International hoopster

So far, playing basketball 4,300 miles from home is working out just fine for Colby Taylor.

Creston’s first professional basketball player is leading his team in scoring (19.1 points per game) and rebounding (8.9 average) through 15 games in the 30-game regular season for his team in Leon, Spain. He has the most 3-pointers on the team, hitting 36 percent from pro distance at 30-of-83. He’s shooting 76 percent at the free throw line (26-34).

On Sunday, Taylor returned to Spain after enduring a grueling 26-hour trip home on Dec. 20 for a holiday break. His team will have five practices before its next game on Jan. 14.

“I had a five-hour bus ride from Leon to Madrid to start the trip home,” Taylor related during an interview last week at the home of his parents, Bill and Joni Taylor of Creston. “We are up in northern Spain. Then it was a two-hour wait for our flight in Madrid, and another couple of hours layover in Chicago before I flew to Omaha. It all added up and made for a long day, but it’s good to be back.”

Family time

While back in Iowa, Colby was able to watch younger sister Jenna Taylor play two games — both victories — for the Simpson College women’s basketball team.

The 2017 Central College graduate, where he became the Dutch’s all-time scoring leader with 1,856 points, played a lot of games in Simpson’s Cowles Field House as a visiting player, but now found himself rooting for Jenna and the Storm.

“It’s awesome to get a chance to see her play,” Colby said. “Their team won only eight or nine games last year, and they’ve already surpassed that this year, so they’re off to a great start.”

Jenna, who had to sit out her freshman season last year with a stress fracture in a leg, starts at forward for the Storm.

“Obviously he couldn’t come back and see me play in Creston much when he was playing at Central, so it’s special to have him here,” Jenna said Saturday after scoring a career-high 15 points in her team’s 80-72 victory over Loras College. “I know he’s been able to catch a couple of games online, but it was nice that he was able to come here on his break.”

Colby is one of two Americans on the Ule Ingenova Fundacion C.B. Leon team in the EBA, one of several professional basketball leagues in Spain. It is considered the fourth-highest level of seven pro leagues in that country.

The other American on his team is 6-8, 230-pound center Nigel Holley, who played on East Tennessee State’s NCAA Tournament team under former SWCC coach Steve Forbes.

Team outlook

The Leon team is 8-7 so far and has an uphill climb to finish in the top three to advance to the playoffs in late April, but Taylor sees it as a possibility.

“Nigel joined our team late, after we’d played four games,” Taylor said. “We were 7-3 at one point, but our starting point guard was out for a month with a sprained ankle, and then I sprained my ankle and missed three games. For a couple of games we were missing three or four players and struggled a lot. We’re only a couple games out of the top three now, but we’ll have to play well to move up.”

Taylor was a Division III Academic All-American player at Central, graduating with a 3.41 grade point average (4.0 scale) in actuarial science. At age 23 he’s delaying his start in the American corporate world to continue his playing career and explore the world.

“Once you get into the workplace, you cant really get that experience of just dropping everything and being able to go and live in another country,” Taylor said. “This has given me experiences that I would have never gotten if I had gone straight into a job.”

Taylor doesn’t have to go far to look at ancient world history as a resident of Leon, a city of 130,000 in northwest Spain.

“Leon is one of the most beautiful cities in Spain,” he said. “The Basilica (de San Isidoro) was built in the 900s. They have Roman ruins from the 400s. That’s the kind of stuff that you can’t get here in America, the old architecture and that kind of stuff. When our team has traveled, like to the ocean side, we’ve done some exploring of the town and the beach area.”

Language issues

Taylor took four years of Spanish in high school and a semester at Central, but the language barrier was still an issue in his early days.

“The first three or four days, they were talking so fast and I had no idea what they were saying and I was thinking, ‘Wow, what am I doing here?’ But once we started getting into games and stuff, and getting to know my teammates better, it’s gotten a lot better,” Taylor said.

Fortunately, he’s usually standing near a teammate who can translate coaching instructions, and he’s starting to pick up more of an understanding of what’s being said.

“There are about six or seven guys on the team who speak English,” Taylor said. “The older people in Spain are not generally speaking English, but the younger generation does a lot. They help me out a lot. And, now if the coach is speaking basketball, I can normally figure it out, between the hand gestures and words that I know.”

Andre Norris, who played against Taylor in the Iowa Conference for the University of Dubuque, plays on another team in Leon in the third Spanish league. Taylor harbors hopes of getting an offer to move up to a higher league next year.

“My agent is from a town an hour and a half away,” Taylor said. “He came to a game and he said there are some teams in the league above us that are already asking about me. So, hopefully if I play well in the second half of the year I’ll get some feedback from them. I’ve been thinking that if I go back, I would probably need to move up.”

Compensation

Salaries in the EBA range from $300 a month for the younger, inexperienced players to about $1,000 a month for the higher caliber players like Taylor. But, he has no real living expenses.

“Nigel and I live in the area of the international students at the university there,” Taylor said. “The university’s soccer team has a lot of foreign players and they live there. I met one guy who speaks Korean, Chinese, English and Spanish, which I thought was pretty amazing. You don’t run into a lot of people in Iowa who can do that.

“All of the living expenses and food is free, so I don’t really have any expenses unless I go out,” Taylor added.

The team travels in a charter mini-bus in a league with trips similar to his experience in the Iowa Conference, ranging from one to five hours one way.

Taylor gets one day off a week when no games or practices are held. He arrived in mid-September and will likely return to Creston for the summer in May, depending on his team’s postseason status.

“I’ll probably come back to Creston, maybe work a little and use the college facilities to work out,” said Taylor, whose father is the vice president of instruction at SWCC and the college’s former head men’s basketball coach.

For now, there are no regrets in choosing to extend his time on the court in international competition.

“I know eventually I will have to come back and start a real job,” Taylor said. “That’s in the back of my mind. I’m not going to be playing over there for 10 years or anything like that. If I can keep moving up, I’ll try to make the most of my potential.”

Box scores to games are frequently linked on Twitter at https://twitter.com/fundacioncbleon or on the team's statistics website: http://bit.ly/2Eol9fW.

Video replays of the games are available at this website: http://bit.ly/2CVajlo.