‘I know my worth’: Jaime Echenique learned to believe in himself and became a WSU star
For almost his entire life, Jaime Echenique has been worried about what other people think of him.
Growing up in Barranquilla, Colombia, Echenique was made fun of by other kids for being pudgy. When he started to grow into his 6-foot-11 frame in high school, he could feel the stares from people gawking. For an insecure boy, it made him feel even more like an outsider.
When Echenique arrived in the United States in 2016, he was so congenial that he wouldn’t correct Americans who tried to pronounce his first name. So now he goes by both, JAY-me and HI-me. English was his second language, so he didn’t feel comfortable speaking up too much in his two years at Trinity Valley Community College or even last year, his first at Wichita State.
It wasn’t until this season, his senior year with the Shockers, that Echenique came to the realization that his true problem wasn’t other people not believing in him. All along, it was him not believing enough in himself.
Consider this season evidence of the power of self-belief, as Echenique has made himself invaluable to a WSU basketball team trying to return to the NCAA Tournament. Not only for his all-conference level of production — he leads WSU in points (11.3), rebounds (7.1) and blocks (1.6) per game — but also for his verbal leadership as the team’s only senior.
“When I was younger, I didn’t have any self-respect for myself,” Echenique said. “I had a lot of insecurities and I didn’t want to be around people because they make jokes about me. I didn’t value my physical attributes back then. I just wanted to be a regular person.
“Now, I know my value and I know how important I am as a person, no matter how tall I am. I’m proud of that too. And I’m proud of the person I have become here. I know my worth.”
Here is Echenique’s journey to his breakthrough season:
‘Just give me one more year’
Basketball is not a popular sport in Colombia, but Echenique took a liking to it after giving up baseball at an early age. By the time he reached high school, he had developed into a skilled post player. His school, JED Pestalozzi, won four straight region championships with Echenique winning region MVP honors his last two seasons.
He had multiple offers to play professionally in Europe after graduating high school in December 2015, but his father forced him to turn them down because it was more important for his son to pursue his academic career.
“He didn’t care about how much money I was going to make,” Echenique said. “He said, ‘I want you to study.’ I was like, ‘Dad, do you see how many zeroes are in there?’”
His education always took precedent, event if it meant turning down a pay day that could have been potentially life-changing for the family. The reason why Jaime Echenique Sr., a bus driver in the city, and Lidis Salinas, a chef, worked long hours every week was to give their son an opportunity never afforded to them: college.
It was their dream to see their son become the family’s first college graduate, not a professional basketball player like Echenique wanted.
“My father really wanted me to take my studies seriously, so he told me, ‘I don’t know if I want to keep supporting you with basketball,’” Echenique said. “I told him, ‘Just give me one more year and I will show you something. If I don’t get anything, I am going to leave basketball and just go to study.’”
A former coach had planted a seed in Echenique’s head that he was good enough to play college basketball in America. Echenique convinced his father that this could satisfy both of their goals: he could earn a college degree and continue his basketball career.
So Echenique left his hometown of Barranquilla and traveled 14 hours to Medellin to join an amateur basketball club. He begged for someone to splice together grainy footage of his top plays for a highlight tape he could send to coaches. After two months, he found a club in Bogota who helped him fill out the necessary paperwork to receive his visa and had connections to American college basketball coaches.
Then Echenique received a phone call: a college in Texas is interested. That same day, Echenique boarded an international flight by himself with no money, not knowing hardly any English and his whole life packed into a single duffel bag.
“It was really scary. I was a young kid with a lot of dreams, but I had to face something I had never faced before,” Echenique said. “I had to live an adult life, being on my own without my parents. There were some points I was scared and some places I wanted to give up and just come back to my mom, but I knew that wasn’t the plan for me. I took it as a challenge to prove myself.”
‘Nobody doubted Jaime but Jaime’
Guy Furr, the head coach of Trinity Valley Community College, picked up Echenique at Dallas/Fort Worth International Airport the next morning.
Furr remembers being surprised how quickly things had developed. The day before, a pair of Colombian players at Trinity Valley told their coach of another countryman who they thought was talented enough to play for them. After watching that grainy highlight reel of Echenique, Furr contacted the coaches in Bogota and said he would be interested seeing Echenique work out. Fewer than 24 hours later, Echenique was there.
“I remember how big his eyes were,” Furr said. “You have to understand, at this time yesterday, the kid was living in Colombia. Now he’s getting out of plane in one of the largest airports in the world and getting in a car and seeing the skyline in Dallas. His eyes were all lit up.”
Echenique said it was a surreal experience, like he had been dropped in the middle of his favorite video game, Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas.
“I’m coming from Colombia, so we don’t have those big highways,” Echenique said, laughing. “I was like, ‘What?’ I was feeling like I was in a dream. It was crazy.”
But those skyscrapers and five-level interchanges soon faded in the distance and the one-hour car ride to Athens took Echenique through the pastures of Texas. Soon, he was on the basketball court proving himself to be every bit as talented as his clips suggested.
“We could immediately tell that he had the tools and the potential,” Furr said. “He had a soft touch, big hands, good feet. We couldn’t understand what he was saying, but he had a big smile on his face and he seemed like a really good kid. We never looked back and never regretted bringing in Jaime.”
But Echenique had never been trained or pushed anywhere close to the level of Trinity Valley practiced, something Furr quickly came to find out.
“We had to baby him that first year because he was this gentle giant who was far away from home and didn’t understand the language,” Furr said. “I don’t think he had ever been pushed to exhaustion before. When we would run, everybody else would put their hands on their knees to catch their breath. Jaime would fall on the floor like he was about to have a heart attack.
“We were probably too easy on him that first year, but he was so fragile and didn’t have a lot of confidence in himself.”
Echenique had natural talent, however. WSU coach Gregg Marshall received a first-hand glimpse of it in the summer of 2017 at the Mullens Top 100 camp for junior college prospects in Wichita, where Echenique was a breakout prospect. Furr reckons Echenique would have been one of, if not the highest-recruited junior college player in the country if he didn’t verbally commit to WSU after Marshall extended him a scholarship offer that fall.
Looking back now, Echenique admits he was still immature at the time and remembered boasting about proving his doubters back home in Colombia wrong after signing his national letter of intent to play at a Division I university.
He was still looking at things through the wrong lens.
“I don’t believe him when he said he had doubters because we always believed in him,” Furr said. “He reminded us of a young Tim Duncan. He just had to get tougher to develop into the player that we thought he could be. Nobody really doubted Jaime but Jaime.”
“If I don’t have confidence in myself, who else is?’
It didn’t take long after Echenique announced his commitment for rival coaches to get in Echenique’s ear and warn him that he wouldn’t be a good fit for an intense coach like Marshall.
But Echenique had enough self-awareness to realize that he needed a coach like Marshall to help him reach his potential.
“You see this crazy guy yelling on the TV, it was kind of scary,” Echenique recalled. “But I looked at it as a challenge. It was something I needed in my life, somebody to push me to the limits and help me reach my goals.”
Furr agreed, saying WSU would be a perfect fit for Echenique.
“We tried to push him to that level, but it was Gregg Marshall and his staff that were the ones who dug down and made Jaime find his inner self and push himself to the next level,” Furr said. “He needed a coach that was going to hold him to a high standard.”
Marshall demands a certain level of toughness and Furr thinks one of his best accomplishments has been pushing Echenique to meet that high standard the last two years.
When Echenique first arrived at WSU, like he did at Trinity Valley, he collapsed on the court after sprints. He was so convinced that his heart was having problems that Marshall took him to a cardiologist to prove through tests that nothing was wrong with heart. His problems were in his head: he had to learn to push through exhaustion.
“There were some questions whether he could play here or whether he was physically and mentally tough enough to play for me in this program,” Marshall said. “He had the skill set, but the questions coming in where about his toughness and his stamina. I thought he’s gotten better in both of those areas.”
After averaging just 17.9 minutes per game last season, Echenique’s conditioning work in the summer has allowed him to play nearly 26 minutes per game in conference play this season. Marshall helped Echenique understand it was his head, not his heart, that was holding him back.
That realization has unlocked Echenique, who now plays with the mean streak on the court that Marshall so desperately desires. He improved his endurance in the offseason, allowing him to make an impact in more minutes. He is more fiery on the court and that passion has made him the heart and soul of the team.
He doesn’t have the numbers to match up with the senior seasons of Garrett Stutz or Shaquille Morris, the two most talented centers to come before him at WSU during the Marshall era, but Marshall said no center has been more foundational than Echenique.
“His numbers belie the quality of player that he is and I just shutter to think of where we would be without him this season,” Marshall said. “His impact on our team is probably as good of an impact as we’ve had from a big guy in my 13 years.”
But the biggest sign of his maturation at WSU hasn’t been Echenique’s stellar play on the court. It’s been his rapid development as a leader, both in his actions to the younger big men but more importantly as a verbal leader who no longer hesitates to speak up because English is his second language. Echenique speaks from his heart and you can hear the passion in his voice. Those inside the program say he has been instrumental in holding together such a young WSU team that has 10 underclassmen as its glue in the locker room.
When WSU hit rock bottom following a 33-point loss at Houston on February 9, Marshall scheduled an impromptu Monday practice and lined his players up and had them run full-court sprints until they started talking about what was wrong. This was a situation where in the past Echenique would have remained silent and waited for someone else to be the first one to talk.
But not this new version of Echenique. He was the first one who stepped forward in front of his coaches and teammates and pleaded with them to come together so the team can make an NCAA Tournament run. He shared with his teammates that he had offered to redshirt this season, an idea that Marshall rejected, because he wanted to be there for when WSU made it back to March Madness.
“He said that to the guys, ‘I don’t have a next year now, this is it for me. I’m begging you to put aside whatever pettiness and jealousy you have and play for me just as I play for you every night,’” Marshall recalled. “It was pretty powerful stuff. It was very, very well-spoken. He has grown through sports and basketball and become a very good, young leader.”
Even Echenique’s father has come around on the whole basketball thing, as Echenique says his parents watch all of his games on the internet. But he laughs and says his father is still more proud that his son will be the family’s first college graduate this May. Although his parents were unable to attend Sunday’s senior day game, they have a meeting later this month in Bogota to secure visas to be able to attend Echenique’s graduation in May.
Not only has their son survived in America, he has thrived. He has proven himself to be a skilled basketball player that will likely earn enough money to provide not only for himself, but for his family back in Colombia. He’s found a new home away from home at Wichita State, where he was showered with applause and affection after finishing with 13 points, seven rebounds, four steals and two blocks in WSU’s 79-57 win over Tulsa on Sunday. When it was all over, he even went to center court and bent down to kiss the floor one last time.
Who would have ever thought all those years ago that reality would have been even more wild than his dreams growing up in Barranquilla?
It’s amazing what self-confidence can do.
“What I learned here was that if I don’t have confidence in myself, who else is going to?” Echenique said. “If I don’t express confidence to other people, then who is going to have it for me?
“I could have never imagined being in this position. I’m so thankful. Wichita State feels like family to me. I’m so proud in my decision to come here because I’ve learned so much and these are things that I can take with me through my whole life.”
This story was originally published March 8, 2020 at 10:29 AM.
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