The Emporia Gazette

May 28, 2012

• Headlines
• Sports
• Forums
• Weather
• Classifieds

• Help
• Log in
• Home

• E-mail story
• Post a comment
• iPod friendly version

James Wilbern knew before anyone else. Before his voice went and the disease ravaged his body, Wilbern told his son Lamar that he was going to be a great player. It came to him in a dream.

“And this was many years ago,” Lamar’s older brother, James Jr., says. “It sounds like I’m (kidding) you, but I’m not. My father told him, ‘You’re going to play pro.’”

That’s where this story begins. That’s when, as Lamar describes it, he started chasing basketball. Chasing a dream.

“I trust him that much,” Lamar says. “When he told me, that’s really why I’ve been chasing it.”

Lamar Wilbern is chasing a dream for four. His story is that of a longshot.

Today, Lamar is the star player for the Emporia State Hornets. This week he was named to the All-MIAA second team. He’s Emporia State’s leading scorer and leading rebounder. At 6-foot-2, he’s second in the MIAA in defensive rebounds.

“A lot of times I’ll go up for a rebound, and he comes out of nowhere and grabs it,” Jeremiah Box says. “And at a point, I’m like, ‘Man you took my rebound.’ But then again, I guess he just wanted it more.”

“He’s just hungry for it,” Robert Moores says. “When he goes up for a rebound, you can just tell in his eyes that he wants it more than anybody.”

When you ask anyone around the program who’s the team’s leader, the answer is Lamar Wilbern. His competitiveness is what his teammates point to when they explain how they ended up in third place in the MIAA after being picked to finish eighth in the preseason.

But rewind a couple of years ago, and only a dreamer could have imagined that Lamar Wilbern would be where he is today.

•••

Thumbing through the Emporia State men’s basketball media guide, the player bios all look the same. They’re all filled with All-League, All-City, All-State honors. No different than any other college team, the Hornets are made up of players who were stars in their high school days.

Then you come to Lamar Wilbern’s bio, and it’s barely two lines: “A 2004 graduate of Milwaukee Vincent High School... letterwinner in basketball for the Vikings.”

James Jr. will tell you about big shots his brother made growing up, about how he was on another level than all the other kids.

But when Lamar enrolled at Harold S. Vincent High School, a powerhouse in Milwaukee basketball, Lamar was a 5-foot-4 freshman who got lost in numbers. As a sophomore and junior, he didn’t even go out for basketball.

“I got caught up with the girls and just being cool,” Lamar says. “Grades were a problem for me.”

Still, he kept playing on the playgrounds and never lost his love for the game. And before his senior year, he decided to give the high school team a final shot.

“I had a couple talk-tos that summer from my father and uncle, said I needed to get it together,” Lamar says. “I tried out and made the team, but I didn’t play much at all. I had my coach telling me I was good enough, but I wasn’t in his system. He didn’t have the trust in me.”

Even though Lamar had not played much his senior year, an assistant coach got him a chance to go play at Iowa Lakes Community College.

Lamar went to Iowa Lakes and went through fall conditioning and was ready to play. But before the season started, his coach called him and some other out-of-state teammates into his office. The coach told them they were only allowed to play four out-of-state players, and Lamar would have to redshirt.

But unlike most redshirts, Lamar wasn’t allowed to practice with the team.

“We were pretty much dumped,” he says.

•••

Back home in Milwaukee, James Jr. needed help with his dad and oldest brother, Sharod. Both James and Sharod have spinocerebellar ataxia, a hereditary condition that attacks the cerebellum. The cerebellum helps coordinate the body’s ability to move, and the disease eats away at the body’s muscles and affects one’s speech.

“It regresses you from an adult to a baby,” Lamar says.

James had to move to a nursing home, and Sharod was progressively getting worse. He was losing his ability to speak and walk.

Lamar’s dad and his brothers never asked him to move home, but he felt as if he needed to come back and help out.

“He didn’t need any convincing,” James Jr. says. “He saw what needed to be done, stepped up to it and knocked it out.”

James and his three sons had always stuck together. Lamar’s mom, Patricia Wilbern, died of leukemia when Lamar was 5. James raised the three boys, and Lamar felt as if he owed it to his dad to come back.

“Me becoming an adult, I don’t see how he raised three males the way he did,” Lamar says. “I mean, I hear people’s stories growing up, I didn’t have this and that to eat, and I honestly never remember a time that there wasn’t food. There was always food. We always had clothes. And I don’t really see how he did it, because it wasn’t like he was educated, had a college degree or anything like that.”

James wanted Lamar to have a college degree and wanted him to continue to chase his hoop dreams. He pulled Lamar aside one day and told him he wanted him to go back to school.

Lamar considered going to a local college, but he couldn’t imagine going back to school and not playing basketball, so he started searching for a school that would take him on the team. A childhood friend was playing at Hamilton College in Lincoln, Neb., and convinced the coaches to give Lamar a shot.

So in the fall of 2006, Lamar left for Hamilton College.

•••

Lamar’s first season at Hamilton was a repeat of high school: He sat on the bench and watched. Once again he was stuck behind players the coach trusted.

Lamar didn’t give up, though. Out of nowhere one day, he saw his name in the starting lineup.

“I found out later he was testing me,” Lamar says. “Seeing if I would break. Seeing if I would give up.”

Lamar was a role player that first year. After the season, the top players on the team moved on and Lamar was going to be the go-to guy his sophomore season for the first time in his life.

But rumors swirled that the basketball program might be cut. The rumors proved true a year later. Kaplan University bought the school that summer, and Kaplan officials closed dorms where Lamar and his teammates lived.

Lamar and his teammates were forced to get jobs to pay for their housing. They practiced at a church and played in front of home crowds of about 40.

“People who went down the street that we knew who went to University of Nebraska, they didn’t even know about Hamilton College until they met us,” Lamar says. “That’s how unrecognized that school is. That town, that city doesn’t even know about it.”

Lamar was finally playing, finally chasing his dream. The small crowds, and working a side job along with school and basketball, didn’t bother him.

“You hate to say it when you’re in an authoritative role, but a lot of the guys you had to put in check last year,” says Tom Casart, who coached Lamar at Kaplan. “They were just basket cases. You didn’t know what the heck to do with them from time to time. But Lamar was the one thing you could always count on. You knew you were going to get certain things.

“In a weird way, he was kind of like an assistant coach and he was kind of like a colleague, because he was a little bit more mature than some other guys.”

Kaplan became Lamar’s team his sophomore year. He averaged 23.2 points, 9.4 assists, 7.6 rebounds and 3.9 steals — numbers that generated interest from several Division I schools, including Nebraska. When Lamar started getting interest from the D-I schools, they checked with the NCAA clearinghouse to see about his eligibility.

Athletes are only allowed five years to play four seasons in Division I, and because Lamar had started off at Iowa Lakes in 2004 and taken a year off, he only had one year left to play Division I. In Division II, athletes have 10 semesters to play four seasons and are not penalized for taking time off from school. So Lamar decided to play Division II, in which he would have two seasons left.

ESU coach David Moe found out about Lamar while he was visiting Nebraska, recruiting Shang Ping. Lamar decided he wanted to play for the Hornets, picking ESU over rival Washburn.

•••

Last spring, as Lamar finished his second year at Kaplan and prepared to leave for Emporia State, Sharod’s condition grew worse.

“My brother was calling me every day and telling me Sharod’s heart rate, and it was unbelievable,” Lamar says. “It was two times a person’s (heart rate) working out, and he was laying in bed.”

Lamar went back home to see his brother.

“Growing up with males, we didn’t show too much emotion,” he says. “If you ask anybody about me, you’d probably never seen me cry, and I went back and I was like a little girl, just bawling when I saw him, and you could see the pain on his face.”

Lamar and James Jr. prayed for the pain to go away, and in March, it did. Sharod, 29, died.

Lamar went back to school and finished up at Kaplan after Sharod’s death. He moved to Emporia last summer and went to work immediately in the weight room and in the gym.

Thinking about his brother and his dad and how hard it was to finally get his chance pushed him every day. Plus, he was still chasing the dream.

Then in October, when practice finally started, Lamar knew he had made it.

“The first day we got those practice jerseys and I saw my name on that locker, I knew that I arrived and I was excited about it,” he says. “I remember taking a picture of the nametag on my locker and sending it to somebody. I just knew I arrived, and at that moment I knew my hard work had paid off.”

•••

Lamar is talking in his apartment about Emporia State’s shooting game that the team does before game days. The game is supposed to be for fun, and there are no repercussions for losing, but Moe had to tell Lamar to chill out after his team lost the shooting game a couple of times early in the season.

“Coach Moe told me to work on it, but I get pissed,” Lamar says. “I want to win every one. I don’t know, man. I hate to lose.”

Box, Lamar’s roommate, is eavesdropping in the kitchen and turns around with a sheepish smile on his face.

“Seriously, he might not talk to you for a whole day,” Box says. “One time we lost and he did not talk all day when we got home. He was so mad.”

Through the season, Lamar’s competitiveness has rubbed off on his teammates. With a roster overhaul this year, the Hornets did not have an identity or a leader when the season started. But, quickly, it became Lamar’s team.

“He’s definitely our leader,” Box says. “We thrive off him. If he gets down, we all get down. If he feels you can do it, we feel we can do it. He’s definitely the leader of this team. He carries us.”

Lamar has carried the Hornets to three straight wins after losing six of eight. In the final loss of that streak, Lamar scored a season-low five points and had only four rebounds. In the three wins to end the regular season and keep Emporia State’s NCAA tournament hopes alive, Lamar has averaged 21.3 points per game.

“Mentally, there’s not a doubt in my mind that we’re as good as any team in the county at this level from a standpoint of mental toughness, and a lot of that is Lamar,” Moe says. “Because Lamar has arrived at the standpoint mentally as a leader to understand what it takes mentally to be successful against the top teams, and that’s what’s helped us finish well down the stretch.”

Lamar has been at his best when games have gotten tight this season. He had cramps at Pittsburg State and refused to come off the floor until his team had won in four overtimes. In games decided by five points or less, the Hornets are undefeated.

“You see the things that he does are what guys who really want to win will do — especially late in the game, his game changes,” says ESU assistant coach Ben McCollum. “All game long he may grab two, three rebounds and then all of a sudden at the end of the game he’s going to grab 10 in a row, because he’s going to make sure that we win that game.”

Lamar wants to know how he can get some pictures from the paper this year. He wants to send them back to his dad.

James hasn’t been able to see his son play live since Lamar was a freshman in high school, but Lamar wants to share everything with him. He sends him posters and T-shirts.

Last year, Lamar got some tapes of his games and took them back to Milwaukee to show his dad.

“It brings tears to my eyes to let him see it, because I know he would give anything — I mean anything — to be there,” Lamar says.

Lamar thinks about Sharod and his dad every day on the court.

“I catch myself, man,” he says. “We’re human, so we never do things like we should do or do things perfect. So I catch myself taking a play off or catch myself not going hard in practice, and I just remind myself how selfish that is, because people would kill to walk, let alone be in here shooting baskets, getting a scholarship to play something that billions of people wish they were good enough to play.”

James Jr. watches Lamar for the other three Wilbern men. He’s watched almost every game this year online on MIAA TV, and he’ll drive from Milwaukee to Kansas City, Mo., tonight to watch Lamar play against Washburn in the first round of the MIAA tournament.

“He’s going to put on a show,” James Jr. says.

After years of waiting, it’s finally time for Lamar to be the show, and James Jr. knows how much playing for Emporia State means to him.

“I think if you grow up in a situation where a lot of things we take for granted, just getting up and dressing ourselves, and if you’re around people whom are not given that opportunity, it kind of makes you appreciate things and see things a little differently,” James Jr. says. “He’s so appreciative of the opportunity to play that he just wants to do his very best. He has the attitude, ‘Why not him?’ Coming from being overlooked to now getting an opportunity to play and be productive at it, it’s, ‘Why not him? Why not now?’”