A Tough Decision For A High School Kid, Or Any Of Us
Posted
Roger Grossman, Lake City Radio-
One of the great traditions of our state will be renewed this weekend when the best high school basketball players from Indiana will take on the best from Kentucky. This year’s games will be played at Transylvania University in Lexington Friday, and then at Bankers Life Fieldhouse in Indianapolis Saturday night. Once again this year, the Indiana roster is loaded with very talented players from around the state. But it won’t have everyone who was originally named to the team. It doesn’t happen often, but a couple young men who were selected to the All-Star team are not playing. Homestead product and Purdue recruit Caleb Swanigan, Indiana’s Mr. Basketball, will miss the games because he’s slated to be at a training camp in Colorado, preparing for a trip to Greece with the U19 U.S. national team. That’s quite an honor. The other player is Ryan Fazekas, a terrific player for Michigan City Marquette the last four years. He led Marquette to a Class 1A state championship in 2014, and then helped them to a runner-up finish back in March. He’s 6-foot-7 but plays like a wing and is a more-than-capable shooter from distance. He’s headed to Providence to play for the Friars next fall. Fazekas’ resumé was plenty good enough to make him one of the 12 best players in Indiana and worthy of a spot on the Indiana All Star team … and he got one. Except for one little problem, Fazekas will be busy that weekend graduating. Technically, he has already completed his course work at Marquette and has actually been at Providence taking summer classes since May 21st. Providence officials totally supported him and had already signed off on him missing time to be an All-Star. He told Indiana All-Star Director Charlie Hall on April 27 that he was in a pinch, and that he didn’t know how he was going to be able to do it all. Here is what the schedule would have been for Friday and Saturday: • 8:30 p.m. Friday: Indiana All Stars vs Kentucky in Lexington. 360 miles, 5:43 drive time. • 11 p.m. Friday: drive back to Michigan City. 360 miles, 5:43 drive time. • 3 p.m. Saturday: Marquette graduation ceremony. • 5 p.m. Saturday: drive to Indianapolis • 8:30 p.m. Saturday: Indiana All-Stars vs Kentucky in Indianapolis. 172 miles, 2:48 drive time. Total: 892 miles, over 14 hours on the road from noon Friday to Saturday night (and that’s assuming they would spend the night in a hotel and drive back home Sunday morning). Oh, and that also doesn’t include him flying from the east coast at the start of the week and then back on Sunday. The kid is smart. He did the math. He couldn’t do it and he couldn’t make his family do it either. So, he made the incredibly hard decision to drop out of the All-Star games. Hall took the call from Fazekas and the two tried to work something out so that he could participate in at least some of the events surrounding the Indiana All-Star experience. But again, Fazekas is smart and he just knew it wasn’t going to work. So he politely bowed out. “Having graduation on Saturday, playing in Indy, after playing Friday in Kentucky, I'd have to come back all the way up to Michigan City late at night, wake up early, drive back and still have the chance of being late and only playing the second half of that game, it just wasn't going to pan out,” Fazekas told the Northwest Indiana Times. “It was putting a lot of pressure on my family, having to drive and travel so much, to fly me in early and fly me back out. It was definitely (our) decision. They understood.” Hall said that Fazekas will still receive two All Star jerseys – one for himself and one for the school to display – and his place on the team will not be filled with another player. This is certainly no life-or-death decision. Fazekas wasn’t asked to decide whether he should play in the state finals or be at the bedside of a dying family member. And the Indiana All-Star team has lost some of its luster because of past politics in picking the team and the sheer number of other summer basketball all-star games that have popped in the last 15 years. But this IS STILL the top honor for an Indiana basketball player to be given, shy of being named Mr. or Miss Basketball, and it’s a shame that the big fella from Michigan City won’t be part of it. I can relate a little. As a senior in high school, I missed a varsity soccer game because my sister got married on a Saturday in September. I wasn’t really asked my opinion on what I wanted to do that weekend, but if I had I would have had a choice I would have chosen the wedding (I had tremendous ushering skills). Not the same, but parallel. It’s not easy for a kid that age to make that kind of decision – graduation or the ultimate honor for a high school hoopster. But Fazekas made his decision and I get the feeling that, in the end, it wasn’t that tough of a decision to make. I don’t know if anyone from Marquette offered to let him out of the ceremony to be with the All-Star team or not, but I wonder if Fazekas would have been in cap and gown anyway. I am proud of him. When you cover the state finals you don’t really get to ‘know’ guys like I do the boys or girls on the Warsaw teams or even the teams Warsaw plays a lot. But when you see a kid play there twice and you read all of the articles about him and the quotes he gives the newspapers, you can draw some conclusions and opinions. Fazekas is a good kid, and when put in a bad spot he did what he thought was best for himself and his family and I am sure he will not regret that decision. Good call, young man.
