HOLT — Drew Lowder doesn’t know in what league, country or part of the world he’ll be playing professional basketball this coming season. But he’s confident he’ll be somewhere and that it’ll be somewhere that allows him to showcase his game and elevate his career.
That’s a very different feeling than nine months ago, when the former Lansing Community College star and Cleveland State starting guard was still at home in Jackson, Michigan, questioning everything, as leagues overseas began their seasons without him.
“You doubt yourself,” Lowder said Tuesday evening, after his game at the Moneyball Pro-Am. “You get down on yourself about things. You think about what you could have done or should have done in college — decisions you made, the school you went to.”
FROM 2022: Couch: A winding trek brought Drew Lowder to LCC. It’s paying off in a big way for him and the Stars.
In those bleak months last fall, Lowder said he fell in love with working — on his game, his body and mind. And when the call came …
“I think I was really prepared.”
The offer: To play for Sumqayit in the Azerbaijani Basketball League.
“It’s really windy. I didn’t know that. But it’s a beautiful place,” Lowder said of Azerbaijan, which borders Russia to the north, Iran to the south and Caspian Sea to the east. “… I couldn’t complain. I liked my coaches, my teammates.”
His club was just outside the capital city of Baku, which has more than 2 million people. He had a nice apartment, provided by the team, an owner who treated them well, an American roommate, Zion Young from Chicago, who he recognized instantly from an AAU game in the fifth or sixth grade, and he played every single minute of all 14 games after he joined the team in January (none of the four American players ever left the court). Lowder averaged 21.0 points and 8.4 assists, helping Sumqayit go 6-5 in the back half of the season and then push a bigger club to the final game in a first-round playoff series, after Sumqayit went 2-7 before he got there.
And thus began what Lowder hopes is a decade-plus playing professional basketball.
“Until the wheels fall off is my plan,” he said. “I want to see the world. I want to see Greece, Italy, Spain, wherever it takes me, China, anywhere.”
It might happen for him now. It didn’t look like it would until friend Deante Johnson — a teammate from Cleveland State, playing for the Grand Rapids Gold in the NBA’s G-League — realized Lowder was still home during the season and connected him with his agent, Rob Anshila. Lowder’s previous agent had done nothing for him. Now he had a guy with connections, who understood how important where a player is placed is in building a career.
“He told me, ‘If you perform well, I’ll sign you,’ ” Lowder said of his now-agent, Anshila. “ ‘If you don’t perform well, I can’t say that I’m going to be able to find you a job next year.’ But he just said that I went over there and I did exactly what I needed to do, and he signed me as soon as I got back.”
With that, the cost of 10 weeks of training this spring and summer were covered. Lowder also just returned from a pro day in Las Vegas, put on by Anshila for his clients.
That pro day is the reason Lowder missed a Moneyball Pro-Am game last week — his team’s only loss on the season. Lowder plays with Michigan State’s Coen Carr and Cam Ward on Team Motorcars, which, along with Tri-Star Trust (Jeremy Fears, Carson Cooper) is 6-1 as the pro-am closes in on the playoffs next week at Holt High School.
Lowder has had offers already for this coming season, but has been advised to wait as his agent works to find the best situation.
“I’m not really worried about the financial reward right now,” Lowder said Tuesday, just ahead of an evening training session at a pole barn gym just down the road in Holt with East Lansing’s Malik Jones (his trainer) and former Trojans star Brandon Johns, who played last season in Sweden. “Just finding the club where, if I play well, it’s going to springboard me into the next thing. That’s all I’m really worried about — getting somewhere where I can continue to get better, where the coach trusts me. My coach had the ball in my hands every play over there (in Azerbaijan).
“I feel really confident about what’s ahead. I felt like I was impacting winning a lot, especially on the defensive end. Professionally, those guys sometimes don’t want to play defense. But coach (Daniyal) Robinson at Cleveland State really ingrained that in me, and I thank him for that. Because, before there, I really didn’t know how to play defense. I thought I did, but I didn’t.”
Cleveland State wound up being the college home Lowder was seeking when he came to Lansing Community College for the 2021-22 season, after playing the previous year at Eastern Michigan and his freshman season at Division-I Holy Cross. Lowder — who played in high school at Ann Arbor Pioneer, where his father was the principal — wanted to find a college program he’d be able to go back to, a place where he’d have lasting camaraderie and be a proud alum. A dazzling season at LCC led to the opportunity at Cleveland State, where he started 48 of 71 games during two 21-win seasons, averaging 11.4 points as a senior.
“Cleveland State definitely was what I had been looking for since I was a freshman,” Lowder said.
“Cleveland State is such a family atmosphere that this is our photo and video guy from Cleveland State,” he continued, pointing to a guy videoing this interview. “He has come up here to stay with me a couple days, because that’s how close we were, everybody top to bottom in the program there.”
For his pro career, however, Lowder doesn’t mind making lots of different places home again. So far, so good with Azerbaijan.
“Hopefully I can get up into the Euro leagues and Euro Cup and stuff like that,” Lowder said.
Contact Graham Couch at gcouch@lsj.com. Follow him on X @Graham_Couch and BlueSky @GrahamCouch.
This article originally appeared on Lansing State Journal: Couch: Drew Lowder’s pro basketball dreams are alive and well after a jumpstart in Azerbaijan
Reporting by Graham Couch, Lansing State Journal / Lansing State Journal
USA TODAY Network via Reuters Connect
