HOOP DREAMS IN A SHRINKING QUEBEC TOWN.
A SMALL ASBESTOS TOWN IN QUEBEC IS AN UNLIKELY PLACE TO CHASE HOOP DREAMS, BUT ONE ACADEMY IS RISING TO THE CHALLENGE
When his coach asked Quincy Guerrier about joining an elite basketball program in Thetford Mines, the Montreal teen had no idea where the town with the English name even was.
“I thought it was in the United States,” he said recently.
Guerrier’s confusion was understandable. Known for producing Quebec Nordiques goalie Mari o ( Goos e ) Gosselin as well as millions of tons of asbestos, Thetford Mines would have ranked near the bottom of any list of basketball hotbeds.
But the teen had faith in coach Igor Rwigema and signed on to his project to introduce top-tier basketball to this out-of-the-way corner of Quebec. Two years later, at just 16, Guerrier has a conditional scholarship offer from a major U.S. university and is starring on a Thetford team that takes on players from Canadian universities and top American prep schools.
“I have a goal in life: to go far with basketball,” the 6- foot- 6 guard said one recent night, still sweating from a gruelling practice.
Thetford Mines is an unlikely place to chase that dream for Guerrier and his teammates, who are mostly — like him — black kids from multi- ethnic Montreal. The 2011 census found that 99 per cent of the town’s 26,750 residents were white and 97 cent of them spoke French as their mother tongue.
In his show You’re Gonna Rire, Indo- Canadian comedian Sugar Sammy jokes that when he was heading to play a show in Thetford Mines, he entered the town into his GPS. “Are you sure?” the GPS replied. “You know you’re in a white town when even the people cleaning your hotel room are white,” the comedian said.
The town, 2 ½ hours east of Montreal, is named for the asbestos mines that propelled its economy for more than a century. Health and environmental concerns pushed the industry into decline beginning in the 1980s, and the last mine was closed in 2012.
But asbestos remains central to the region’s identity, from the barren mountains of tailings that shape the landscape to the plaque downtown commemorating Joseph Fecteau’s 1876 discovery of asbestos fibres in a shining rock while he was out blueberry picking. Driving around Thetford Mines, one passes a medical clinic, an auto- repair shop, even a funeral home with the word “amiante” — French for asbestos — in their names.
The disappearance of the one-industry town’s industry is part of the reason basketball has arrived in Thetford Mines. At the town’s CEGEP — the college that Quebec students attend after finishing high school in Grade 11 — administrators have been struggling for years to reverse a decline in enrolment brought on by an aging population.
As t he mines wound down, families and young people left in search of jobs. Now, 25 per cent of residents are aged 65 and over, compared with a national average of 15 per cent. “A generation left Thetford at that time,” Robert Rousseau, director of the CEGEP de Thetford, said of the collapse of the asbestos industry. “They are not here to have children to go to CEGEP.”
As enrolment dropped from 1,300 to 800, the college identified elite sports as a way of attracting stu- dent- athletes and creating a school spirit that would make it attractive to nonathletes. A football team took the field in 2004, hockey was introduced in 2011 and basketball made i ts debut in 2014.
“Overnight, we went from no teams to three teams, one of which is good enough to play Canadian university teams,” Rousseau said. The number of students has climbed back to almost 1,100, including 150 student athletes.
Rwigema, 29, is the man who brought basketball to the former mining town. He arrived in Canada from Kinshasa with his family, refugees from the civil war in Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of Congo), at the age of 10.
“My granddaddy used to be the right- hand man of Mobutu ( Sese Seko, who was overthrown as president of the central African country in 1997),” Rwigema said. “They were looking to hurt the family.”
They escaped to Gatineau, Que., and Rwigema says that as a teen, basketball kept him out of trouble. He played through CEGEP and into university. But after his second year playing at Université du Québec à Montréal, where he studied business, he decided he enjoyed coaching youth basketball more than playing.
He began a summer team in Montreal for his younger brother and other kids from the Congolese community, and they called themselves the Okapi Ballers after a zebra- like animal native to Congo.
“It happened some of them were the best players in Quebec at the time,” he said. That team grew into a successful club called QC United, but Rwigema felt his potential to shape the players was limited because at the end of the summer, they returned to their schools.
He dreamed of creating a year- round basketball academy, modelled on travelling prep school teams that are important recruiting grounds for American universities. But he wanted to get out of Montreal, where his players — most from disadvantaged backgrounds — faced constant temptations pulling them away from school and the gym.
“The fact we can control what they’re doing from when they get up to when they sleep, that’s a major plus,” he said. “When I was doing this in ( Montreal), we lost a lot of kids.”
The first stop in 2012 was Alma, about 370 kilometres northeast of Montreal. A friend of Rwigema who was working at the CEGEP there said the school was hungry for new students and was thinking of starting a basket- ball program. Did Rwigema think his program could take root there? At first he thought there might be a few kids willing to make the trek to Alma, but in the end 40 signed on.
Alma, though, proved a little too remote, and the academy was unable to attract elite squads from Ontario and the U. S. Northeast to its tournaments. After two years, the CEGEP ended the program, and Rwigema and his assistant, Ibrahim Appiah, moved the academy to Thetford Mines.
With 45 players attending Thetford’s CEGEP and main high school, the arrival in 2014 made an immediate splash.
“It’s true, the majority of the Thetford population are white, and all of a sudden four basketball teams arrive, if you count the highschool team, and 80 per cent of these kids are black,” said Rousseau. “You have just added colour to the town.”
With one seven-footer, another 6- foot-10 and a third 6-foot-8, you have also added a lot of height. “At first it can be a surprise, but the reception has been very good,” Rousseau said. “I think people remarked more on their height than the colour of their skin. That makes me happy.”
In the stands last Sunday, watching Thetford’s top team, the Golds, destroy visitors from the Université de Sherbrooke 114- 43, Emmanuel Baril said his children are excited to attend the basketball games.
“They talk about going to see the ‘ tall black guys,’ ” he said.
Kase y Paul - Buzas, a 20- year- old from Montreal, has been with the academy since its first year in Alma. He is set to graduate this year and has committed to play for Nipissing University in North Bay, Ont., next fall.
The player, who was raised by his mother after the death of his father, said getting out of the city helped him “grow as a man and as a basketball player .... It kept me away from all the distractions, from all the bad things that happen in Montreal.”
But in Alma, he and his black teammates would get suspicious looks. “If something was stolen, people would think it was us,” he said. He has found Thetford Mines to be much more welcoming.
Borys Minger, 18, who is also graduating this year and headed for Ottawa’s Carleton University, has arguably experienced the greatest culture shock of all the players. He is from French Guiana on the northeast coast of South America, where Rwigema recruited him two years ago.
“I had never seen towns like this before coming to Canada,” he said, “towns that could be so quiet — so cold too.”
But he said he was immediately interested in Rwigema’s academy because North America is where the best basketball is played. His dream is to play in Europe’s top professional league, but first he plans to earn a university degree.
“Coming here is the best decision I could have made for my basketball and for everything,” he said.
The players have to love basketball to make the commitment. Rwigema’s academy is part boot camp, with players agreeing to follow the strict rules laid out in a We Are Thetford handbook.
Curfew is 11 p. m., players are forbidden to drink alcohol or go out to bars, and no girls are allowed in their dorms. Hair must be kept short, pants must not slip below the waist and rooms must be kept tidy. Penal- ties range from pushups ( as many as 800 for disrespecting a coach) to expulsion. Academically, they must pass at least four of the five courses they take each semester if they want to keep playing.
Enforcing the rules is easier in a small town, though, where Rwigema says there are only three bars and the owners know to call him if a towering basketball player shows up. Giving a quick tour, he offers an appraisal that will not show up on any tourism brochures. “This is the downtown of Thetford. You see? There’s nothing attractive for our guys,” he said.
If the young men are prepared to sacrifice, it is because they see the academy as their best shot at basketball success, short of attending a U.S. prep school.
“If you want to have a chance to play at the next l evel, if you want to be pushed, if you want to travel, you should come to Thetford,” Rwigema said.
Including t his year ’ s graduating class, 28 players will have gone on to play Canadian or American university basketball in the academy’s first four years.
By far the biggest success story is Chris Boucher of Montreal, who was in Alma in 2012-13, then went to junior colleges in New Mexico and Wyoming before moving to Oregon University this year. Oregon is ranked ninth in the U. S. by The Associated Press, and Boucher, a 6-foot-10 forward, is leading the team in rebounds and blocked shots while averaging 12.5 points a game.
Mike Mannenga, an Oregon assistant coach who first spotted Boucher when he was playing for Alma at a U. S. prep school tournament, said the success of a player like Boucher will fuel interest in what Rwigema is building in Thetford Mines.
“Any time you’re building a program, and your program has the capacity to develop a player of Chris’s calibre, clearly you’re going to get some attention, particularly if you’ve got some other guys coming up who show the same promise,” he said.
At t he Polyvalente de Thetford Mines, the French high school, principal Jean Roberge still marvels at the thought this hockey town could become known as a hothouse for basketball talent. Originally from Quebec City, he moved here 18 years ago to play semi- pro hockey after graduating from university. Now he is helping Guerrier, in his last year of high school, pursue his dream of playing in the NBA.
“There is not much of a basketball culture in Thetford,” Roberge said.
That was clear on Sunday, when the academy’s top team performed spectacular dunks and drained three- pointers in a near- empty gym while hundreds gathered to watch snowmobile drag races on a closed-off downtown street.
Roberge hopes residents will pay more attention as the success of Boucher and other players shines a spotlight on the program.
“Suddenly there is credibility and renown associated with basketball here,” he said.
Rwigema is also hoping the attention could attract a corporate sponsorship. Nike provides the players with gear, but the program still runs on a tight budget.
Jean-Pierre Lessard, a local businessman, said he wants to get the business community behind the drive to make Thetford a basketball capital.
“A lot of these kids are coming out of difficult environments,” he said. “Getting them out of that, and having them finish their studies and play basketball is a double goal that is very noble.”
Guerrier stands to be the next big star to emerge from the academy. He has been offered a scholarship to follow Boucher to Oregon, provided he maintains his marks and his basketball continues to progress.
The 16- year- old says he is glad to have escaped Montreal, where “there are a lot of street gangs and things like that,” even if it means being apart from his mother and two younger siblings. “My mother said she wants me to realize my dream,” he said. “I feel like it’s not a dream but more a reality. If I do everything my coaches tell me to, watch the videos, I think I will get to where I want to go.”
Along the way, he will have done his bit to put Thetford Mines on t he basketball map.