Last year, the Northwestern men’s basketball team had to spend most of the year playing teams with bigger rosters and bigger players.
The disadvantage for the Wildcats was clear: Tavaras Hardy, a forward, moved to center despite his 6-foot-8 frame, creating opportunities under the basket for opponents.
And when head coach Bill Carmody and staff didn’t nab anyone in the spring signing period and starting guard Ben Johnson transferred to Minnesota, the Cats looked like they might not even have enough players to hold a full scrimmage in 2001-02.
But the Cats spent the summer abroad and found three players who will add both depth and size to the roster. They now boast a Dane and two Croatians, bringing the roster back up to 12 players.
However, former guard Sean Wink, who played during his freshman and sophomore years under Kevin O’Neill before Carmody got to NU, will not join the Cats this winter. NU went through an appeal process to get Wink eligible — he had been given a medical non-counter status — but Carmody said “it just didn’t work out.”
But the three newcomers, who are 6-foot-7, 6-foot-8 and 6-foot-10, have size that even Wink could not have provided.
“These guys are all right out of high school,” Carmody said on Tuesday. “We’re bigger. (But) I think these guys are also skillful.”
Thomas Soltau, a native of Roskilde, Denmark, is the tallest of the three and in June became the first to verbally commit to Carmody. With a very thin frame, Soltau isn’t a center, but he could contribute at a forward position.
The two Croatian players, Davor Duvancic and Vedran Vukusic, played together in Split, a city of about 250,000 on the Adriatic Sea.
“People in the basketball world know about Croatia and know about Split,” said Carmody, who traveled to the city in July.
Split is widely regarded as a hotbed of Croatian athletics, having produced Atlanta Hawks forward Toni Kukoc.
Pat Baldwin, who played for the Cats in the early 1990s, now plays professionally in Croatia and helped Carmody find information on Duvancic and Vukusic.
Soltau played basketball in the United States for an entire summer, and Carmody had known about him while coaching at Princeton.
Soltau was expected to go to prep school for a year before heading to the collegiate ranks, but a phone call from his coach late in the spring told Carmody otherwise. Soltau had given a verbal commitment to St. Joseph’s in Philadelphia, but the school later backed out because they had another recruit qualify academically. Shortly thereafter, Soltau decided to come to NU.
As much as the new recruits should help the Cats in the long run, Carmody said he did not think any of the three Europeans would be immediate starters. Vukusic weighs 215 pounds, Soltau 210 and Duvancic 200. All three will need to add muscle, Carmody said.
Since their arrivals in Evanston — and therefore their preseason physicals — were slightly delayed by flight stoppages, Tuesday was the first day the players could work out for Carmody.
But even though the three will be joining a team that didn’t graduate anyone from last season, Carmody thinks they will fit in just as well as any new student on campus.
“They’re freshman, that’s what they are,” Carmody said. “Someone from California might have just as hard a time as someone from Denmark.”
The three newcomers aren’t the only roster changes from last season. Langston Hughes, a walk-on who had played sparingly for the Cats for two years, will not play a third season for NU.
As a result of all the changes, NU will have three scholarships available for the next signing period, which takes place in November. Two slots are those belonging to current seniors Tavaras Hardy and Collier Drayton, and the third is going unused this year since Johnson transferred.
