{"id":71597,"date":"2019-08-01T09:56:27","date_gmt":"2019-08-01T13:56:27","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/webapp2.wright.edu\/web1\/newsroom\/?p=71597"},"modified":"2024-01-04T15:09:54","modified_gmt":"2024-01-04T20:09:54","slug":"ddn-wright-state-mens-basketball-trip-to-italy-a-learning-experience","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/webapp2.wright.edu\/web1\/newsroom\/2019\/08\/01\/ddn-wright-state-mens-basketball-trip-to-italy-a-learning-experience\/","title":{"rendered":"Dayton Daily News: Wright State men\u2019s basketball trip to Italy a learning experience"},"content":{"rendered":"

Excerpt<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"Wright State coach Scott Nagy doesn\u2019t know the level of competition his team will face in the three basketball games it plays during the Raiders\u2019 10-day trip to Italy, which begins Friday.<\/p>\n

But he and his players do know they\u2019ll be facing one famed big man who easily dwarfs their own powerful presence, 6-foot-9 Loudon Love.<\/p>\n

The guy who\u2019ll tower over them in Florence stands 17-feet high, is made of marble and is over 500 years old.<\/p>\n

David, the Renaissance masterpiece sculpted by Italian artist Michelangelo, now stands quite magnificently in the Galleria dell\u2019Accademia, a place the Raiders will visit.<\/p>\n

They\u2019ll also tour the Colosseum and the Vatican in Rome, see the Leaning Tower of Pisa, traverse the waterways of Venice on gondolas, visit Lake Como and a few other sights.<\/p>\n

But they won\u2019t be just another band of gawking tourists, they\u2019ll be student athletes with the emphasis \u2013 regardless of the three games they play \u2013 on the former.<\/p>\n

Nine of the 16 players on the trip \u2013 all of them underclassmen who use it as an elective \u2013 will be taking a one credit, mini study abroad course touching on Italian history, art, architecture and culture that will be taught by veteran WSU professor Susan Carrafiello.<\/p>\n

The group already has met with her for classes on campus and been given a variety of reading assignments.<\/p>\n

In Italy, the nine \u2013 accompanied by the rest of the team \u2013 will take various excursions with Carrafiello, who previously has taken two other WSU groups around the country.<\/p>\n

The players taking the class will write short papers and will keep a daily journal.<\/p>\n

The Raiders seem to be embracing the idea of the study abroad opportunity or at least they are pragmatic.<\/p>\n

As redshirt sophomore guard Jaylon Hall put it: \u201cIf I have to write a journal to get a trip like this, that\u2019s fine. I mean it\u2019s a free trip to Italy. I think it will be great.\u201d<\/p>\n

From her previous experiences, Carrafiello thinks so, too:<\/p>\n

\u201cIn the past, the most exciting thing for me has been to see the reactions of the students. You\u2019ll tell them about these places that maybe they\u2019ve seen pictures of or just heard about. But there\u2019s nothing that can replace the experience when you\u2019re walking to the location.<\/p>\n

\u201cI remember walking in Florence and the students looking up and seeing the dome of the main cathedral there. The look on their faces when they saw it for the first time was just priceless.”<\/p>\n

The Italian connection<\/strong><\/p>\n

The NCAA allows schools to take one international trip in the summer every four years.<\/p>\n

Wright State has taken just a few since it first fielded a school-sponsored team 50 seasons ago. In 1985 \u2013 when its basketball was still at the NCAA Division II level \u2013 the Raiders went to Germany. Five years later \u2013 as a D-I program \u2013 WSU toured Sweden and Denmark.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s only trip since then was in 2011 when the head coach was Billy Donlon and the Raiders made another 10-day trek through Italy, playing four games.<\/p>\n

The team was supposed to return there in the summer of 2015, but Donlon admitted he canceled the trip in response to several off-the-court incidents that had involved some of his players in the summer prior.<\/p>\n

He felt their behavior didn\u2019t warrant any reward.<\/p>\n

WSU associate athletic director Jeff Giles said this trip is \u201ctotally privately funded through donations. We have some staff going too and they have paid their own way.\u201d<\/p>\n

Over the years WSU players have had a special embrace of Italy.<\/p>\n

Bill Edwards, the program\u2019s all-time leading scorer and rebounder, played for teams in Verona, Varese, Rome and Bologna during his 13 years overseas. He lived in Italy in the off-season some years and spoke Italian.<\/p>\n

DaShaun Wood, the program\u2019s second all-time leading scorer and, like Edwards, a WSU Hall of Famer, played in Cantu and in 2008 signed a multi-million dollar contract to play for Trevisio Benetton.<\/p>\n

And Raider great A.J. Pacher has played for Italian teams in Legnaro, Reggio Calabra and Sienna. He just recently signed to play for a team in Treviglio.<\/p>\n

On the current Raiders team only Aleksandar Dozic and Bill Wampler have been to Italy.<\/p>\n

Dozic, a grad student transfer from Marist, grew up in Montenegro just across the Adriatic Sea from Italy. He said he\u2019s been to Italy once and after this tour he will go back home to Podgorica, Montenegro, for 10 days before returning to WSU.<\/p>\n

Wampler was part of a basketball tour that had stops in Denmark and Italy when he was a freshman at Drake University.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe had a Danish teammate so we flew to Demark for two days and then we went to Italy for eight,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt was a good team-bonding experience. It was my freshman year and I got to know a lot of my teammates better. The teams we\u2019re going to play might not be the best teams, so it\u2019s about the bonding experience and experiencing a different culture together. And there\u2019s always plenty of laughs because there are a lot of things you don\u2019t know.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt opens a lot of lives.\u201d<\/p>\n

Since transferring to WSU, Wampler played last summer in Brazil with an Athletes in Action team and went to Cancun, Mexico with the Raiders for a tournament last season.<\/p>\n

Carrafiello said she senses a real curiosity about Italy from several of the players and redshirt freshman Grant Basile admits he\u2019s one of them.<\/p>\n

He\u2019s Italian-American \u2013 his great grandparents came from Italy, he said \u2013 and when his dad remarried, he did so in Venice.<\/p>\n

\u201cEvery Christmas our family gets together and my dad\u2019s cousin makes these things called spadini (paper thin beef rolled in breadcrumbs and olive oil and made into kebobs) and rice balls,\u201d he said. \u201cI look forward to that every year.\u201d<\/p>\n

Jaylon Hall\u2019s cousin Tony Williams \u2013 whom he lived with in high school while he was being coached by him \u2013 spent part of his long pro career in Italy after being a 1,000 point scorer at the University of Louisville.<\/p>\n

\u201cHe can really cook pasta,\u201d Hall said. \u201cI want to see the place he learned it.\u201d<\/p>\n

Love said he is looking forward to the Italian coffee and the food, but with him there is one catch.<\/p>\n

Since last season he has been drastically reshaping his body. He weighed 270 last year \u2013 down from his 315 pounds as an incoming freshman \u2013 and now weighs 250.<\/p>\n

\u201cYou\u2019re going to look like an Italian model,\u201d he was teasingly told.<\/p>\n

\u201cI can only hope,\u201d he said with a laugh, then a nod to his old self.<\/p>\n

\u201cItaly prides itself as a country in its food and I\u2019m looking forward to it.\u201d<\/p>\n

Coach takes the lead<\/strong><\/p>\n

Giles said while he\u2019s heard Nagy talk about this trip on a few occasions, he\u2019s rarely heard him talk about the basketball aspect of it:<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s almost like the basketball is secondary. He believes you can really wear these kids out too early if you are not careful. It\u2019s a long season. For him, I believe this is much more about being together as a team.\u201d<\/p>\n

Carrafiello said in her observations of Nagy \u2013 who last summer took his team to the Dominican Republic to do volunteer work, just as he once took his South Dakota State team to Haiti to do the same \u2013 she sees someone \u201cwho sees this as a whole person education rather than just an opportunity to enhance fundamental skills of basketball.\u201d<\/p>\n

She hopes the players on this trip \u2013 with the classwork, the excursions and the personal interactions \u2013 will follow their coach\u2019s lead:<\/p>\n

\u201cThis will be a whirlwind. Hopefully the students will learn some things and it will pique an interest to one day come back and learn more.\u201d<\/p>\n

Even before this tour that\u2019s happening with Nagy, who is making his first trip to Europe<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019m really excited about this and, God willing, my wife and I are going back in May,\u201d he said. \u201cWe\u2019ll go to Budapest (Hungary) because my name is Hungarian and then we\u2019ll drive through Germany and Switzerland and come to Italy to meet friends.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe plan to stay for a week.\u201d<\/p>\n

View the original post at daytondailynews.com<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Excerpt Wright State coach Scott Nagy doesn\u2019t know the level of competition his team will face in the three basketball games it plays during the Raiders\u2019 10-day trip to Italy, which begins Friday. But he and his players do know … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":21,"featured_media":62394,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[730],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-71597","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-wright-state-in-the-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/webapp2.wright.edu\/web1\/newsroom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/71597","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/webapp2.wright.edu\/web1\/newsroom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/webapp2.wright.edu\/web1\/newsroom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/webapp2.wright.edu\/web1\/newsroom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/21"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/webapp2.wright.edu\/web1\/newsroom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=71597"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/webapp2.wright.edu\/web1\/newsroom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/71597\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":145609,"href":"https:\/\/webapp2.wright.edu\/web1\/newsroom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/71597\/revisions\/145609"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/webapp2.wright.edu\/web1\/newsroom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/62394"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/webapp2.wright.edu\/web1\/newsroom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=71597"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/webapp2.wright.edu\/web1\/newsroom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=71597"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/webapp2.wright.edu\/web1\/newsroom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=71597"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}