On an early summer day, he was in the place where he’s spent so much of his life, a place where he’s left gallons of sweat, a place that is like a second home.
Ryan Appleby was in a gym. His old high school gym.
“I love this,” he said, as he sat in the bleachers at Stanwood before beginning an afternoon workout the other day. “Nothing has changed. I’m still the kid I was in high school. I love this the same as I did my freshman year of high school.”
His desire and commitment to the game are as strong as ever, maybe even stronger than when he came out of high school a year ago. But some things have changed about Ryan Appleby.
He’s bigger. He’s stronger. And he’s hairier.
The shoulders have grown, the biceps have ballooned. He no longer looks as if a strong breeze could knock him down.
He has gone from a shaved-head look in high school to a handsome blond hairdo. He even made the All-Hair freshman team of FHM Magazine. “Good claim to fame,” he joked.
He is still an indefatigable worker. In the first hour of a two-hour practice, he put up 70 3-point shots, one right after another from every angle on the court. Then he drove the basket, with his father, Mike, a sturdy fellow, putting a body on him to knock him off balance. Still, the ball went in the basket more often than not. Then old dad used a padded leather bag to rough up his son a bit, simulating the kind of treatment college guards get when they venture down low.
Through it all, Ryan Appleby was like a kitten with a ball of yarn.
Having fun.
Once again.
The last year hadn’t been much fun.
A starter all four years of high school, Appleby became more a spectator than a participant in his freshman year at the University of Florida. He went there thinking he was joining a team that liked to play a fast pace of basketball – his kind of game. He went there thinking he would get considerable playing time as a point guard. Neither came true.
He came away feeling as if he wasn’t getting any better and that to spend another season there would be a waste of his time because he was still destined to spend more minutes on the bench than on the floor next winter.
That’s why after the season, he put in a call to a coach who had recruited him hard in high school: Lorenzo Romar, head man at the University of Washington.
Appleby told Romar that he was thinking about transferring and wondered if there might be a place for him at the UW. Appleby had seen a couple of Husky games on TV last winter and liked the way they played – blitzkrieg fast.
Romar asked him if the UW was his No. 1, No. 2 or No. 3 choice. Appleby said there was only one school he was interested in. “I didn’t want to go through the whole recruiting process again,” he said.
Besides, he had gotten along well with Romar when the Huskies recruited him.
Not only was there a place, but there was a scholarship awaiting him. The only bad part – he’d be sitting out the entire 2004-05 season, as dictated by the NCAA when a player transfers from one Division I school to another.
The good part – with the likely departure of Nate Robinson to the NBA after next season, the Huskies will have a vacancy at point guard in 2005-06, and what better fit than Ryan Appleby. If he’d stayed at Florida, he reasoned, he’d have spent half his college career coming off the bench. With the Huskies, he has a chance to start for three years.
Romar likes everything about the kid. His ball-handling. His passing. His shooting. And, maybe most of all, his passion for the game.
The coach knows that he never has to worry about what Appleby is doing with his time. If he’s not sleeping, he’s in the gym. Or lifting weights. Or watching some basketball video. “This is my job,” he said.
The day before we talked, he had watched “The Pistol” – the Pete Maravich story – for the umpteenth time. “I can pretty well repeat the lines,” he said.
Appleby has patterned his game after the late, great Pistol Pete. “He’s kind of an inspiration because of how much he loved the game,” Appleby said.
Just as Appleby is likely to be an inspiration to some youngster coming up through the Stanwood school district. What that kid has to understand is, Appleby wasn’t born a standout basketball player, he became one through countless hours alone on the court, 6 a.m. workouts before school started.
A boy, a ball, a net and a gym to himself – hoop nirvana.
Hoop purgatory is not having games to play. And that’s why the next year will be the longest, the most excruciating of Ryan Appleby’s life.
“It’ll be hard,” he admitted. “I try not to think about it too much.”
He’ll do what he did at Florida: treat each practice as if it were a game. With Robinson and Will Conroy there to test him, practices will be more challenging than some games. “They’re good players,” Appleby said. “Quick and physical.”
To handle the battering of college ball, he put 20 pounds onto his spindly body between the end his senior high school season and the start of practice at Florida. That shot him all the way up to 170. There’s still room for growth on his 6-foot, 3-inch frame, and he’s trying to add 10 more pounds with weight-lifting sessions.
He feels he’s a better shooter now than he was in high school, and if my calculations are correct, he swished about 68 percent of those 70 3-pointers he put up the other day. And they weren’t cheap treys.
While the last year was frustrating, he says he didn’t pout nor complain but went hard in practice and in those few minutes he played in games. He got to experience some things he’ll not see in the Pac-10 – such as the rabidness of Kentucky Wildcat fans in 23,000-seat Rupp Arena. “They’re throwing stuff and yelling at you,” he said. “That was the craziest place we played.”
The most memorable play? That might have come in practice.
“We were doing traps, where two guys come at you and you try to split them,” he said.
A Gator guard dribbled between the defenders and flipped a pass over his back into the hands of a guy soaring towards the rim for a dunk.
The guy making the pass – Ryan Appleby.
It was, he said, one of his best moments of the year.
Things should get much better in 2005-06.
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