Jakub Wojciechowski was 15 when he was proposed to move to Treviso. He was a kid with a great basketball body, he was tall and in love with basketball. Kuba is from Lodz, a city of about 700,000 citizens now, a city that was drained during World War II when the population was reduced in half. Lodz is also the place where this story begins. “I came to Treviso and didn’t care or think about the consequences of that choice. For me – he says – it was about changing city, but still playing basketball in a sports hall with a different jersey and different teammates. All the rest, the language barrier, the cultural differences, or the difficulties of living in a foreign country at a very young age, with no parents or family members with me, I really didn’t think about it at all. That experience made me grow faster and made me the person that I am now. Somebody tipped Treviso, they came to see me play in some youth tournaments, it all started like this.”
The Benetton head coach at that time was Ettore Messina, in his third season in Treviso. Kuba became in effect a Benetton player around that time. And as he spent more than four years in Treviso’s youth system, he also became an Italian by formation. “By now I’m fifty-fifty, half Italian and half Polish,” he says smiling. Since then, he has played on several Italian teams, including Cremona, Capo d’Orlando and Brindisi, probably where he had the best seasons. “In Capo d’Orlando and Brindisi, the system was perfect for me, it was based on moving the ball, hit the open man and take what the defense is giving, and the coach’s confidence allowed me to completely express myself. I also had experiences teammates that helped me a lot. Basketball has never been a matter of one player only,” he says. At Orlandina, he averaged 8.9 points and 6.1 rebounds (10.2 and 4.3 rebounds in the BCL); the following year in Brindisi he had 5.3 points and 3.1 rebounds but in just 12 minutes, off the bench.
This season he was playing in Biella when the call from Milan came unexpected. “But I didn’t have the time, let’s say so, to celebrate my coming to Olimpia. I spoke with the coach, with Ettore Messina, and he explained to me my role, what I should expect, what he needed, he said the things I hoped he would say, which I liked the most from a human point of view. I have no expectations, I am focused on doing what will be asked of me, helping the team, my teammates as much as I can. I don’t want to expect anything, this is my mindset, then whatever I will gain I will gain” he says. He is a 2.13 mt tall, and he knows how to shoot from the perimeter, he is a 34 percent three-point shooter for his career. “I am a center, but I have a nice touch, I know how to shoot from the outside, I am dynamic, and I know how to move the ball, make the right decisions, I think those are my most important characteristics,” he says.
He’s chosen to play with the number 81, because he could not wear the 18 retired by Olimpia in honor of Arthur Kenney, “so I reversed the figures. When I went to Treviso there was an American player that I liked very much, Marcus Goree. I tried to emulate him, I tried to learn from him, and he taught me a lot. He wore the number 18 and so I wanted that number too, a tribute to my favorite player.”
