Basketball journey — 13 teams in 8 years — takes former Saints, Aztecs standout Trey Kell to Japan

Bosnia, Canada, Hong Kong, Russia, Qatar, Poland, Italy, Australia, Turkey, China.

Now, Japan.

“Yeah,” Trey Kell says, “I’ve got a lot of stamps in my passport.”

The former Saint Augustine High School and San Diego State guard is 29 and beginning his eighth year of professional basketball, flying to Japan’s west coast earlier this month to play for the Toyama Grouses. This is his 13th team.

Oh, and he became a naturalized Syrian citizen (more on that later).

Toyama is known for firefly squid, white shrimp, yellowfin tuna and pressed trout sushi. Kell, by his own admission, is a “picky” eater and doesn’t do raw seafood. But he’s an expert in overseas basketball, which means he’s an expert when it comes to adaptation and assimilation and acclimatization. He’ll be fine. He’ll figure it out.

“If you don’t really love basketball, it’s going to be tough,” Kell says. “You’re going to really struggle. There are so many unknowns and things you can’t really control. Regardless of what your contract says, it seems like they move to the beat of their own drum sometimes.”

He has two tenets of survival:

“One: Everybody has a dream of getting to the NBA. You have to disregard that and kind of be where your feet are, just focus on that and whatever happens, happens. Two: I normally expect the worst, and if it’s not that, then everything else is a bonus and a benefit. Because I’ve experienced the worst.”

Kell left SDSU in 2018 after twice being an all-Mountain West selection. KK Igokea was his first, and nearly last, stop. The kid who grew up in San Diego and attended college a few miles away was suddenly in a tiny town in northern Bosnia with bad living conditions, bad food, bad weather, a bad knee and a coach who thought he was fat.

He lasted a month.

“Terrible experience,” Kell says. “It was miserable in every aspect, and that’s literally the tip of the iceberg of that whole situation. I was so over it that I almost left without taking the money. I have a picture of me and my fiancée (now wife) at the time. She came to visit and you could just see I was miserable.

“My eyes were black. I looked like a completely different person. It was tough. Sometimes I look back and think, ‘I don’t know how I managed that.’”

The next stop was the far eastern corner of Canada, with the Moncton Magic in New Brunswick. The Magic had lost its starting point guard to an injury at midseason, and there were only a few days before the league’s transaction deadline. Kell and another player were brought in for a tryout.

Kell didn’t even know Canada had a league, but it was a team and a paycheck, and former Aztecs teammate Kevin Zabo, a Canadian citizen, recommended it. One of his Moncton teammates was Billy White, who played at SDSU before him.

Kell won the job and instantly thrived. He hit a step-back jumper with 0.6 seconds left to send them to the championship series, then had 41 points, nine rebounds, six assists and three steals in the clinching game against Zabo’s team. Kell was named finals MVP.

Next stop: the Eastern Long Lions in Hong Kong, where he averaged 31.3 points, 8.3 rebounds and 5.0 assists per game … before breaking his thumb.

Then, the pandemic.

Kell’s thumb recovered. His career didn’t. There were two strikes against him: That he couldn’t adjust to overseas life from the Bosnia experience, and that he was injury-prone with his knee in Bosnia and thumb in Hong Kong.

The offers dried up, and Kell returned to San Diego to weigh his options. Which were: “I was contemplating being an Uber Eats driver. I didn’t work for six or seven months. I needed money. I was this close to doing it.”

Then Joe Salerno called.

Salerno was Kell’s coach with the Moncton Magic, which shut down the following season for the pandemic and then folded.

“I was out of a job as well,” Salerno says. “An agent I had been working with called me and said there’s an opportunity with a national team. He said the country is a little scary. I said, ‘Who is it?’ He said, ‘Syria.’ I said, ‘No way, man.’ It took me probably a month to be convinced to take that job.”

Part of the enticement was that Syria would allow one naturalized player, or import, for the upcoming FIBA Asia Cup qualifiers (with the caveat that once you play in an official game, you are no longer eligible for any other national team). Salerno’s first call, in October 2020, was to Kell.

“It took a lot of convincing,” says Salerno, now the head coach at the University of New Brunswick. “It took a lot of trust that we were going to be safe, that this could open a lot of doors for him professionally because the FIBA Asia Cup qualifiers would be seen by a lot of overseas teams.”

Since holding a training camp in Syria was not feasible (or advisable) in the throes of a bloody civil war, the team arranged to spend five weeks in Kazan, Russia, given the strong diplomatic ties between the Assad regime and Vladimir Putin. One problem: Kell, Salerno and his assistant, as U.S. citizens, needed a visa to travel to Russia and were supposed to leave the day after arriving in Damascus.

Solution: The Syrian government issued them Syrian passports overnight.

Trey Kell, Syrian citizen.

The training camp in Kazan was no picnic, living in spartan dorm rooms, eating bland food, no one speaking English, grinding away in the gym all day. Then they flew to Doha, Qatar, and lost to the hosts in the first of two qualifiers despite 35 points from Kell.

The next game was against Iran, No. 22 in the FIBA world rankings, 74 spots above Syria. When they met earlier that year, Iran won 94-48.

Final score in Qatar: 77-70, Syria. Kell scored 34 points on 13 of 14 shooting.

“I’ve been told by a lot of people since that it’s one of the biggest upsets they can remember in a long time in terms of international basketball,” says Salerno, who gained 5,000 Instagram followers in a matter of hours following the game. “For Syria, it was the first time they had ever beaten Iran. It was a massive, massive upset. After that win, I really felt like I played a role in making an entire country feel happy, whether it was for two days or two weeks or two months.

“People were really proud of that victory. They’re a super passionate fan base. It was a special win.”

For Kell, it changed his life. Scouting the games in Qatar were dozens of representatives from overseas clubs. One was Igor Milicic, the coach of Polish team Stal Ostrow Wielkopoloski who instantly offered him a contract.

Stal Ostrow won the Polish title that season, which Kell parlayed into a move to Pallacanestro Varese of the prestigious Italian League.

He averaged 15.3 points for Varese and at midseason was swooped up by Olimpia Milano, the perennial Italian champion that plays in the EuroLeague with the biggest clubs on the continent.

The next three seasons were spent with different teams in Australia, which comes with the bonus of ending in February or March, allowing players to “double-dip” in leagues that go through the spring. One year, he went to Turkey. This year, literally hours after his 26 points, 11 rebounds and seven assists led the Illawarra Hawks to the Australian title, he was on a plane to China to finish the season with the Shanxi Loongs.

Kell landed in the evening, signed a contract at 2 a.m. and was in uniform the next day.

He returned to San Diego for a couple months, then was back on a plane across the Pacific, this time to Japan.

It’s a long way from Laktasi, Bosnia.

“I’ve been around the block, you could say,” Kell says, laughing. “My journey is not normal. People have crazy stories in international basketball, but the roundabout way I got to have a successful career is not normal. I ask my agent that all the time. He’s like, ‘Yeah, your journey is not normal.’”