Northern Star Online: Gates travels to China for unique experience

Dennis Gates is about to enter his second year as associate head basketball coach at NIU under Ricardo Patton. In May, Gates got to experience something not every college assistant coach gets to experience: playing against professional teams, Chinese cuisine and an earthquake.

Gates, as well as NIU newcomer Xavier Silas, traveled to China as part of Reach USA. Reach USA is a division of Sports Reach, a Christian sports ministry founded in 1986.

The team, coached by University of Illinois assistant Jerrance Howard, traveled to different cities in China facing different Chinese professional teams. Featuring nine players from different schools around the country, the team went 1-3-1 on the trip.

“It was a great experience to represent NIU and the U.S.,” Gates said. “It was unbelievable competition; basketball’s growing internationally.”

Silas, who transferred to NIU from Colorado, where he played under Patton, agree that the experience was a positive one.

“We were playing the third best pro team in China, and they were a really good team,” he said.

Silas was the team’s leading scorer on the trip, averaging 14 points per game, as well as 7.4 rebounds.

Silas also said the food wasn’t exactly what he expected. “The food wasn’t like Chinese food over here,” Silas said. “They had bullfrogs and rabbits.”

In addition to eating unfamiliar food, Gates and Silas also faced something that doesn’t happen in DeKalb very often - an earthquake. The team experienced a couple of aftershocks from the May 12 earthquake. The team was forced to have three of its scheduled games canceled due to the recent events.

“I grew up in California so I’ve been a part of earthquakes before,” Silas said. “It was scary being so close to where the base of the earthquake was.”

Gates, too, was familiar with earthquakes.

“I experienced them in college (in California),” Gates said. “It was scary but it rang home to a lot of people to not take things for granted.”