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Lehigh, 'Nova, WCU student-athletes heading to Europe

08/06/2015, 6:15pm EDT

By Josh Verlin

Lehigh's Tim Kempton (above, right) and 10 others are headed to Europe for an eight-day trip and plenty of basketball. (Photo: Josh Verlin)

Josh Verlin (@jmverlin)
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If nothing else, Tim Kempton is looking forward to the weather in Europe.

Lehigh’s junior center has spent the majority of his summer in his hometown Phoenix, where temperatures can often soar past 110 Fahrenheit for weeks at a time. That’s quite a contrast from the winters he spends up at school, where the average temperature from December-February is somewhere in the mid-30s and often lower.

The predicted weather in Brussels on Friday? A beautiful 83 degrees and sunny.

“I always joke around with people because I go down to Arizona during the hottest parts of the year and I come up to Pennsylvania during the coldest, so I get screwed with the weather both ways,” joked Kempton, a few hours before he and 10 other student-athletes departed from Philadelphia airport Thursday night on a Global Sports Academy Goodwill Tour. “Being able to come here and step outside without sweating is nice.”

The GSA tours send teams of Division I, II and III players from across the United States on trips to Europe to see various countries, “promote international goodwill” and, of course, play some basketball.

This trip, one of six launched by GSA this summer, is an eight-day excursion that will take Kempton and his teammates to (among a few smaller stops) Dusseldorf, Germany; London, England; Brugges, Belgium; and Amsterdam. While there, they'll play five games against pro teams in the various countries, with SMU operations director Jay Duncan serving as head coach.

The rest of the team: Brian Bernardi (Jr./Hofstra), Phil Booth (Soph./Villanova), Mikal Bridges (R-Fr./Villanova), Ben Emelogu II (Jr./Southern Methodist), Will Ferris (R-Fr./Eastern Washington), Aaron Foster-Smith (Fr./Detroit-Mercy), Walter Gregg (Jr./St. Bonaventure), Semi Ojeleye (R-Soph./Southern Methodist) and Matt Wiselely (Sr. West Chester).

One obvious outlier on the roster is Wiselely, who’s the only Division II player on a roster full of high-level talent. He averaged 8.3 ppg and 8.7 rpg during the 2014-15 season as an undersized forward for the Rams, certainly not numbers to scoff at, but his teammates have some impressive credentials themselves.

Kempton was Patriot League Player of the Year as a sophomore. Miller-McIntyre already has 1000 points in the ACC. Bernardi made nearly 100 3-pointers during his sophomore season at Hofstra. Ojeleye began his career at Duke before transferring to SMU.

Wiseley got the opportunity thanks to Global Sports Academy founder Roy Blumenthal, who recently retired from his position as an assistant coach at West Chester.

“I’ve played with and against guys that are at their level, (but) never on a trip where I play with them for multiple games,” he said. “I’m definitely looking forward to getting experience with them, and trying to learn a few things from their style of play from the Division I level and try to bring it into my game.”

While the basketball portion is certainly secondary to the experience of being abroad for the majority of those on the trip, at least one local player is certainly looking forward to being out on the court.

Bridges, a Great Valley alum, spent his entire freshman season at Villanova watching from the bench as the Wildcats went 33-3 and won both the Big East regular-season and tournament championships. Now, with minutes available but plenty of talented wings around him, he’s look at this trip as a chance to get a jump-start on the season and work his way into the rotation.

“I can’t wait to get going,” he said. “It’s kind of a chance for me to get my feet wet again after redshirting last season, and get back into playing competitive basketball.”

Of course, they can't totally ignore the cultural side of the trip. The published itinerary includes stops at the Grand Palace in Brussels, the Tower of London, and Buckingham Palace in the British capital, and the famous canals in Amsterdam.

While Wiselely said he didn't have one particular country he was looking forward to visiting and Bridges singled out walking around London, Kempton was particularly excited that the trip was based out of Belgium. They'll begin and ending in Brussels, with several other stops in the country along the way.

You see, in eighth grade, Kempton did a research report on Belgium, writing about the northern European nation of 11.2 million people sandwiched between France to the West, Netherlands to the North and Germany to the East.

Then again, how much can one remember from a middle school research paper?

“Not too much," he admitted, "just the big things like Brussels and Bruges. And I took a French class, so I can maybe understand some of the French that they speak down there."

At least the weather will be nice.