Elvir Ovcina is caught in a contradiction.
He wants to be just another basketball player at Sycamore High School, but height, ability and history make that impossible.
Ovcina wants desperately to play basketball, but the more he plays, the more he will stand out. It’s hard to blend in when you’re 7 feet tall, come from war-ravaged Bosnia and can dribble with either hand, throw no-look passes and swish 20-footers.
That height and those skills drew nearly a full house, including scouts from Illinois and De Paul, to Sycamore Saturday for the debut of Ovcina and fellow Bosnian Srdan Selimbegovic.
They saw Selimbegovic score 16 points and Ovcina 10 in Minooka’s 59-56 victory.
Ovcina’s debut had the breakfast regulars at the Kingsway Family Restaurant buzzing for weeks. Alvin Mirotznik, for one, says it’s as big a basketball event as he can recall in 45 years of watching Sycamore play.
“Oh God, yes,” said the retired cattle buyer. “Everybody is interested to see what he can do. There’s no doubt about that.”
Even the opposition got into the spirit. “I’m kind of looking forward to it,” Minooka coach Bill Wiesbrook said before the game. “It will be kind of fun, I think. I’m curious to see how good the players are. I know our players will be curious, too.”
What they saw was a player understandably nervous and a bit tentative-as well as hampered by fouls-but one with obvious potential. That potential was most obvious with 5 minutes 24 seconds left when Ovcina took a pass off a fast break and put down a thunderous dunk.
Wiesbrook was suitably impressed by both Bosnians, especially because they are just juniors: “I wish those two were seniors. They’re already good players. They’ll be awfully good.”
Ovcina could have done without all the curiosity and the attention.
“I’m a member of the Sycamore team,” the 17-year-old said at midweek in an interview he would have loved to avoid. “I’m not anyone special. I’m just one of them.”
You wish that were true, but the world’s madness has made extraordinary people of Ovcina, Selimbegovic and the 17 other members of the Bosnian Cadet National Basketball Team now living with families in the Chicago area. The athletes and two coaches had to dodge sniper fire and hide out for months in order to flee Bosnia last spring and summer.
They reached Sycamore in August and September, from where the players were divided among 13 west and northwest suburban high schools. The Illinois High School Association let the four who are freshman play basketball immediately but ordered the rest to sit out games for a semester.
Those 15 athletes began appearing in games this weekend. It means entering the bright spotlight of American sport, but even for Ovcina, the chance to play is worth the resulting glare. He had been literally counting the days until Saturday since learning he’d have to sit a semester.
“We can’t wait until the games start,” said Selimbegovic, a 6-3 guard-forward. “We waited a lot of time. Now we’re really excited. It’s very hard when you sit and can’t play.”
Particularly when every day brings news of the 21-month-old civil war that has torn their country apart. Both players’ families live in Sarajevo, a frequent target of shelling.
“It’s something they wake up with every morning,” said Sycamore attorney Jim Minnihan, a driving force in the battle to get the Bosnians into the U.S. “They have good days and bad.”
“Everyone expects these kids to walk in and be normal,” added Sycamore coach Tim Carlson, “but they haven’t seen their parents in months, and they wake up in a strange country in strange houses. That’s tough for 17-year-olds to go through.”
Sports could never erase that kind of pain, but Sycamore’s Bosnians seem to find some solace in basketball.
“It helps me because when I play, I forget,” Selimbegovic said. “That’s the only time I do.”
“I can’t forget home, because my family is there,” Ovcina said. “But it will be a little easier for me when we start to play games.”
Selimbegovic calls his family about twice a month. Ovcina has gotten through to his parents and younger brother by phone only twice.
Both get letters periodically. One from his brother distressed Ovcina so deeply he wanted to give up on school, basketball and anything else he could think of.
“He wanted to quit and go home,” Carlson said. “I said, `Worry about the things you can control, school and basketball. Work hard, that’s what your parents would want.’ “
At such times, basketball comes to Ovcina’s rescue.
“Elvir clearly is funneling all his stress into practice,” Minnihan said. “It’s his therapy. If he has a bad day, he’ll do extra. He has worked real hard.”
So hard he works out on his own in Sycamore’s gym from 7 to 8 each morning and sometimes stays after practice, too. Bosnian coach Zoran Zupcevic, who has worked with Ovcina for seven years, says it’s that work ethic that has made him one of the top six players on the Cadet team as well as a likely Olympian-assuming he has a country to represent.
For now, he represents Sycamore. The Spartans were 9-6 without him despite having no starter taller than 6-1. With him, Carlson can dream of perhaps reaching the school’s first supersectional game ever.
“I’ve been telling the kids we have a chance to do something that a school with 750 kids does not have a chance to do often,” Carlson said. “It’s not realistic to expect Elvir to walk on the floor and dominate right away, but he has all the tools. He’s good now, and he’ll continue to get better because of his great work ethic.”
That prospect has already attracted college coaches to Sycamore practices, not to mention eight to 10 recruiting letters a day.
Ovcina regards all that attention like he does the rest, wishing it would go away and willing to ignore it when it doesn’t. He says he doesn’t think much about the future, which makes perfect sense given that fate has allowed him so little say in it.
“For right now, I don’t care about recruiting,” he said. “I focus just for the games.”
