Your future, our focus
Guard Kyle Brown is making new friends.
It is mandatory since he is the lone returning scholarship player for the Northwest College men’s basketball team left in Powell from last year’s 10-21 team.
The Trappers are definitely starting fresh under their third head coach in less than two full seasons.
After current athletic director Brian Erickson was promoted, he was replaced on an interim basis by Dawud Abdur-Rahkman just as the 2018-19 season was starting.
Now enter Jay Collins, the new man, who is in charge of rebuilding with Brown the point man, though there are a couple of last year’s redshirts around too.
“We have a new coach,” said Brown, a 6-foot-2 guard from New York City. “We’re building chemistry.”
Brown, who averaged 8 points per game last season, said Collins’ promise to play high-speed offense and full-court defense, excited him.
“I like that kind of game,” Brown said. “Being a fast-paced team, it fits my type of game.”
A former assistant coach at Idaho State, who also previously played briefly in the NBA G League when it was called the Development League, Collins recruited the world to fill the Trappers roster.
Northwest, which prides itself on having a diverse international student body, now has men’s basketball players on campus from Belgium, Mexico, Canada and Italy, as well as New York, Phoenix and Milwaukee.
Mysen McArthur, a redshirt sophomore, of Lovell, is back too. He didn’t have to fly.
The 6-5 Josh Petteno from Venice was recommended to Collins by a trusted friend.
Petteno said he knew little about Wyoming other than it was a state, and nothing at all about Powell, before Northwest reached out to him.
“I had to look it up,” he said.
While Venice is best known for its waterways, Petteno said there is a solid basketball tradition at home.
“It’s not bigger than soccer,” Petteno said.
Venice is a two-time Italian League champion though.
“It was part of my dream to come to America,” he said.
Elijah Leyva is part of this Northwest College crew too. The recent Cody High School grad who led the state in scoring last season, is a freshman who is pretty sure he will redshirt given the surfeit of Trapper guards.
“I’m learning a lot,” Leyva said of absorbing the game at the next level. “It’s way faster.”
The first indication of how this new group will mesh will be Thursday-Friday-Saturday with season-opening games on the road at Williston State, Dawson Community College, and Miles Community College.
“The hard part of it is building a culture,” Collins said.
Rarely, he said, does a coach have to start from scratch like this.
“That’s my biggest part of the job before X’s and O’s. I’d like to really play uptempo. I’d like to press for 40 minutes and create chaos.”