| 20 November 2011
Hey World...my name is Luke Sikma and this is the first installment of my column with Beyond the Beat covering my first year playing professional basketball in Europe.
For those who don’t know me I’m a 6-foot-8 forward from Bellevue, Washington and I played for and graduated from THE University of Portland (Go Pilots). Currently, I play for UB La Palma, a Spanish club that’s located on the island of La Palma in the Canary Islands and competes in the LEB Gold Division which is basically the 2nd best league in Spain behind the heralded ACB league. The Canary Islands are part of Spain but are actually located off the western coast of Africa near southern Morocco. We’re one of two LEB Gold teams in the islands, and the rest of our competition is from mainland Spain, or as they call it here, “The Peninsula”. There’s also one ACB team from the islands, CB Gran Canaria.
If you’re wondering how I ended up here I’ll give you a quick rundown: After my college season ended in the spring I was invited to play in the Portsmouth Invitational which consists of 64 college seniors who play in front of scouts from the NBA and basically every professional league around the world. I had a good showing there and the representatives from UB took notice and contacted my agent and eventually ended up offering me a contract. So in mid August I packed my bags and after four flights and two long days of travel I landed in beautiful La Palma.
The day after I arrived, we had a light shooting session scheduled that was more meant to let us get to know our new teammates than anything.
The majority of our team is made up of native Spaniards and I was pumped to finally be able to put my 6 years of Spanish class to good use and surprise them with my Spanish skills. I quickly found out though that the basic and carefully rehearsed conversations we practiced in Spanish class were nothing compared to the machine gun paced speech I was bombarded with when I met my Spanish teammates. Luckily most of them speak a decent amount of English so we managed to communicate pretty well going back and forth between my broken Spanish and their broken English. Of my teammates, six are Spanish (one from Còrdoba on the peninsula, and the other five from the islands), two are American (though Antonio plays as a Dominican), two are Dutch, one is from Mali, and one is from Cape Verde.
After getting to know my teammates a little bit and having some team outings to build camaraderie, it was time to get to work.
This for me was hands down the thing I was most looking forward to. I was excited to play with a new group of guys, in a different system, and in a league with an overall different style of play then I was used to. Now don’t get me wrong, my time at Portland was the best four years of my life and I wouldn’t trade the time I spent with my teammates, coaches, and the rest of the community for anything, but I was ready for a clean slate and new situation. The first two weeks here was basically a training camp, with two-a-days of practice and conditioning. I’ll be honest, I hate conditioning with a passion, but conditioning here was surprisingly tolerable. Our conditioning didn’t consist of us just running suicides in the gym all day, our coaches kept us guessing. One day we were running through the forest in the mountains and another day we were running up hills of black volcanic sand at the bottom of a volcano. It was wild! As a team we put in a lot of good work over those two week s and it really prepared us well for the type of pressing, high energy, fast break oriented system we like to play well in the handful of preseason games we played. It also let me get my bearings in terms of the layout of the island and really showed the overall natural beauty of the island.
Let’s fast forward to now, where we’re 10 games into the season and we’re 7-3 which puts us in 3rd place in our league.
Our three losses have all been really close, including a comeback from 26 down on the road that we thought we had won until an “unfortunate” foul call, which I’ll just leave at that for fear of retribution. As for myself, I’m playing pretty well averaging 10.5 points and 8.5 boards per with some good games of late. Our next couple games are all against the top half of the league so it’s important that we play well and stick near the top of the league.
I know I’ve skipped over a lot of hoops but it’s a long season and I’ll be sure to revisit some moments in the following entries. You can also look forward to some in-depth analysis of my teammates and coaches, my ongoing adjustments to the European game and the Spanish lifestyle, and some interesting and comical moments both on and off the court during my time here on “La Isla Bonita”!
Oh almost forgot, hi Mom! (Had to sneak that in there).
Hasta la próxima vez!
Luke Sikma is in his first season playing professional basketball overseas with La Palma in Spain's 2nd League. A 2011 graduate of the University of Portland, Sikma averaged 12.9 points, 10.5 rebounds, 2.6 assists and 1.3 steals per game in his senior season for the Pilots. He was named All-West Coast Conference 1st Team and finished as Portland’s all-time leader in rebounds (987). Sikma's column chronicling his rookie season in Spain, "Life in La Palma", will be updated throughout the season. You can also follow Sikma on Twitter @LCSikma43
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