Jacob Wiley lost the love of his life as a young man living in the Garden City. Five years later, Wiley has discovered his love once again and the rest of the Big Sky Conference is feeling his passion full force.
Through the first half of the current season, Wiley has established himself as a front-runner for the Big Sky MVP through his dominant play in Eastern Washington’s front court. Wiley has claimed the league’s Player of the Week honor two weeks running.
On the surface, the 6-foot-7, 230-pound physical specimen looks like a senior reaping the benefits of a coaching staff accentuating his abilities during his final season on the block. Look deeper and one will find Wiley is taking advantage of his final chance to shine in a life filled with conquering adversity.
EWU forward Jake Wiley (24)/by Jason Bacaj
Wiley grew up in a rough neighborhood in Long Beach, California. His freshman year of high school, he struggled academically, passing just one class. Heading into his sophomore year, his father moved his son to Newport, Washington, a tiny town in Northeast Washington along the Pend Oreille River, to be closer to Wiley’s grandparents.
In Newport, the long, lanky jumping jack blossomed into a dominant athlete. He caught 52 passes for 875 yards and eight touchdowns for the Newport football team as a senior. He averaged 26 points, 10 rebounds and blocked three shots per game during his final basketball season. He shined as a sprinter for the track team each spring.
Hardship defined his personal life. He lost his grandmother in December of 2010. His father died in his sleep on Super Bowl Sunday just months after. The night before his father died, Wiley led his high school to a pivotal basketball win. The following morning, Wiley opened up the newspaper and saw his name in the headline. He went into the living room to show his father, who Wiley believed was sleeping on the couch. He wasn’t breathing.
“I knew he was gone,” Wiley told Greg Lee of the Spokesman Review in 2012.
Despite the trials, Wiley continued to shine in athletics, earning MVP of the Northeast A League two years in a row. Once former Montana head coach Wayne Tinkle reviewed his transcripts, he offered Wiley a scholarship.
“Jake is a kid who is 6-7, has a nice frame on him, very bouncy, good perimeter skills – he can shoot it … ,” Tinkle told The Missoulian newspaper when Wiley signed in November of 2011. “I feel, with time, adding some weight and so on, Jake could be a special player for us.”
But that special player did not materialize in Missoula and did not blossom at all for several years. Wiley played in 20 games as a true freshman during the 2012-2013 season for Montana. Tinkle’s staff envisioned Wiley as a slasher who played on the perimeter rather than the leaping power forward he would become years later.
Wiley played a total of 60 minutes his freshman season, 13 of which came in Montana’s embarrassing 81-34 loss to Syracuse in the first round of the NCAA Tournament. Wiley scored five points, tying a team-high for a Griz squad that shot 20.4 percent.
Seven months later, Wiley quit the team.
“I was totally burned out and I didn’t touch a basketball for six months,” Wiley said in mid-January in an interview with Skyline Sports.
“I wasn’t in a good place mentally with the game. I was really questioning whether I loved basketball or not. I felt that I didn’t want to waste my time playing basketball if I didn’t want to do it. I dabbled with other sports — ran track, practiced with the football team for a while. I was trying to find myself as an athlete. I was young and confused.”
Most Division I athletes possess superior athleticism. But Wiley’s diversity and his ability to compete at a Division I level in three different sports is uncanny. Wiley dabbled in track during the outdoor season in the spring right after Montana’s loss in the Big Dance. Weeks after his basketball career ended for the first time in October of 2013, Wiley approached former UM head football coach Mick Delaney about the prospect trying to rekindle his wide receiver skills during spring drills.
The experiment was short-lived. Because of his height, Wiley constantly had his legs taken out from under him, ultimately suffering a knee injuring in Montana’s very last practice of 2013 that caused him to hang up his football cleats.
By January of 2014, he was not only running for the Montana indoor track team but thriving. He teamed with Dominque Bob, Dylan Reynolds and Andrew Monaco for a 4×400-meter relay team that qualified for the Big Sky Indoor Championships. He also qualified individually in the 400 meters. At the indoor championship meet in Bozeman, Wiley helped the relay team take fourth and broke 50 seconds individually. But he still did not feel satisfied.
“Running track was a blast but I knew even in just one year, I had reached my ceiling with it,” Wiley said. “I felt like it wasn’t something I wanted to continue to pursue.”
“With football, it’s a crazy story. It was our last practice of the year and I pretty much blew my knee up. Coach Delaney, that was his last year there, he basically told me I probably shouldn’t play football because I was getting hurt. I was doing really well but I kept getting banged up. He just said, ‘Hey, are you thinking about playing basketball ever again?’ In the back of my mind, I wanted to return to the Big Sky but it would’ve taken a year of eligibility from me.”
Wiley felt lost and without a competitive outlet to display his rare gifts. A few months after indoor track season ended, Wiley found himself watching the NCAA Tournament on television. He remembered the thrill of playing in the marquee event and began to wonder if basketball could again be in his future.
EWU forward Jake Wiley (24)/by EWU Athletics
“That was one of the great experiences of my life, playing in the tournament,” Wiley said. “Seeing that, that sparked me. I went to the gym, started shooting around and it felt good. I wanted to play ball again.”
Wiley had already burned two of his five years of college eligibility. The list of options for a Division I transfer with 60 minutes of game film was not long. He eventually settled on Lewis & Clark State in Lewiston, Idaho, an NAIA school in the Frontier Conference.
His superior athleticism was on full display from the outset at LC State. As a sophomore, he averaged 14.6 points, 7.3 rebounds and 1.8 blocks per game while shooting 61 percent, fifth in the NAIA. In December of 2014, LSC pushed Eastern Washington to the brink in a non-conference game before losing 87-81. Wiley finished that game with 19 points, eight rebounds, five assists and two blocked shots.
“I really paid attention to the offense they ran and the style they played,” Wiley said. “I knew they would be trying to fill that role after (Venky Jois) graduated. I knew I could fill that role and I knew I could excel.”
Wiley was even better as a junior, earning first-team NAIA All-American honors by averaging 14.9 points, 7.5 rebounds and 1.4 blocked shots per game. He led L-C State to a 29-5 record playing for former EWU assistant coach Brandon Rinta.
Last spring, Wiley earned his undergraduate degree in communications. Months earlier, Wiley’s fiancée Brittany Hopkins gave birth to their daughter, Aliya. LC State does not offer a graduate program of any sort so he elected to explore his options as a graduate transfer.
“After I left Montana, Eastern was on my radar,” Wiley said. “I’m from the area and I know a lot of people who go to school here. I’ve heard a lot of good things about the program and I love the way they play. Out of high school, it boiled down to Montana and Eastern so they were always at the top of my list.”
EWU forward Jake Wiley (24)/by Jason Bacaj
Wiley joined the Eagles in the summer before EWU embarked on its international tour to Australia. With several key players out, Wiley shined. Eastern Washington sixth-year head coach Jim Hayford felt optimistic about his team’s prospects for the 2016-17 season despite the graduation of Venky Jois, EWU’s all-time leading scorer.
“I came back from Australia and I thought, ‘You know what? I might have the best big in the league,” Hayford said. “Part of that was some really good ones in (Joel) Bolomboy and (Martin) Breunig and Venky (Jois) had graduated. But knowing what Venky had done and knowing how Jake was fitting in to what we do and then you combine his work ethic and his personal character with great ability and athleticism, I knew he would be a beast.”
Beast is exactly what Wiley has been. He scored 25 points, grabbed 10 rebounds and dished out seven assists in an 82-64 win over Montana State. He made 10 of 12 shots in scoring 27 points to go with seven rebounds and four assists in a win over Idaho State. He converted 15 of 20 shots, including two 3-pointers, in scoring 36 points to go with nine rebounds against Weber State’s stout frontcourt. He was 14-of-16 from the floor in a 30-point, eight-rebound, four-block effort in a win over Northern Arizona. He is shooting 67 percent in league play and 62.8 percent overall.
“He plays really, really hard,” said Montana State junior center Benson Osayande, who will be one of several Bobcats trying to check Wiley as EWU plays at MSU on Saturday. “He’s up and down the court. He’s really athletic, plays above the rim and he’s really quick. He’s tough to guard.”
“It’s going to take everything I got, everything we got to slow him down because he’s a dominant player,” added MSU junior Sam Neumann. “Sometimes with as good a player as he is, any matchup can be a mismatch but we will step up to the challenge.”
Wiley, who has transformed his body from 195 pounds when he arrived at Montana to 230 pounds of chiseled muscle, is averaging 22.8 points, 8.6 rebounds and 2.5 blocks per game in conference play. EWU has thrust itself into the title hunt with a 6-2 league record punctuated by Thursday’s 72-60 win over Montana in Missoula.
“It was actually kind of emotional seeing the Griz jerseys on the other side,” Wiley said before the first matchup with the Griz. “It was eye-opening like we are in Big Sky play now.”
EWU forward Jake Wiley/by EWU athletics
At Montana, Wiley tried in several different ways to be something he is not. At Eastern Washington, Hayford allows for the cultivation of Wiley’s unique skills: soft hands, peerless jumping ability, great court vision and a motor that allows him attack the basket relentlessly. After a winding road that led from California to small-town Washington to Missoula to a lumber town in Idaho now to the Palouse, Wiley has finally found his true love once again.
“I think Wayne saw something in him really early in high school and I’m the coach who is benefiting from the end of the college road for him now that he’s mature,” Hayford said. “It’s amazing to watch a young man grow like he has. It’s all come full circle for him.”
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