Some are thought to be heaven-sent and invisible, others come from your same hometown and, while you’re being interviewed, they peek unexpectedly over a 6-foot wall, then disappear, then a few seconds later, mischievously reappear again.
That’s what happened the other afternoon on the University of Dayton campus as Juwan Staten was sitting in a semi-secluded spot in the Frericks Center, talking quietly and quite earnestly about what it’s been like to be one of the most scrutinized, most debated, most anticipated basketball recruits ever to come to UD.
And that’s when the top of a head... then a pair of eyes ... and finally a familiar grin rose up over the nearby wall.
Finally, Chris Wright, the Flyers’ 6-foot-8 senior star, stepped around the partition and approached the 5-11 freshman point guard he has taken under his wing.
“Whassup with ya?” Wright said with a teasing smile, then an apology. “Didn’t mean to interrupt, just wanted to make sure you’re all right.”
And with that Wright reached out, maneuvered through a choreographed handshake with the beaming Staten, then turned and disappeared.
While Staten offered that Wright had came up with the special shake, he wouldn’t demonstrate or explain it. “I can’t really give that out,” he smiled. “It’s a secret.”
That would make it about the only thing with UD basketball and him that is.
Ranked by rivals.com as the 49th best freshman in the nation this college basketball season — and rated the highest of all Atlantic 10 Conference freshmen — Staten seems to handle the lofty status with grounded sensibility.
That has to do with his parents, Bill Staten and Cecilia Hill, with Flyers’ coach Brian Gregory and his staff and, to a certain extent, with Wright, a guy who knows plenty about center-stage attention.
Wright’s high-flying feats on the court are countered by an approachability, a sincerity, a playful sense of humor away from it. That’s something that especially shows around Staten.
“You’d expect a star player, so to speak, to be kind of all about business or to himself, but Chris is just a good guy,” Staten said. “After UD first started recruiting me — that summer before my sophomore year — he was the one who would come and get me and take me to open gym.
“With us both being from Dayton and my family knowing him and his family knowing me, there’s been a bond from the start.
“After open gyms, I’d go over to his apartment and hang out and now that I’m on campus he’ll pick me up and drive me home to see my mom and dad. Sometimes he just calls me up and says, ‘I’m getting ready to go out to a Trotwood football game, you want to come?’
“It’s nice and it’s important, too. When you’re both going to be big parts of the team, you have to be on the same page and be comfortable with each other.”
As for Flyers coaches, they sensed Staten would be big even when he was little.
Longtime Flyer
“I was joking with my dad the other day that it doesn’t feel like I just got here this year,” Staten said. “I’ve been seeing Coach Gregory for so many years now and I’ve been coming to UD games and practices and open gyms and been in the locker room afterward listening to what they say — I feel like I’ve been a part of this for soooo long.
“Even though I’m just a freshman, I feel kind of old. It feels like I’ve been a Flyer a long, long time.”
Gregory offered a scholarship to Staten when he was a 5-foot-7, 14-year-old freshman at what was then Colonel White High. The following season Staten made a verbal commitment to UD and that drew plenty of attention and debate from hoops fans both here in the Miami Valley and around the college basketball world.
“As soon as I made my decision I heard people say all kinds of stuff,” Staten said. “ ‘Man, you really gonna go to UD? Why UD? Why not Ohio State? Why not go to some big-time school? Why not try to go to Duke?’
“Some people couldn’t understand, some thought I’d end up going somewhere else when it got down to it. I heard all the stuff from the day I verbaled ’til the day I stepped on campus. I still hear it now.
“When I hear all that I just kind of smile. It’s funny how people who don’t really know you think they can determine what you’re going to do or what’s best for you.
“I just tell them, ‘Look, I’m here now. Obviously, you were wrong.’ It’s not about the name on the front of the jersey, it’s where you feel comfortable. And I feel comfortable here.”
He talks about being close to home and feeling a bond with the UD players and especially appreciating the “honesty” of Gregory.
“No matter what, he tells you what you need to hear, not what you want to hear,” Staten said. “Sometimes when you mess up, it’s like, ‘Man, I’m gonna really hear it from Coach,’ and you do. But afterward he lets you know it’s not because he’s mad at you. He has your best interests at heart.
“I’ve been able to see that since he started recruiting me. He and his coaches were always around, they got to know me off the court. And that’s when I realized you don’t have to go far to look for something good that’s right under your nose.”
Hooked on UD
Growing up, Staten said he had no interest in UD: “I saw myself going to Duke.”
But when he was in the seventh grade one of his teachers was former Flyers player Alex Robertson.
“He asked me if I wanted to go to a (UD) game,” Staten said. “I did and then I loved it. After that I asked him to take me whenever he could and I probably went to eight games that year.”
Once he finally signed with UD, Staten decided the best place to put some final polish on his prep game — after leading Thurgood Marshall to the state tournament as a junior — was at Oak Hill Academy, the Mouth of Wilson, Va., school where scores of college and NBA players have gone.
While the team plays a schedule that takes it all over the nation, the school is isolated in an Appalachian Mountains crossroads, hard on the North Carolina state line.
“In a way it felt like I was in the middle of nowhere because none of us had cars and we weren’t allowed to have cell phones either,” Staten said. “Even the malls were about two hours away in Charlotte and Winston Salem. So 95 percent of the time we spent right at school.”
He said it was good for two reasons:
He learned to fend for himself — “I couldn’t call my mom when I didn’t feel good or something” — and because there was little else to do, there were two choices: study or go to the gym and work on your game.
When the team travelled though, it was another story, he said: “We flew to our games in Oregon and New Jersey and we took charter busses with beds in them to the rest. In some ways it was living the life. We went city to city, played on ESPN, stayed in hotels, signed autographs and took pictures with people all the time. People everywhere know about Oak Hill.”
Staten averaged 12.1 points and 7.2 assists for an Oak Hill team that went 29-4 last season. Like him, the other six seniors all went on to Division I basketball — at Syracuse, UConn, Maryland, Kentucky, Radford and Fairleigh Dickinson.
Throughout last season, Staten — whether by Facebook or on the few trips he made back to Dayton — kept in contact with the three other Flyers freshmen-to-be, Ralph Hill, Brandon Spearman and Devin Oliver.
“We call ourselves the Fantastic 4,” Staten said with a grin. “We want to come in and make a statement from day one. We want to be people Coach can depend on.
“We always tell each other we’re not ordinary freshmen. We refuse to be ordinary. We want to be fantastic and we want everybody to see that.”
And one guy — peeking over a wall and smiling — seemed to see just that the other day.
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