'Rejects' find home at UL
Coach embraces four transfers who now start for Cajuns
"Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to be free,
Your future Ragin' Cajuns."
In many cases, transfers are the wretched refuse of college basketball, coming to their new schools with attitude, academic and/or ability baggage. While transfers are common, seldom does a team have more than one or two on its roster.
But at Louisiana, they have been the nucleus of an NCAA Tournament team that meets Louisville in a first-round game Friday in Nashville, Tenn.
Four of the Ragin' Cajuns' starters -- Dwayne Mitchell, Tiras Wade, Brian Hamilton and Orien Greene -- started their college careers elsewhere.
And the fifth starter -- center Chris Cameron -- is a true immigrant, from Australia, who had to sit out his first year at the school for academic reasons and thus was a sophomore in his first year of eligibility.
That means none of UL's starting five played there as freshmen, a situation perhaps unique in Division I and certainly unique among the 65 tournament teams.
"This is a school and a coaching staff that took a chance on us," said Mitchell, a Kennedy graduate who played one year at Auburn before transferring to UL after the 2001-02 season. "Sometimes when you hear 'transfer' you think of somebody that's going to be trouble because he was unhappy where he was.
"I don't think that's been the case here at all. We've all found a school that fits us better."
Mitchell left Auburn so he could be closer to New Orleans to help deal with some family problems. Hamilton departed Texas A&M-Corpus Christi after two seasons because he believed he could do better than the fledgling independent program.
Neither of those moves attracted any attention.
Greene's and Wade's did.
Greene was a Parade All-American from Gainesville, Fla., who played on two NCAA Tournament teams for his hometown Florida Gators, starting 30 games as a sophomore. But disagreements with Coach Billy Donovan led to his departure.
Wade was leading East Tennessee State in scoring as a sophomore during the 2002-03 season when he left the team with eight games remaining in the regular season. The Buccaneers went on to win the Southern Conference tournament to advance to the NCAA Tournament, and the team was generally considered better off without a selfish player like Wade.
"There was a lot of untruths out there about me," said Wade, who leads the Ragin' Cajuns in scoring with 20.4 points per game. "The truth is that I was leaving anyway, and when the coach found out he kicked me off the team.
"Then he wanted me back, but it just wasn't in my heart. No matter what I did, they were going to make me look like the bad guy."
Such stories made many schools back off Wade, but then-UL coach Jessie Evans made contact with him and impressed him by listing the success other transfers under his regime had had.
"They trusted me," Wade said. "They just wanted to know what kind of guy I was, and there was none of that 'he said/she said' stuff.
"That kind of got my heart right there."
Current coach Robert Lee was involved in the recruiting of Wade and the other transfers. To Lee, determining whether a transfer will be a right fit for a program is an inexact science.
The rest of the story
Times Picayune
By Ted Lewis
tlewis@timespicayune.com
(504) 826-3405
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