Being from Decatur, I'm actually a little more familiar with the situation at Decatur Christian, and I kind of take offense to you passing such judgment on the school and the program as a whole based on a limited understanding of what actually went on there.
First of all I want to point out that the roster you guys keep referring to is both extremely dated, and extremely sloppy. It looks like it was put together in about 10 minutes on a random Wednesday in June prior to the start of their season. There are 7 foreign kids listed on that roster who never enrolled at DCS, and never played a game with them.
Also some of you are getting confused by the players that were already at DCS prior to Huss getting there and bringing in all the foreign players. None of those players had much (if any) college basketball potential. When Huss said that all of his players would play division 1 ball, he meant those 9 (although some of them have had some setbacks).
Also a lot of you are hinting that DCS might have been some sort of a basketball factory in which the players weren't forced to study at all. That couldn't be further from the truth. I personally saw Beas and Lucca doing multiple hours of homework each night. In fact both have said that their transitions to college classes were made a lot easier by how hard they had to work at DCS to earn their grades. Several players at DCS spent significant time ineligible due to grades. I think all the players were trying hard, but going to a difficult school is tough when you consider English is not the primary language of a lot of these kids and they are studying American History for the first time and senior level English classes.
So I'll go player by player, and explain their situations:
Lucca Staiger - No Academic problems whatsoever. Lucca was a part of the starting lineup at Iowa State prior to the NCAA randomly deciding to enforce rules about foreign players playing on the same team with players receiving compensation. There's a ton of information about this all over the internet, and there is also a decent thread on this website with a lot of information about him
here.
FreeLucca.com is another website that shows how upset the Iowa State fans are about his situation. It is complete BS, but Lucca will bounce back, and he will likely be a starter this time next year.
Beas Hamga - Beas' qualification problems were the result of him attempting to graduate a year earlier than expected, and making that decision a little late (during the spring of his junior year). Beas passed his ACT in his third language, but the NCAA is worried about whether or not his classes his final year in Cameroon were actually high school level classes. They claim those classes were at the 8th grade level. I claim not to care, because he's clearly shown he has both the intelligence and knowledge to perform in the classroom at the college level by getting the needed score on his college entrance exam. Reports from Vegas say he's the best overall player on his likely NCAA bound team, but the NCAA has decided he needs to redshirt for a year to make sure he's ready to handle the load in college. Another BS decision. I think Beas will be drafted at some point and play in the NBA. He's a force defensively, and Kruger has him working his butt of shooting tons of jump hooks with both hands each day. He will definitely be a success story by this time next year.
Mario Stula - No academic problems whatsoever. People that watched DePaul practices seemed to think Mario would get major playing time as a freshman, but he separated his shoulder prior to their first game, and now it appears he'll be forced to miss a year and 8 games prior to the NCAA's anti-foreign rules. Rules in which they decided to make the penalty 5 times as severe (from 20% of one year to one full year) without spreading the word. Another BS NCAA decision, but Mario would have likely missed the entire year anyway. The only bad thing in this situation is that Mario now has to lose a year of eligibility when he was planning on using a medical redshirt.
Darrington Hobson - I think someone else did a better job of talking about Darrington in a thread I already linked to
here: In that thread, SoyCityHoops said:
"(Darrington) is the poster child for all that is wrong with “prep school” basketball. He actually meets all the criteria to be an NCAA qualifier. Unfortunately, he received many of his credits from 2 separate schools that are no longer in existence (Gulf Shores Academy & Calvary Baptist Christian School). The NCAA red flagged his case and he was not able to provide the documentation on the classes from those schools to prove his case. He is now enrolled at Eastern Utah Community College. He hopes to enroll at New Mexico midyear 2008."
Since then several things have changed with Darrington. Just recently it seems that Darrington has finally admitted to himself that he is going to have to stick it out at CEU for 2 years. In his last two games he has scored 37 points, and 46 points, and I just heard from a junior college scout that he very well might be the best junior college freshman in the entire country. If he can keep his head on straight, I think Darrington has a decent chance to be an NBA player. He only played 3 or 4 games with DCS last year for a number reasons (mainly a high ankle sprain), but he was easily the best overall player on the team when he actually played. He is just a ridiculously good basketball player.
Duro Bjegovic and
Ivan Gombovic were both Croatian and lived together. I don't think either of them learned English as well as they should have, and they talked to each other, and the other two Croatians on the team in their native language a little more than they probably should have. Duro was hurt for the majority of the year with a shattered thumb, and Ivan spent a semi-large portion of the year ineligible because of his poor English. I think Duro was offered a scholarship to Iowa over the summer, but he never qualified, and he ended up enrolling in Juco in Missouri. His numbers surprise me because he's actually a very good scorer. I wouldn't be surprised if there is a story behind it, but I'm not close to Duro or Ivan, and know less about them than the rest of the kids.
Ozren Bjelogrlic - You guys keep acting like Ozzy's name was spelled wrong purposely. It is just hard to spell. That whole roster looks like it was thrown together in like 10 minutes prior to most of the players actually getting to Decatur. Someone claims he's 21, but I don't see that anywhere. In fact, I think he turned 19 in October. It just seems to me as if the records of a kid who's played so much basketball in a country like Croatia would exist fairly far back... too far back for him to lie about his age. Perhaps in the case of an African player in a developing country it might be possible, but I don't think so in Croatia. Either way, it was always obvious Ozzy was on the border of being either a D-1 or D-2 player. He was asked to redshirt at Liberty, and he will transfer after he finishes his academic freshman year because he's unhappy at Liberty (a radical christian school with extremely strict rules that won't allow him to kiss girls or see rated R movies). If you'll remember, Liberty University is the former home of Jerry Falwell and his radical televangelist church.
Johann Mpondo - Johann didn't look like a D-1 player all year. He's another kid from Cameroon who is fluent in Spanish, French, and English. He had no problems getting eligible, but he kind of struggled on the basketball floor for DCS. But during the spring and summer of 2007, he played some very good AAU games, and got some D-1 notice from teams like New Orleans, Nevada, and Rhode Island. I'm not sure exactly what happened at Rhode Island, but that didn't work out for him, and he's spending a year at a post-grad prep school. He's really athletic and tall, and he's got a TON of potential, but basketball is just pretty new to him. I think he will be playing D-1 ball somewhere next year.
Ty Nurse - Ty was a sophomore, and he decided it was best for him to go back to Canada when Decatur Christian decided against bringing in new talent. He will probably play D-1 basketball in a couple of years.
So yeah, it looks bad when you group them all together, but the DCS kids were not put in a basketball factory, and it actually was a good thing for most of them. They were all put in an opportunity to succeed. The basketball program didn't stay there for a number of reasons mainly because the administrators and decision makers at the school weren't 100% behind making the program successful. Some of the people there didn't really like the attention, and didn't like the influence of the outsiders on their children. I suppose you'll have that when you have an extremely religious school. They weren't expecting this program to come in and stir everything up, and I'm guessing there were mixed feelings about it leaving.
Of the 9 players, 4 of them will be playing D-1 basketball next year (Lucca, Mario, Beas, Johann), 3 of them will be in junior college because of eligibilty issues (2 for struggling with English as a second language in Duro and Ivan, and Darrington Hobson with his blacklisted prep schools from his past), 1 will transfer to Juco because he's unhappy (Ozren), and 1 is still in high school. I'm not exactly sure how many kids lives' you're giving DCS credit for ruining, but you can go ahead and put that number back to 0.
I hope that clears some things up.
