The FAU basketball team visted Paris during its 10-day trip to Europe. (FAU Athletics)
Overseas adventure
The basketball was good and the culture was enticing, but the food, well, that required a bit of an adjustment during FAU's 10-day trip to Europe.
Originally published on
8/22/2010
by
Chuck King
BOCA RATON - As much as he might want to, it’s unlikely Ray Taylor will ever forget his first basketball game in Europe.
A self professed picky eater, the FAU point guard was still trying to adjust to European cuisine on Aug. 14 when the Owls took the court for the first of their four games against European professional teams.
The play Taylor ran wasn’t exactly what coach Mike Jarvis drew on the chalk board.
“I was bringing the ball up the court,” Taylor said, while laughing and shaking his head. “I felt it coming. I threw up in my mouth a couple times, but I couldn’t hold it anymore. I just dribbled past half court so there wouldn’t be a 10 second call. I dribbled to the baseline and I just threw up.”
Taylor said the referee blew his whistle and sent him to the locker room. Minutes later Taylor re-emerged and eventually returned to the game. A few days later he was touring Paris.
So what did you do on your summer vacation?
Taylor and the rest of the Owls returned from their 10-day tour of Amsterdam, Belgium and France on Saturday. Food issues aside, reports of the sojourn were glowing.
The Owls spent part of Sunday in the Oxley Center getting their pictures taken for media guides and being interviewed for videos that will appear on the school’s web site.
And they were telling stories…
“We all kind of got spooked one night because the lights went out at the hotel,” Alex Tucker remembers of a night in France. “Somehow all 14 of us ended up in one room – like a really, really small room.”
On the court, the Owls didn’t spend much time in the dark. FAU players gained valuable playing time, which should enhance chemistry for the coming season.
“Whoever scheduled our games really did a good job,” Taylor said. “The first game, our opponent wasn’t that good but every they got better, so we had to get better. I feel like every time we got better.”
The Owls won three of their four contests. The other game ended in a 64-64 tie. On that day the court the Owls played on had also been reserved for a badminton match, so there wasn’t an opportunity to play overtime.
Six days later, the players were still perplexed by that outcome.
“After the game, me and Greg (Gantt) were standing on the court for like 5 minutes trying to figure out what was going on,” Tucker said. “We were like just looking around going, was there really a tie right now?”
Jarvis had said beforehand that the trip was designed to be more about education and cultural experiences than basketball.
From the Eiffel Tower to The Louve, players enjoyed the kind of cultural experiences rarely encountered by American college students.
“It was kind of a mind blowing experience,” said Dennis Mavin, who’d joined the Owls only weeks before the trip. “There are not a lot of freshman doing that around the country. It was kind of a humbling experience.”
Humbling and humorous – especially when it came to the language barrier.
“Things got lost in translation a lot,” said Brett Royster, who cited the Eiffel Tower visit as his favorite part of the trip. “We would ask for a bathroom and we’d get led to McDonald’s.”