Quote from: Gregory Sager on March 12, 2019, 02:27:37 PMQuote from: duckfan41 on March 12, 2019, 11:28:49 AM
Regarding Aston, I watched every Wheaton men's game this year and there are basically no players who surprise me when they miss a turnaround fade-away three pointer from the wing or the corner, but Aston is one of them. I saw someone on twitter call D3 basketball as a whole out because of how good Aston is, as a slight to its inferiority to D1. However, Aston has a rare work ethic that most D1 guys don't even have. The fact that he went to the practice gym after the Augie game and didn't leave until he made 100 of the shot he had just missed is a testament to how hard he works and how much he wants to win basketball games. You certainly don't luck into averaging 33.9 points per game.
What really opened my eyes to the whole Aston Francis narrative was going back and looking at his freshman season at Tyler Junior College. Again, for those of you who missed the post I made about my discovery earlier this season, Aston Francis was not some sort of teenaged basketball superstar who just happened to land at Wheaton after setting the world on fire at the juco level. Yes, Mike Schauer saw him in high school and tried to recruit him then, but he wasn't down in Texas to look at Aston Francis; he was down there to look at Trevor Gunter and stumbled upon Aston Francis by accident. But the biggest surprise is just how ordinary and easily-overlooked Francis was at TJC. He did not start for the Apaches; he came off the bench. His shooting slash was a very modest .360/.333/.750. And he averaged 4.5 ppg and 0.8 rpg, which seems astonishing when you realize that he averaged 23.9 ppg as a sophomore at Wheaton with a shooting slash of .458/.388/.781, and has had an upward offensive trajectory over his junior and senior seasons.
It's all well and good for Mike Schauer to call Aston Francis the hardest-working player he's ever seen, but the numbers he posted at TJC put into stark relief just how hard he worked to become the hardest-working player that Mike Schauer has ever seen. It fleshes out his narrative in the same way that knowing that Michael Jordan got cut from the tryout for his high school's sophomore team makes you understand what drove him to become the greatest player who ever laced up sneakers. Yes, Aston Francis is a gifted athlete, but we all know that even the D3 level is replete with gifted athletes. What sets him apart isn't mere work ethic; it's an approach to making himself a better player that has been both maniacal and methodical. I don't get the impression that he's wasted any energy in applying himself to be better. That whole I'm-going-to-perfect-the-shot-that-I-missed-against-Augie story and the fact that he spent a summer studying videos of players like Larry Bird and Steph Curry in order to break down their techniques and incorporate them into his game indicates that he harnesses his amazing drive to specific on-court purposes. And that also explains why various phases of his game have improved over the past three years. It's one thing to be driven; it's another thing to be smart about it.
But the biggest part of the story, of course, is the whole aspect of a nondescript juco benchwarmer becoming the most sensational D3 player in recent memory. Within the ordinary lies the seed of the extraordinary. I wonder how many other D3 players who have played against him have taken this to heart and have looked at Aston Francis as a role model who will inspire them to put down the Xbox and click on YouTube videos of great players of yesteryear with the intent to study their moves or their technique, or to put in extra hours in the gym and the weight room even above and beyond what they're already doing.Quote from: duckfan41 on March 12, 2019, 11:28:49 AMIt's been awesome getting to see Aston dress in the orange and blue these last 3 years and here's to hoping he has two games of magic left in the tank.
I make no bones about the fact that I'm an Aston Francis fan, which is a very weird and uncomfortable feeling for me as a North Parker. (I had the same unpleasant "you shouldn't be a fan of this guy" sense a decade and a half ago when the CCIW player I respected the most was Wheaton center Joel Kolmodin.) I try to reconcile myself to this by remembering that one notable occasion in which Aston Francis missed the big shot at the very end of a one-possession game was in the crackerbox against NPU this past December ... and that I felt perfectly fine watching that shot clang off of the front of the rim.
Nice post. I didn't know much about Aston Francis.
The other thing to consider about this young man is that sometimes you hear stories of kids not playing or playing mediocre minutes and they decide to leave their teams... what if they buckled down like this? They may not become this kind of player, but they may!
Wow. Inspiring on several levels.