Game on for son of Wesmen hoops legend

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This article was published 19/04/2019 (2597 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Like his dad before him, Kai Toews plays like he was born for the game.

His motion seems so natural. The basketball as an extension of his hands. The instincts to find an open man when everyone else sees hands and feet. The subtle head fakes, the no-look passes… making the unexpected look commonplace.

Oh, and not to forget, there’s that ruthless competitive streak.

“That’s a trait I think we both share — we’re ultra competitive,” says Kai, a 6-2 point guard. “As a child, he would teach me the importance of being competitive when it comes to really high-level sports. That competitive edge sets you apart. Even learning about his accomplishments made me hungry to compete and beat him. For the longest time, we would play one-on-one in the gym back when he was in his 40s. I was 10, 11 or 12 years old and he would never let me win. So when I actually did win, it was real.”

That victory, Kai figures, coming when he 14 or 15, was a turning point. His dad, former University of Winnipeg star Burke Toews, remembers it as a passing of the torch.

“Kai’s personality early on was one that required me to ‘push’ him,” says Burke, now 53, in a text message from Tokyo, where he has been a career coach in Japanese men’s and women’s pro leagues for almost two decades.

“I think he would acknowledge that… But I thought at the time that the day would come soon enough where he could manhandle his old man, so I wanted him to really earn it, to feel like he had ‘arrived’ so to speak. Not just hand it to him… We never talked about it. At the time, I was both quietly upset and glowing with pride.”

Kai Toews grew up surrounded by basketball. Born in Japan to his expat Canadian dad and his Japanese mom, Eiko, Kai spent two years as an infant living with his family in his dad’s hometown, Winnipeg.

Career opportunities soon brought the Toews family back to Japan, where Kai honed his skills on the court, eventually playing for the Japanese under-15 and under-16 national teams.

He also dreamt about going to the United States to challenge himself against the best American competition he could find. At 15, he told his parents he wanted to relocate to a U.S. prep school to chase his dream of attracting an NCAA Division I scholarship. No, was the answer.

A year later, Kai finally convinced his parents he was ready for prime time. He played one season at a U.S. prep school before transferring to Northfield Mount Hermon in Northfield, Mass., for his final two years of high school.

“I had to separate him as a coach and as a dad,” says Kai, now 20. “A lot of the things he’ll say negatively about my game I used to take very personally. Just that it was coming from somebody I looked up to and somebody I love. That’s one of the reasons I wanted to leave and go to the States. I wanted to show I could do it on my own.”

At Mount Hermon, Kai made steady progress and started to flash elite skills for a point guard. Trouble was, the scholarship offers he was getting were not from the top basketball schools, due in part to the fact he had eight senior teammates who were also high-profile Division I prospects.

His AAU team, meanwhile, was also stocked with high-end talent and his college aspirations suffered in comparison.

Enter C.B. McGrath, the newly installed head coach at the University of North Carolina Wilmington.

McGrath, a longtime member of Roy Williams’ staff with the University of North Carolina Tar Heels, was rebuilding the UNCW program and needed point guard help. Kai Toews fit the bill.

“I was hoping we’d get him because I think he was a little under-recruited,” McGrath says. “I don’t know what caused it but I knew he could be very successful for us.”

Toews, who chose the UNCW Seahawks from a number of other offers, was immediately installed as the starting point guard by McGrath, although success didn’t come immediately. Slowly, after some confidence-bruising blowouts against schools such as UNC, Toews and the Seahawks started to gather strength and cohesion and it was Toews’ uncanny playmaking and on-court leadership that helped to ignite the turnaround.

By the end of the season, the Seahawks finished with a modest 10-23 record but Toews had established himself as a force, earning Colonial Athletic Association rookie of the year honours while starting 32 of 33 games and averaging 8.8 points and 7.7 assists per game, establishing a CAA freshman record with 253 assists. He was No. 2 among all Division I players in assists per game.

“I think I just started to gain confidence in myself,” Toews says. “I always knew that I could play at this level, but I didn’t know how well I could play. As time went on, as the season went on, I got more and more comfortable. I was in a system where I was allowed to play to my strengths, which is get to the paint, find open shots, finish and play in transition. It just made me more comfortable the more I played.

“Our first half of the season was rough because we played an out-of-conference schedule with a lot of high major, good teams. When conference play rolled around, I had faced better players already.”

McGrath appreciates Toews’ need to push the limits of his game.

“He has a good basketball IQ and he’s been around the game for so long and obviously there’s the added component that he thinks the game,” McGrath says. “But he’s a risk-taker with his passing and he’s aggressive. Oftentimes, coaches’ sons are on the straight and narrow. They don’t want to make the great pass, they don’t want to thread the needle. They want to make sure they don’t turn it over.”

Earlier this month, Toews was named one of 30 finalists for the Kyle Macy Award, handed out annually to the top freshman in NCAA men’s basketball. The award went to Duke star Zion Williamson, but Kai’s stature as a rising star was unaffected.

After playing for the Japanese national B team this past summer, Toews is considered a serious candidate to play for his country at this summer’s World Cup in China and the 2020 Toyko Summer Olympics. Three more years of college should also unlock more potential.

“My outlook on my future changed after this year,” Kai says. “For the longest time this was only as far as I could see playing in the States and playing four years of Division I and then just coming back to Japan and playing the pro league there. Maybe Europe… maybe.

“After the season I was talking to people and I realized that I’m putting up numbers that if they continue to improve in four years or less, the NBA is not an impossibility.”

A hectic off-season will prevent Toews from making his annual summer trip to visit his paternal grandparents, Clint and Pearl Toews, and their extended family in Manitoba, but that’s how things go sometimes if you’re a basketball expeditionary.

Toews says his only sibling, younger brother Luka, is planning a similar career path in North America.

“He might be one of the most skilled 14-year-olds I’ve ever seen,” Toews says. “The only thing is he’s still small. He hasn’t grown into his body yet.”

mike.sawatzky@freepress.mb.ca

Twitter: @sawa14