‘We need to win now’: Jaime Echenique desperate to make most of time left at WSU
Jaime Echenique feels time running out.
There are just 10 regular-season games remaining in his two-year career at Wichita State, a dwindling number that the 6-foot-11 senior from Colombia is constantly reminding his WSU teammates of. That number shrinks again Thursday when the Shockers (17-4, 5-3 American) play host to Cincinnati (14-7, 7-2 American) at Koch Arena.
Echenique is playing the best basketball of his career recently. In a 54-51 loss at Tulsa over the weekend, he logged a 15-and-10 double-double to go along with three blocks, three charges taken and two steals. It was the first time in 22 years as head coach that Gregg Marshall has given out his “Junk Yard Dog” award in a loss.
“It’s an award for making those type of extraordinary effort plays,” Marshall said on his radio show Monday. “It’s about toughness, resiliency, rebounding, taking charges, running down loose balls. Normally I’m not in a mood to give it out (after a loss), but I wanted to make sure the other players understood the fine game that he had with the effort he was putting forth. And I followed that up by saying, ‘The kid needs some help.’”
There is a sense of desperation to Echenique’s play because he knows the potential of this team. He saw the Shockers scratch the surface with its 14-4 close to last season and their 15-1 start to this season. But WSU is still so young — Echenique is the team’s lone senior — and that inexperience has been evident in losses in three of its last five games.
Through the adversity, Echenique has emerged as WSU’s vocal leader determined to carry his younger teammates.
“I am 22 years old and I have passed through a lot of things and I have never (given) up,” Echenique said. “I came from another country, I’m away from my family and I think good players step up in the moments of adversity. If I have eight points and two rebounds, I don’t care as long as we win. If we lose, then stats don’t matter anything.
“I’m going to keep battling and I love my young guys. I’m going to do the best I can in my last year and show them that we need to mature and we need to win now.”
WSU has been stuck in neutral for almost a month now, as Marshall likes to say WSU is somewhere around the “pretty good” range. To shed that label and become “great,” WSU needs the kind of wins it can find this week — against top-tier teams like Cincinnati and Houston.
Those discussions mean one thing coming from a coach, but they become different when there is peer-to-peer communication. Echenique has been that voice in practices this season.
“We discuss that we’re a pretty good team and we could be a really, really, really good team, but they have to decide they want to be really, really, really good,” Marshall said. “(Echenique) always chimes in. ‘No, we don’t want to wait. There’s no future for me. This is it.’ So he always gets the last word on that and I think he’s encouraging these young guys to grow up faster so we can have the type of end of season that we would like to have this year.”
Echenique’s growth as a leader was never more apparent than after WSU’s 65-54 home loss to Houston on Jan. 18. It was the second straight loss and WSU’s most disjointed offensive performance of the season. Echenique stood up in front of his teammates in the locker room and addressed some uncomfortable truths.
“Everybody was kind of down and then he voiced, ‘This is my last year, this is all that I’ve got left,’” WSU sophomore Dexter Dennis said. “I think he wanted to get us going and make us realize not to waste our talent and waste his last year. He was absolutely correct.”
“Against adversity, I think you have to do things that nobody wants to do and say things that nobody wants to say,” Echenique said. “People needed to hear it and somebody had to say it. I felt like I had to raise my voice and say what is happening and what I thought about it. I respect my teammates and I love those guys and I think they respect me, so that’s a healthy teammate relationship.”
What’s even better is that Echenique has backed up his words with his play on the court. With WSU in desperate need of offensive production, Echenique has elevated his level of play and averaged 14.2 points on 54% shooting in the last six games.
But those gaudy stats don’t mean much to him unless they end in Shocker victories, something he’ll try to do to help stabilize WSU’s season with wins this week.
“I don’t know what’s going to happen tomorrow or in one week, so I try to push myself as much as possible every single day,” Echenique said. “This is my last year, so I have to live day by day because I don’t know what will be next.”
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