Two talented Eagles gain eligibility

Despite his team’s early-season success on the court, Kirk Earlywine hadn’t received much in the way of good news on the eligibility front this school year.

But that all changed Thursday afternoon when Eastern Washington’s second-year men’s basketball coach learned that Adris DeLeon and Chris Busch have cleared up the academic issues that sidelined them through the first eight games of the 2008-09 season and will both be eligible to play in Saturday night’s non-conference game against Hawaii in Honolulu.

“It’s great news – they’re both good to go,” Earlywine said shortly after receiving word that DeLeon and Busch, a pair of projected starters heading into the season, had both done enough positive things in the classroom this quarter to regain their eligibility.

“Obviously, I’m really happy – and I hate to say it, but more so for Adris, because none of this was his fault. Chris Busch missed eight games strictly because of Chris Busch. Adris missed eight games because of something he had nothing to do with.”

DeLeon, a 5-foot-11 senior point guard and the Eagles’ top returning scorer and playmaker from last season, when he averaged 12.5 points and 3.1 assists per game as a first-year transfer from College of Southern Idaho, was declared ineligible prior to the start of the season. Earlywine said at the time that DeLeon had been the victim of bad advice offered by a university counselor who prompted him to withdraw from a class that was part of the academic recovery program the school had submitted to the NCAA to ensure his eligibility last winter.

Eastern’s appeal to the NCAA on the matter was denied, leaving DeLeon with the sole option of passing the difficult biology and computer literacy courses he took during the fall quarter if he hoped to play college basketball again.

DeLeon took his biology final Wednesday morning and learned on Thursday he has passed it.

“I was kind of excited about that,” said the native of the Dominican Republic, who was raised in the Bronx and punctuated his first season as a Division I player last winter by scoring 42 points in Eastern’s 91-85 overtime win over Northern Colorado.

“But I had a tutor who was helping me and I had spent a whole lot of time studying, so I went into the final feeling pretty comfortable about it.”

Busch, a 6-6 forward junior, who averaged 20.9 points and 8.9 rebounds as a sophomore at Merritt College in his hometown of Oakland, Calif., last winter, ended up failing a correspondence course he needed to be eligible at the start of the season and had to pass a full load of classes at Eastern during the fall quarter that ended on Thursday.

“I was kind of depending on that correspondence course, but, unfortunately, it fell through,” Busch said. “It was frustrating at first, but I was a lot more confident about the classes I took (at Eastern) this quarter.”

Busch, like DeLeon, did not learn he was eligible until Thursday after completing a group project that was part of a communications class he took.

Both players have been practicing with the Eagles (6-2) all fall and expect to play against Hawaii (3-3). But neither is certain how much they will be asked to contribute in the way of minutes.

“I’m kind of nervous,” DeLeon said. “I haven’t played in a long time, so I’m just going to go in there and try to take my time and get in the flow of the game.”

Busch, who has yet to play in a Division I game, seemed less concerned about how he might react.

“I might be a little nervous,” he said. “But I’ve played in front of big crowds and against good Division I-caliber players before, so I’m pretty confident.

“I’ve still got to get my game speed and game conditioning back, though. And I’ve still got to earn my minutes.”

Earlywine, while expressing his excitement over adding two more talented players to his lineup, warned Eagles fans against expecting too much too soon, mainly because of the hectic schedule his team has played.

“I would have liked to have worked those two in more by now,” he said of DeLeon and Busch. “But with us playing so many games in such a short span, all of our practice time has been in preparation for those games, so I couldn’t give Adris and Chris reps with our regular guys, knowing they couldn’t play in those games.

“Now, integrating them into what we’re doing on both ends of the floor is going to be a major challenge, because maybe what we’ve done best to this point is that we’ve had terrific role acceptance. Now the group dynamic of our team is changing. Minutes are going to change, the rotation is going to change, substitution patterns are going to change.

“And how well our guys accept all of those changes is going to be a big key to how we do the rest of the season.”