FRESH FROM GW TODAY NEWS WIRE: THANKS FOR THE MEMORIES!

---

---

Yegor Mescheriakov

A Basketball Star Returns

After 11 years, former Colonial Yegor Mescheriakov comes back to finish his GW degree.
April 18, 2011
By Brad Bower

He first arrived in Washington during the fall of 1995 with a 10-word English vocabulary. He took nonstop English classes along with study halls and meetings with tutors. He even took part in preseason karate practices that began at 7 a.m. followed by more classes and three-hour basketball practices.

Fans who attended George Washington basketball games during the late 1990s will tell you he was one of the best players to ever don the Buff & Blue. In fact, he is the youngest member of GW’s All-Century Team, an unofficial list of the best players in GW basketball history that was compiled in 2001.

He is Yegor Mescheriakov (“YAY-gor Mes-SHARE-a-kov”), a lanky man from Minsk, Belarus, who played under former GW coach Mike Jarvis from 1995 to 1999. A rarity in the college game, he earned a bachelor’s degree prior to his senior season and returned to the team to play the 1998-99 season as a graduate student while pursuing a master’s degree in tourism administration.

The American Life: Playing Basketball for GWU Colonials

After winning the gold medal in European U22 Championship in Slovenia, I spent another season playing in Belarus and won second consecutive National Championship with the local team RTI Minsk becoming a top scorer and MVP of 1994-95 season. I was still a teenager - just under 19 years of age - when I got a call from George Washington University coaches and, barely speaking English, understood their interest in bringing my friend Andrei Krivonos and me over to the GWU Foggy Bottom campus in U.S. Capital.

My teammates and I never got paid for playing basketball in Belarus back in those days so we were able to safely transfer ourselves (and our college credits) into the entirely new environment - NCAA. To say that we were ready for the American adventure is an understatement; we were eager to prove to ourselves and to the rest of the world that we belonged! We were fully aware of difficulties ... and yet we totally embraced them.

Introduction. We Are The Champions, My Friends!!!

Winning a gold medal in 1994 European "Under 22" Championship was simply surreal and out-of-this-world feeling for a young Belarus team. Till this day I feel like it was a blessing from God, but then again good things happen to those teams that work hard and have a great chemistry.

It's interesting how the big things are seen only from a far... Growing up in the post-Soviet era in Belarus, which was one of the fifteen Republics that composed the collapsed Soviet Union, was not an easy task. Like the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear plant disaster was not enough, the country was limping and stumbling in its transition to market economy. The signs were way too obvious - unemployment, scarcity of food and political instability. But there was a promise, if not for all of the 10 millions of Belarussians,  for athletes for sure.