In his first exhibition game as a pro overseas, Portland native Victor Sanders says he was tossed to the hardwood by a bigger basketball player from the famous Red Star club based in Belgrade, Serbia.
“I tried to box out this guy and he threw me on the ground and that was the first wakeup call, was like, yea, that will never happen again,” said Sanders, who was then a rookie pro with a club in Belgium. “It pushed me to try and get stronger and gain more weight and figure out ways to adapt and be effective.”
Nearly six years later, 2013 Jefferson High grad Sanders has kept good on his vow — despite other challenges since then, including an incident in Italy in 2022 that drew national headlines. During the 2022-23 season he left a team in Romania to play for Anwil in Poland and he has played all the 2023-24 campaign with the same club. First-place Anwil plays in Wloclawek, a city of about 106,000 in southeast Poland.
“It is pretty opposite of every city I have been to with teams,” said guard Sanders, an all-state player who led Jefferson to a 5A state title in 2014. “It is small — in 10 minutes you can drive to each side of the city. There are not many people (in town), but the basketball culture is rich. It is run perfectly. I like the support we have — probably the biggest fan base in Poland. I was here last year and we won a tournament. The coach had big aspirations for us after winning. We had a plan. We talked over the summer and he wanted me to be a big part of that and have a big role. I felt he was probably the best option to help me improve my career. He built a team that has been a force. Everybody has jelled together. We have had some injuries. We are still in first place and getting ready for the playoffs.”
Sanders is averaging about 18 points per game in Polish league play this season for Anwil, whose home arena can hold about 4,000 fans. He has averaged 10.4 points and 3.4 assists per contest in five Euro Cup games. Sanders was named the league’s MVP ahead of the postseason in his second year with the club.
One of his American teammates is Victor Bell, a native of New Jersey who played in the Ivy League for Princeton.
“It is really an honor to be alongside of him since he broke his leg in half last year,” Sanders said of Bell. “Being able to be alongside of him and how he deals with it, and he stays determined and the process he goes through, I have a real admiration to be able to come back and play at the level he is playing. He is only going to get better with time. To see that dedication, it gives me motivation and strive to be good. I have torn my ACL before and so I know how it feels. A leg broken in half, that is something different. Being able to go to battle with him is definitely an honor.”
Another American (of about 70) who has played in the top Polish league this season is Matt Coleman, who is from Virginia and played at the University of Texas for Shaka Smart.
When they met March 23, Sanders had a game-high 18 points while Coleman had 14 as Anwil won 95-67 over Dziki of Warsaw. In the first meeting of the season between Dziki and Anwil, both players had 14 points as Sanders and his team prevailed 78-66. “I just love how aggressive he is,” Coleman notes of Sanders. “He plays with no conscience.”
The league requires that at least one Polish player is on the court for each team throughout the 40-minute contest. Sanders had 24 points on Dec. 26 in a loss at home to Legia. That was the first setback of the season for Anwil after a 13-0 start.
Seeing the world
Sanders lists some of the countries he has been to: China, while on tour with the team at Idaho, and then places since he turned pro: Spain, Cyprus, Greece, Israel, Turkey, Germany, Latvia, Lithuania, Czechia (Czech Republic), Russia, Belgium, Italy, Romania and now Poland.
“I have been to a lot of the major countries,” he said.
After a standout career at Idaho, where he was a Big Sky All-Conference player, Sanders played in two summer league games with the Denver Nuggets.
He then played two seasons with the Telenet Giants of Antwerp in Belgium, which won the regular-season title and reached the tournament finals in 2019. Antwerp won the Belgian Cup in 2019 and 2020 with Sanders on the team.
“It was a good starting point,” he said of Belgium.
Sanders then moved to Trento in Italy and he averaged around 10 points per contest in both domestic leagues play and in Euro Cup action, against international competition. Only the top clubs in Europe play dual schedules (domestic on weekends, international play sometimes during the week) and that is what many top former Division I players from the USA strive to achieve with overseas jobs.
For the 2021-22 seasons, Sanders played for a team in Venice, Italy. He averaged 8.1 points per contest in 22 games in the Italian league and 7.4 points in 16 games in Euro Cup play.
“Venice is nice. The water and stuff. It was a great monumental experience and probably the highest club that I have been on,” he said.
He began the 2022-23 season with Cluj in Romania and scored just 3.9 points an outing in nine Euro Cup contests and 6.5 points per game in 11 Romanian league games.
“Romania is probably the lowest that I have played but the team that I played on was in the Euro Cup. It is always a good team. Romania was nice,” Sanders said.
In January 2023, he made the move to Anwil in Poland — where his Polish coach speaks excellent English and has better used the scoring abilities of Sanders than his previous stop.
Along the way, Sanders has seen the Great Wall of China, where Jesus rose from the tomb in the Middle East, a noted cathedral in Cologne, Germany, and paintings by Pablo Picasso, the Spanish artist who spent much of his adult life in France and died in 1973.
The Italian incident
Sanders says his time playing in college at Idaho prepared him for the Euro style of play. He played for the Vandals for four years under coach Don Verlin, who was dismissed in 2019 during an investigation of NCAA violations.
“To be honest, Idaho prepared me for this. Verlin was my coach for four years; I remember he sat in my living room and what he sees in me, even after I got hurt on my official visit,” Sanders said. “That is what family is. Being there, the system we ran was so sophisticated we had about 180 plays. He expected nothing but excellence. It was just a solid form of basketball.
“So, when I got to Europe, it was not so much being able to play team oriented because that is what we ran. But it was having to adjust to the physicality of playing with 35-, 33-, 32-year-old grown men.”
There are stories of American basketball players in Europe not getting paid on time or the local club failing to take care of problems with furnished apartments, which are standard for American Division I veterans.
“As far as organizations and clubs, I have never had a problem. I have always been paid on time,” Sanders said. According to another American player in Poland this season, the pay for a North American with college experience can vary widely – from $3,000 to $15,000 per month for a season that can stretch for 10 months.
But another challenge came a few years ago for Sanders.
According to published reports in Italy, Sanders drove on the wrong side of the road for 40 kilometers (about 24 miles) in 2022 while playing there.
“In Venice, I did have a national news story that I am still trying to recoup from. I am not going to talk too much about it. There is a lot more to that, and I really cannot talk about it,” he said. “It is something that really changed my life in terms of one of the hardest things I had to go through because of the picture that was painted of me and the label it created of myself is the total opposite of who I am and stand for and for what I want my kids to see in a dad.”
His wife and two children — a son who is 3 and a daughter who turns 5 on May 7 — live in Portland. They have made trips to Europe in the past, but not to Poland.
Even with a family thousands of miles away, Sanders is thriving with first-place Anwil.
The Polish regular-season ended in late April and the the top eight teams (out of 16) have begun three rounds — quarterfinals, semifinals, and finals — of playoffs to the determine the league champ. Anwil entered as the No. 1 seed and is up 2-0 in the quarterfinals series Spojnia Stargard. Sanders scored 12 points in game one and then scored 16 more in game two along with seven rebounds and six assists.
“The coach (with Anwil) took a chance on me despite of what has been said. To see how my story is playing out is definitely a blessing. I am still here. I could have lost who I was, or stopped playing. But I stayed solid and just grinded,” said the Jefferson grad.
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