Perhaps the most interesting moment of IU Indy’s 86-74 loss to Oakland at home — the score was closer than the game — was when Jaguars’ first-year head coach Ben Howlett looked away from the court to turn back toward his bench. “Ajay,” he shouted.
At which point Ajay Holubar jumped up from his spot and proceeded to check into the game for Kyler D’Augustino with 2:34 left to play and the home team down 18.
There would be no heroics in Holubar’s brief time on the court, though his team did outscore the Golden Grizzlies by six while he was on the floor. On one of those possessions, what may have been an attempt to get Holubar into the scoring column went array, as Jaxon Edwards approached his defender for a ball screen on the left wing. But the ball got poked out of Holubar’s hands before he even got there. He dived after it, but his shoulder was out-of-bounds as he attempted to save it, turnover number one. A moment later, he picked up a second turnover on an unsure crosscourt pass that led to an unsuccessful Oakland fastbreak.
Holubar is notable on the IU Indy roster not so much for the turnovers, but for one glaring reason. He’s the one player on this year’s roster — not on a basketball scholarship, by the way — who was also on last year’s roster.
A stat like that is a lot less glaring than it used to be in college basketball, but somehow feels a lot more pertinent, meaningful even in this case because of the whirlwind of what the program has been through recently. Even though Holubar barely ever plays.
Two converted Division II coaches taking their first Division I job, one of them fired for misconduct, one lineup of former University of Indianapolis players being replaced by this year’s group of former West Liberty (West Virginia) players, between the two of them winning a total of 17 basketball games, finishing ninth and last, respectively, in the Horizon League.
Lawsuits have been filed as lawyers, legal documents and judges seek to untangle the intricate web of exactly what happened during the previous regime. Meanwhile, a new basketball arena is coming to campus, the one fertile element left on which Howlett will have to build, as this Appalachian coach tries to work miracles out of the mess he inherited.
It will be worth keeping an eye on, but that’s the future. As for the near past, if only walls could speak.
Holubar might be the closest we get, but he’s a human, he can speak, and he hardly seems like the kind of guy who’s going to be divulging intimate secrets anyway. He still has a stake in the matter, after all, and a life ahead of him.
“I just love this,” he said after his minutes against Oakland. “I love basketball. I love playing. Like I’ve been doing it since I was four years old. It’s so much work, and I just love being around it. Every day I come in, just try to do my best. Do as much as I can, and I know it hasn’t really turned out the way I wanted it to, but I still have a blast.”
After carving out a sixth man role at Indianapolis’s best Southside suburban school for athletics — which is to say Center Grove (think the NBA’s Trayce Jackson-Davis and now North Texas quarterback, Tayven Jackson) — Holubar started his collegiate basketball journey as a walk-on at University of Indianapolis. The school’s athletic website tells us that in two seasons, Holubar appeared in 11 games and averaged .9 points a game. He made one 3-pointer.
Didn’t he get tired of all the work without the playing time?
“100%,” he admits. “Like, I wake up, and I’m like, ‘My body hurts. I’m about to go on this eight hour bus ride.’ “It’s like, ‘I could be sitting at my apartment and just hanging out and just doing school and lifting and doing, like, not basketball.’ But the people. The team, like all these, the competition, things like that, I love all that. And even though there are some days where it’s hard, it’s just worth it. And all the lessons you learn, like playing the game for however long, those can carry you throughout life.”
Former IU Indianapolis head coach Paul Corsaro wasn’t, as you can imagine, available in the building to clarify why Holubar was one of the guys he decided to bring over to IU Indy, but I have a guess that it was something to do with attitude. Holubar is the guy to have around. No drama.
“They brought Coach Howlett in, and then he was like, ‘Are you going to stay?’ and I was like, “Yeah, I might as well just kind of see what’s going to happen, and I mean, I was in the middle of my master’s degree, so I was like, I don’t really want to leave and restart that. So I got that done, but also just really enjoyed getting to know Coach and all the coaches. Kind of seeing the system and just adapting to that because it’s very different than what I’m used to, but it was fun to kind of learn.”
Holubar’s career stats in two seasons at IU Indy? Played in 17 games, averaged 1.3 points a game, career high of four points against IU Columbus this past November.
I had to dig for it, but here’s what Howlett told me about Holubar before the season started.
“If you tell him to do anything, he’ll do it … and that’s a guy that you don’t have to worry about the effort part with him, you know he’s going to bring it every day.”
I have often thought back to the beginning of the movie “Hoosiers,” when there is an exchange between Coach Norman Dale (Gene Hackman) and Myra Fleener (Barbara Hershey) about whether or not Jimmy Chitwood might be willing to play basketball. She says, “You know, a basketball hero around here is treated like a god. How can he ever find out what he can really do? I don’t want this to be the high point of his life.”
The coach counters that “Most people would kill … to be treated like a god, just for a few moments.”
To which she retorts, “Gods come pretty cheap nowadays, don’t they? I mean, you become one by putting a leather ball in an iron hoop. And I hate to tell you this, Mr. Dale, but it’s only a game.”
When observing and talking to Holubar, he seems to understand and embody Fleener’s concern in a way that doesn’t downplay the game he gave his youth to. Now he has a masters’ degree in health administration and an internship completed at Eskenazi Hospital as he considers whether to stay involved in basketball as a coach or as a trainer or merely as a contributor to some men’s league.
After he and I talk, Holubar heads off to entertain the family members and friends who came to watch on this night, which often includes his parents (both former basketball players at UIndy), his brother (a golfer at Marian University) and his girlfriend. Holubar credits his parents in particular with speaking into how to navigate the program’s challenges and why it made sense for him to see his experience through to the end.
Holubar kept playing because he loved the game and being a teammate–not because he got treated like a god as a result of his ability to put a leather ball in an iron hoop.
He learned, in other words, exactly what he needed to learn for life beyond basketball while playing a competitive game during his youth, and he did all of that with chaos swirling around him.
That’s as impressive as it is rare.
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