When Greivis Vasquez emerged out of Washington, DC-area’s Reagan National Airport on September 25, 2004, the teenage native of Caracas, Venezuela, did not know what sort of greeting to expect. He knew why he had left his homeland on his mother’s birthday: to finish high school at basketball powerhouse Montrose Christian in Rockville, MD. He knew how hard that was to make happen; initially, his request for an I-20 visa, which allows foreign students to study in the US, was declined. But he had not envisioned the actual moment of his arrival. Nor could he have.
“The first thing I said to him,” says David Adkins, “was, ‘You’re not effing 6-8!’” Now a member of the Lady Terps’ staff at the University of Maryland, Adkins was then an assistant under Montrose’s head coach Stu Vetter. He was also the man responsible for handling Vasquez’ recruitment—a DI coach made the initial recommendation, and Masai Ujiri, a vaunted scout and the current GM of the Denver Nuggets, seconded it—and on that day, in charge of picking the smaller-than-advertised guard up.
The duo proceeded to laugh, hesitantly and harmoniously, for very different reasons. Adkins, a long-time coach who had dealt with international players before, assumed the player stepping off the tarmac wouldn’t be a 6-8 forward, even if his scouting report said so. As for Vasquez, he laughed out of a nervousness that only a stranger in a strange land for the first time could feel. He laughed because, well, that was really the only way for the two to communicate.
“He thought I was going to be 6-8, and I was 6-3 and skinnier than I am now,” Vasquez says. “And I couldn’t understand anything else.”
After they loaded up Adkins’ late model white Range Rover, where they were joined by a Spanish-speaking woman who worked at Montrose and rode along to help translate, they shifted into gear and embarked on Vasquez’s new life. The first stop would serve the wide-eyed Vasquez—who barely spoke any English—a small taste of Americana, and would reassure Adkins, who spoke even less Spanish, that, no matter his size, Montrose had recruited the right guy.
“I would’ve taken him anywhere, but he wanted to go to McDonald’s,” Adkins remembers, fondly. “This is mid-afternoon, and we sit down to eat. He took a bite, maybe two, then he looks at me and says, ‘When do we train?’ I’m like, ‘OK.’ We usually give a guy a day to settle in before we see what he has, but we went right to the gym and worked out and he’s been working out ever since.”
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Slam Mag article on Vasquez
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Originally Posted by Make It Rain
