At a recent Friday afternoon men’s basketball practice inside Sojka Pavilion, Bucknell senior Alek Delev takes the floor and goes through his typical warmup routine alongside his teammates. The usual stretching and flexibility exercises, followed by some game-speed jumpers and free throws. The one obvious difference to an observer on this day, however, is that Alek’s No. 25 practice jersey is blocked out by a makeshift No. 1 numeral, improvised with some athletic trainer’s tape.
That’s because once practice heats up, Alek Delev is no longer going to be playing the role of Alek Delev. He is about to transform into Elijah Stephens, American University’s lightning quick-point guard (No. 1 on your scorecard), whom the Bison will be dealing with in their next game about 24 hours later.
Such is life for a scout team player. They are rarely noticed by fans on game nights, but they are a critical part of a team’s game preparation. Not only do scout team players have to focus on their own team’s schemes and their personal skill development, but they also must have prepared in advance to know the opponent’s tendencies that they will soon be emulating in practice.
Ever wonder why the bench goes crazy when a walk-on gets a bucket at the end of a blowout? It’s because his teammates know just how important he is to the team’s success behind the scenes, and the reward of a couple of points in the boxscore is well-earned.
Bucknell has had some outstanding walk-ons through the years, guys who probably could have been starters and even all-league players elsewhere. But the opportunity to contribute to a successful Division I program while benefiting from Bucknell’s world-class education is also an appealing option.
Alek Delev is unique among the program’s long list of walk-ons, as he hails from faraway Sofia, Bulgaria, and his path to the Bison squad was a result of his own outreach, rather than the typical recruiting process.
Alek’s parents, Asparuh and Daniela, are engineers in their native Bulgaria and were not much into the sports scene. Like most Europeans, Alek got involved in soccer at a young age, and it wasn’t until his sixth-grade year in school that he picked up basketball. He switched schools in the fifth grade and was encouraged by a new friend who played the sport. Alek’s younger brother by five years, Martin, had also started to play basketball, and it wasn’t long before Alek caught the hoops bug and ditched soccer altogether. High school starts in the eighth grade in Bulgaria, and that’s when he took his game to a more advanced level, playing for his club team BC Ahil all over Europe. In 2019-20, he averaged better than 20 points and five assists per game while captaining his side to a second-place finish in its conference and a first-place finish in the region.
As his high school years progressed, Alek recalls that his two main passions were basketball and math. If he wanted to pursue basketball at the most advanced professional club level in Europe, he likely would have had to sacrifice the academic piece. But in the United States, we play our highest levels of amateur athletics within the educational system, and that was exactly the combination that Alek was seeking.
Once he decided that a U.S. university was his best path, Alek started his search with this online query: What are the best schools that offer high-level engineering programs and also play Division I basketball? The name “Bucknell” came up in every search.
Alek began to send letters and game film to the schools on his list, and he received responses from former Bucknell head coach Nathan Davis and assistant coach Joe Meehan, who had traveled abroad extensively as both a player and a coach. Alek was eventually offered a walk-on spot, and he jumped at the chance.
Unfortunately, like all college freshmen in the fall of 2020, Alek’s introduction to American college life was disrupted by the pandemic. Not only was he living away from his family for the first time, and doing so on a different continent, but Alek’s opportunities to make friends and get established on campus were extremely limited. Thankfully he had basketball to get him through it.
“It was very hard to make friends outside the basketball team,” Alek recalls. “So I’m really grateful to the team and the staff at the time. They were all just so nice to me and accepting of me. I know I’m not the typical guy who comes into the team. I was the only international player at the time, and I relied a lot on my teammates to get me through that year.”
Alek came to Bucknell with a clear understanding of what his role on his new team was going to be. As a walk-on, his game minutes were going to be limited, but he needed to prepare himself every day as if he were a starter. During those all-important scouting sessions in practice, he was going to be counted on to give the best look possible.
“I absolutely understood that. I’m being realistic and think that everyone on the team should be looking at what they can do and bring to the table to help the team. And that’s what I’m trying to do. Whether it’s game preparation or playing 30 minutes, to me it’s the same. I’m trying to help the team win as much as I can. I talk to Coach Griffin every day, and I’m just trying to do whatever he needs me to do.”
On a typical prep day, Alek meets with the assistant coach who has the scout for the next game. They go through game film and identify not just the plays that the opponent employs, but also the style and tendencies of individual players. For Alek, that means learning as much as he can in a short period of time about the opposing point guard.
“It’s a lot of film and just seeing the way the other point guard moves and what he likes to do on the court. For example, Colgate’s point guard [Braeden Smith] really liked doing a right-to-left step back. So it’s good to tell Elvin [Edmonds] and ‘Sco [Josh Bascoe], who will be guarding him most of the time, that that’s a move he’s going to do.”
One element that Griffin has harped on constantly throughout his first year as head coach at Bucknell is communication. Being “connected” is a modern buzzword throughout the sport, and Bucknell’s connectivity has been a work in progress as the team has several soft-spoken young men playing prominent roles. Alek notes that the team is improving in that area under Griffin, who has most certainly never been labeled as “soft-spoken” himself.
“Communication is something we still need to improve on, and honestly that’s probably where some of the mistakes that we make in the game come from. We are all so close off the basketball court, but on the court, the communication is a little different. If we can clean that up a little bit more it’s going to help us.”
For Alek, the communication aspect is especially challenging since he did not begin speaking English until he started high school. By then, he had two years of basketball under his belt and already knew that he wanted to pursue the sport at higher levels. In order for that to work, he was going to have to learn English.
So without knowing much of the language at all, he enrolled in the Second English Language School in Sofia. It was a full immersion into learning English, and today Alek speaks the language beautifully.
“I think most people in Bulgaria speak some English because it’s so popular nowadays. From a young age, you start learning English. But I was more of a math guy and wasn’t really interested in languages, so I didn’t know English until high school. But then I realized, how am I going to play basketball if I don’t know English? So I started at my new school in the eighth grade, and it was hard at first. You join this high school and every subject you have is in English. You are in Bulgaria but you’re studying biology, math, everything in English.”
At Bucknell, Alek is majoring in civil engineering, following in the footsteps of his parents, who were trained as electrical engineers but have jobs pertaining to real estate and other construction in Sofia. Alek is currently part of a team working on a yearlong project to design an aluminum dome for a large petroleum tank.
“It’s an exciting project. We started from the beginning, designing everything and learning about the material, because we had never worked with aluminum. It’s usually steel or concrete. So now we have to learn about the new material and design the connections and everything. At the end of the year, the design that we are going to turn in is actually going to work for a given location. We have a presentation at the end of the year in front of the department. It’s hard work, but it’s much more fulfilling than reading books and doing theoretical problems. This project is something that will be built and implemented by real engineers working in the field right now.”
Alek is currently applying to a master’s degree program in Spain, where he hopes to continue his education. Someday, he says, he would like to return to Bulgaria. His family has made trips to the U.S. around the holidays in each of the last two years, and this year they even visited campus and Sojka Pavilion for the first time.
In the meantime, Alek’s focus is back on the team’s next practice. The Bison returned home in the wee hours of the morning after a terrific road win over Boston University on Wednesday night, but there is no rest for the weary.
Lafayette, off to a surprising 5-0 start in Patriot League play, is up next on Saturday, and Alek needs to get to work brushing up on the Leopards’ young guards.
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