SEATTLE — Ryan Appleby’s college basketball career is finished, but that doesn’t mean the Stanwood High School graduate is ready to give up on the game just yet.
The 6-foot-3 guard, who just finished his career at Washington, doesn’t know what the next step in his life will be, but he hopes to keep playing the game that has been an obsession since early childhood.
“You’ve got to be prepared for everything, but I’m not ready for it to be over,” he said.
A week after his college basketball career had ended, Appleby showed up at a neighborhood coffee shop not looking like a person ready to put the game in the review mirror. His attire for the interview: basketball shorts and a black, hooded sweatshirt with a large NBA logo on the front.
Maybe this was Appleby’s way of making a statement, or maybe it’s what was clean that morning, but the life-long gym rat believes his days of early morning workouts and long-range shooting displays are not over yet.
“I’d love to play someplace,” he said. “But it’s kind of early right now with the college season still going on. I have to wait it out a little bit then see if I can get a chance to play somewhere.”
While the NBA is the ultimate goal of anyone pursuing a professional career, Appleby says he’s will to travel overseas to keep playing. Washington coach Lorenzo Romar, amongst others, has noted that anyone who can shoot the ball as well as Appleby will be able to earn money playing the game somewhere.
In his three seasons at Washington, Appleby holds the school record for 3-pointers made in a game (nine), a season (84) and career (231).
“No one shoots it that well,” Romar said. “Someone is going to be willing to give him a chance somewhere.”
Whatever his future holds, Washington’s loss to Valparaiso signified the end of an era for Appleby. For so long, the path was laid out. Stanwood High, then college, first at Florida and for the past four years at Washington. Now, like so many people finishing college, Appleby faces the unknown. And while he doesn’t know what the future may bring, he’s confident things will work out one way or another.
“If I can play I’ll try to play as long as I can,” he said. “If I can’t, I can’t. I know God’s got a path for me whatever way it works out. I’ve just got to try to find that way and follow it.”
It’s a safe bet that whatever path Appleby heads down, whether it involves basketball or not, he’ll approach it with the same work ethic that turned him into a nationally ranked recruit out of Stanwood, and one of the country’s most feared shooters in college.
As a young child, Appleby’s parents, Debbie and Mike, showed him a video of Pete Maravich, and from that point on, Appleby was hooked on the game and driven by the former LSU and NBA star’s work ethic.
By the time he was at Stanwood, Ryan and Mike were going to the gym at 5:30 a.m. to go through drills before school. A janitor at the school knew the two were coming, and unlocked the gym and turned on the lights each morning.
“There’s no doubt he’s the hardest working kid I’ve seen at any level,” said Nate DuChesne, Appleby’s coach at Stanwood who is now an assistant at the University of Montana. “It got to the point that I’d have to tell him not to come in for a while and take some time off. He just wanted to continually get better. He said to me one time, ‘There is always somebody working and I don’t want anyone to outwork me.’”
Mike Appleby said that on occasions when their son was sick or worn out, he and Debbie would “forget” to wake him up for workouts, and deal with an angry teenager later.
“It was good life experience to realize that if you go do hard work, and you’ll be rewarded for it,” said Mike Appleby, who played at Edmonds High School and Pacific University in Oregon. “He wouldn’t be the best shooter in the Pac-10 if he wasn’t in there making a couple of hundred a morning.”
The payoff for the hard work in high school was becoming a recruit ranked in the top 50 in the nation. He was courted by many of the nation’s top programs, eventually choosing Florida. Mike Appleby jokes that UPS and FedEx carriers knew the family dog by name because they made so many stops to deliver recruiting letters.
Appleby was impressing people with his basketball talent before he even arrived at Stanwood, however.
DuChesne started hearing about Appleby when he first took the Stanwood job, which was the summer before Appleby entered the seventh grade.
“When their season rolled around, I went to a Port Susan Middle School game, and within the first three minutes of the game, he had 10 points and the opposing ballhandler couldn’t get the ball across mid-court,” DuChesne recalled. “I thought right there, he’s going to be a special player. That next summer I invited him to come play open gym with our high school kids and he did. He was between his seventh and eighth-grade year, and he didn’t look out of place at all. He was younger looking than everybody, but he could handle the ball and shoot the ball with the best of them. We had to wait one more year, but he probably could have helped us as an eighth grader.”
Per his usual tradition, Appleby took a week off — or at least as close to a week off as he knows how — following Washington’s season-ending loss. But starting this week, he’ll be back in the gym, honing his game and waiting for his next basketball opportunity.
Looking back, he says he has no regrets about his college career. Sure he would have liked to win more games and play in more NCAA Tournaments, but Appleby says the good outweighed the bad at Washington. As a sophomore he was named the Pac-10 newcomer of the year as the Huskies went to the Sweet 16, but the past two years were disappointing ones as they missed the NCAA Tournament both seasons.
He has also said several times in the past that he has no regrets about leaving Florida, which won back-to-back national titles after he left.
“It would have been nice the last couple of years to come out with a few more wins and be able to go to the tournament,” said Appleby, a sports management major who will graduate after spring quarter. “But there were plenty of good memories too. The camaraderie with all of the guys. You spend a whole lot of time with these guys traveling and everything, so you get to know them really well. You end up with some pretty good friendships, so I’ll miss that with the guys.”
Contact Herald Writer John Boyle at jboyle@heraldnet.com. For more on UW sports, check out the Huskies blog at heraldnet.com /huskiesblog
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