How a phone call from Jerome Tang helped send Wichita State men’s basketball to Greece

A trip to Greece for the Wichita State men’s basketball team started with a phone call from Jerome Tang.

In the days following his hire at WSU in March, Paul Mills was chatting with the Kansas State head coach, like he has done just about every day for the past two decades, and the topic of foreign exhibition tours came up.

K-State had invested in a trip to Greece for this summer, but an opportunity arose for the team to instead play in Israel at a later date that worked better for scheduling, and Tang needed someone to take the Greece trip off his itinerary.

“How much of it are you paying for?” Mills said he asked Tang with a laugh.

“He told me the dates and I said, ‘I’ll make it work. I’ll be happy to take it off your hands.’”

The relationship that dates back to 2003 in their first year together on Scott Drew’s staff at Baylor helped turn the situation into a win-win for both sides: K-State didn’t have to eat all of the cost for the Greece trip and was freed up to go to Israel, while WSU was able to take a foreign trip at a discount.

“It worked out well for them with the timing of the trip and it was able to help us in the timing of ours,” Tang told The Eagle. “Paul is my guy. Anything I can do to help Paul, except on the nights that we play each other, I’m willing to.

“I love him and his family and it’s really, really great for our state to have such terrific men leading the programs across the state.”

The timing couldn’t have been better for Mills, who now has 10 extra practices and three exhibition games to work with his new roster in his first year with the Shockers.

It will be the first foreign exhibition tour for WSU since traveling to Canada in 2016. NCAA rules allow for one foreign trip every four years and the Shockers were scheduled for one during the summer of 2020, but the coronavirus pandemic canceled those plans.

WSU can practice fully as a team 10 times and up to four hours each day, which is not otherwise permitted during the summer, beginning on July 17 in the build-up to the exhibition tour, which is slated from August 1-10. Opponents and dates have yet to be finalized, but WSU is scheduled to make stops in Thessaloniki, Athens, Kalampaka and Corinth.

“Coaches get excited about practice,” Mills said. “Players aren’t as excited about it as we are. To get 10 of them and get four-hour practices, we won’t go four, but to get that much hands-on time with your guys is 100% beneficial.”