BUCKHANNON -- The West Virginia Wesleyan Bobcats are looking to win the WVIAC for the first time since 2007 and to do that they've gone international.
Shunsuke Hatano hails from Saitama, Japan, which is close to Tokyo. The lighting fast guard came to West Virginia upon his graduation from high school and says that adjusting to life in the states wasn't that hard to do.
"The hardest part I think was language,” said Hantano,” I didn't have any English class, I had some, but learning and living is different. I didn't know a lot of words, I just knew "hey" and "what's up."
Shunsuke or, "Shun" (pronounced Shoon) has given his teammates a bit of culture as well, team captain Justin Caldwell found out about Shun's interesting selection of cuisine.
"His eating habit, that’s the one thing, his eating habits is just ridiculous. The stuff that he'll pull out to eat,” says Caldwell, “you'll look at it and say ‘are you really about to eat that?’” He thinks nothings wrong with it, he just loves it."
And then there's 6-foot, 9-inch Neven Zeravica, who was born and raised in Osijek, Croatia. Now at that height, you can imagine it's not hard for him to get up.
But Neven showed Caldwell something last yea he’s done since the eighth grade besides basketball; how to get down with serious dance moves.
"He starts break dancing on the football field, and it catches everyone’s attention and everyone stares at him. Now every time someone meets Neven they want him to break dance."
"I started at the end of my eighth grade and I've been break dancing until my junior year in high school." said Neven, "It took awhile to learn it and it was painful but its pretty fun."
While Neven was a little too bashful to show his moves, and it was just prior to a game so Japanese cuisine might have slowed down Shun, Caldwell assured me that these two imports are crucial to this teams’ success.
"I think we're a top five team in the league, if not even higher than that," he said. "There are teams that are good in this league, and we're definitely one of them. We have all the tools but me saying it doesn't do anything, we need to go prove it."