By Howard Tsumura, The Province -- When we first brought you the story of Diego Kapelan in December of 2004, we called him the best B.C. high school basketball player that you'd never heard of.

Playing at Vancouver's tiny King George Secondary, Kapelan was in the midst of a senior season in which he averaged a highlight-reel 32 points per game.

Yet what Kapelan really wanted to achieve was an NCAA Div. 1 basketball career. Fast forward some 50 months and the dream has come true for the 6-foot-2 guard.

Sure, he's only had to travel 4,190 kilometres from his old high school campus to do it, but Kapelan has become a star player with the McNeese State University Cowboys, a Div. 1 school playing in the Southland Conference which boasts former NBA star Joe Dumars as its most famous alumnus.

"Just being from Canada, you don't expect things to happen this fast," Kapelan said recently. "But being this far away from home, I was able to fit right in. We're like a big family and everyone has made me feel so comfortable."

And nowhere has Kapelan felt more comfortable than from behind the three-point arc.
In the Cowboys' recent 88-74 win over Northwestern State, Kapelan, the team's leading scorer at 13.3 ppg, must have felt like he was back in high school. He scored a career-high 37 points and set a school record with nine treys (9-for-14).

"I think the biggest thing for me as a coach, is that he is a kid that works," says McNeese State head coach Dave Simmons. "You go back to the old cliche of a gym rat. He's in the gym so much that during the season I wonder if it's taking away from his game. I have had to run him out of the gym."
Upon his high school graduation in 2005, all Kapelan wanted was a gym and a team to call his own. So while he plotted his next move, he played in a men's league and helped coach the senior varsity team at St. George's School.

As fate would have it, Kapelan bumped into a relation of Dave Dumars, Joe's older brother who was an assistant at McNeese.

"One of (Dumar's) cousins lives in Vancouver," relates Kapelan. "I was done playing high school and I would play with him at the local rec centres and one day we were on the bus going to a men's league game and he just asked me what my plans were for the next year. He said he couldn't guarantee anything, but that they would look at my tape."

So with favorable reviews, Kapelan took a leap of faith and showed up in Lake Charles, the fifth-largest city in the state with a population of just over 70,000. That first season (2006-07), Kapelan actually worked out with the football team to stay in shape while he sharpened his standing in the classroom.
"There there were times I'd be in the gym shooting at midnight when the team went on the road," he laughed of his first year "And the police officers would have to come in there and kick me out."
There's little doubt those same officers are now big fans of his.

Kapelan sits 14th in conference scoring, fourth in free throw percentage (.842) and third in three-pointers made (31). And he's improved his defence to the point where he averaged 32.3 minutes per game in February with the third-best defensive team in the conference.

But right now, the Cowboys are in a battle to finish in the Southland's top eight and earn a berth to the conference championship tournament which rewards its winner with a ticket to the the NCAA championships.

They'd be an underdog if they got to the Big Dance, but that's a role Diego Kapelan knows all about.

View The Province article here.