and Syria.
• Quotable: “Sometimes when I score four points I don’t get a lot of phone calls from back home. When I scored 23 points (earlier this season against Tulane) I got a lot of phone calls. That’s life.”
• Hometown: Esfahan, Iran.
• Class: Junior.
• Position: Forward.
• 2011-12 stats: 12.3 ppg | 10.4 rebounds | 57 steals | 29 blocks | 59.3 percent field goal shooting | 43 career double-doubles (tied for C-USA record)
• Road to Rice: When Kazemi’s family made the decision to send him to the United States for basketball and study they originally considered Rice. But after playing at The Patterson School, a private boarding school in North Carolina, Kazemi signed with Rice and became the first Iranian-born basketball player on the Division I level in 2009.
The path hasn’t always been easy.
Kazemi said he remembers the isolation, being homesick, not having any friends. For two semesters he had his own dorm room. “I wanted my own room, my own privacy,” he said. “I would go to practice and run back to my room and talk to my friends or mom on Skype. (My teammates) tried to talk to me but t was my fault. I was ignoring them. They were all really nice. I was really homesick.”
Kazemi had a breakthrough when a few teammates invited him over to play video games.
“I started enjoying it and started hanging out with them more and more,” he said. “They took me out of whatever I was going through.”
By the second semester, Omar Oraby, also Muslim, arrived on campus and Kazemi helped him make the transition to living in the U.S. They became roommates. Then followed Ahmad Ibrahim.
“The we had our own Rice gang now,” he said.
Kazemi was a star for the Iranian national team at last summer’s FIBA Asia Championships, which led to some pro offers from overseas clubs. At Rice, Kazemi has emerged as a perennial All-Conference USA forward and one of the top rebounders in the nation.
His mother, Roya, watches every Rice basketball game online – back home the games start around 4 a.m. – and calls her son afterward.
“I keep telling her to go to sleep,” he jokes. “She doesn’t listen.”
Kazemi said he likes to go home as often as his schedule permits, which is usually for a month in late July after his summer class session. That allows him to spend anywhere from 3 weeks to a month with his family. But there are risks. With no American embassy in Iran, Kazemi had to go to Dubai to apply for a visa to play basketball in the U.S. He had not heard back after a month and began to worry after missing the first week of fall classes.
“I didn’t hear anything, so I started contacting whoever I knew to see what was going on because it was a week past school starting,” he said.
With the chance he may be denied, Kazemi said, “it’s a risk I’m going to take.”
• Quotable“I was the first one here. It’s really hard when you come to a place that you basically don’t have any friends, don’t know anyone, you’re homesick and don’t have any family here. It was a really tough time for me.”
• Hometown: Cairo, Egypt.
• Class: Sophomore.
• Position: Center.
• 2011-12 stats: 6.1 ppg | 3.5 rebounds | 46 blocks (school record) | 63.7 percent shooting
• Road to Rice: Unlike his other international teammates, Oraby never lived in the United States before arriving on the Rice campus. The 7-2 center was playing for Egypt’s junior national team when first approached by the Owls coaching staff at the FIBA World Championship in New Zealand in 2009.
The Owls contacted his national team coach and from there cultivated the relationship with Rice assistant coach Marco Morcos, an Egyptian native, serving as the point man. Once he arrived at Rice, he quickly became friends with Arsalan Kazemi and the two are currently roommates.
“That was the first time I lived by myself and it was a totally different country on the other side of the world,” Oraby said. “It was very difficult for me at the beginning to leave my family and my home and all my friends to come here. I’ve made a lot of good friends here and everybody has been very warm welcoming me. I got used to situation very quickly here and it hasn’t been very hard since.”
• Quotable “Rice is very diverse. There are people from all over the world, so that doesn’t make me feel like I’m strange or anything. It makes me feel normal.”
• Hometown: Frankfurt, Germany.
• Class: Freshman.
• Position: Forward.
• 2011-12 stats: 5.4 ppg | 2.7 rebounds | 11 starts
• Road to Rice: While basketball has always been his first love, Reischel spent his Sunday afternoons playing soccer in Frankfurt.
“Soccer is such a big sport in Germany,” he said. Reischel, who was a defender, says he received a couple offers to play on junior club teams.
Reischel, whose father was in the U.S. military, moved to Point Pleasant, N.J., when he was 16.
“When I first came over here the language was a big problem,” he said. “I spoke a little English but it wasn’t good.”
The Owls have established recruiting contacts on the East Coast, most recently with the signing of guard Tamir Jackson (St. Benedict’s Prep).
• Quotable: “Wherever you’re from our common language is basketball.”
David Chadwick (Charlotte, N.C.), Julian DeBose (Washington), Connor Frizzelle (DeSoto), Seth Gearhart (Wilsonville, Ore.), Emerson Herndon (Houston), Tamir Jackson (Paterson, N.J.), Lucas Kuipers (Rochester, Minn.), Dan Peera (Concord, Calif.), Nate Schwarze (Chelsea, Mich.).