The International Expedition

By: D. Scott Fritchen

In March, Anthony Winchester journeyed in Belgrade, the capital and largest city of Serbia. There were many important stops along Winchester's postseason international travel — and this was plenty important for the Kansas State men's basketball program, which finished its season with a 16-17 record, and eyed a turnaround in 2025-26. As fourth-year head coach Jerome Tang put it, "We need some dudes." So, as soon as the final buzzer sounded on the Wildcats' campaign, the K-State coaching staff spent an entire day combing through hundreds of potential prospects who could bring talent to the Little Apple.

The coaching staff mapped out an entire course of action, a master plan, with Winchester, an assistant coach who is entering his fourth season on staff with the Wildcats, taking his passport and international professional experience to further evaluate players who might look good in lavender — and who could soon make life difficult for opponents in the powerful Big 12 Conference.

So, Winchester, who played international basketball at the highest level in Europe for nearly a decade, began this international trip at his roots: Spain. He hit Madrid, Spain, and then visited Barcelona for two days, and then hit Germany for a couple days, where Tang joined him, and they flew together to Serbia. The game to go to was two hours away. They got a driver. It was up into the mountains in a little town. When Tang and Winchester departed their car, they found a little gym with bleachers all to one side.

"Obviously, you're taking your head coach to watch a player, but getting there was difficult," Winchester says. "You hope the kid is good."

But Tang and Winchester had an idea about the kid they came to watch. They saw the film. Everybody raved about him. He was not unknown. On one play in the game, the kid came off a pick-and-roll, went between the legs and behind the back, and hit a circus shot. Tang, seated nearby, shot Winchester an eyes-wide-open all-knowing glare. Winchester thought, "OK, this is good." Tang was sold.

The kid scored more than 30 points that night and was easily the best player on the court. And he was playing against some of the best talent in all of Europe. Seemed people from all over came to watch the best players around. And the kid was clearly the best of the bunch.

The kid, by the way, was just 18 years old.

His name? Andrej Kostic.

"He shot at the highest level," Winchester said. "The way the ball came off his hands, it was just easy for him, you know? He has a chance to be really good."

Kostic is a 6-foot-6, 210-pound freshman transfer guard from Belgrade, Serbia. He led the 2023 European under-18 team to the gold medal, he averaged 24.2 points, 7.8 rebounds and 2.0 steals in the 2024 Adidas Next Generation Tournament in Belgrade, and he was a member of the 2024 All-Serbian Junior League First Team while also earning 2024 All-Serbian Junior League Guard of the Year. He also earned all-tournament honors at the 2025 Adidas Eurocamp in Treviso, Italy. During one game this past February, he scored 39 points. Another night he grabbed 10 rebounds. Another night he dished out eight assists. And another night, he had five steals.

"He has a baby face," Winchester says, "but on the court he's a killer."

Kostic was added to the K-State roster in the summer of 2025, becoming the first-ever Serbian-born basketball player at K-State, and he arrived in Manhattan in late July.

Winchester, 42, remembers being fresh faced and overseas, a kid with a smooth shot, big dreams, and nice views, as the native of Austin, Indiana, and the 2002 runner-up to Indiana Mr. Basketball, moved to Melilla, Spain, on the coast of Africa, after an All-American career at Western Kentucky. Winchester's first season with Caja Rural Melilla in Spain in 2006-07 wasn't about padding stats as much as letting the experience soak in. The team had to fly to all the away games. Once, they had to take a boat. But it was lonely, yeah, and there was the constant feel that Winchester was missing out on something back home.

"You'd get on Facebook and they're doing a birthday party," Winchester says. "When I came home in the summers, it was the same stuff like when I left. There were times abroad that I was like, 'Yeah, I'm ready to get back.' It was good."

But Winchester was good, too, earning Player of the Week and Player of the Month honors several times. In 2013, he was named Player of the Year for his league in Spain. He concluded his playing career in 2016 after playing in Spain's 1^st Division, ACB, which is known as the one of the best professional leagues in the world behind the NBA.

Winchester then served as a graduate intern at Western Kentucky, made a stop at Loyola Marymount and Pacific, and served as an assistant coach at Southern Miss in 2021-22 before Tang hired him on as director of video services at K-State for the 2022-23 season. Tang promoted Winchester to K-State assistant coach prior to the 2023-24 season.

Winchester has nine years of college coaching experience — and now a wife, McKenzie. The couple were wed on May 24 at Union Hall in downtown Manhattan with Tang officiating the marriage ceremony. Winchester became stepfather to a son, Beckham (10), and daughter, Ella (6), while McKenzie last week entered her third trimester with their first child together. It is a boy. And he is expected to join their happy family on December 26.

"It's awesome, man," Winchester says. "When I met McKenzie, it was crazy how — it was like I had a purpose. I always kind of knew that I wanted to be a dad, but when this happened, it was like, 'Nope, you'll be a stepdad first. So, Beckham just turned 10 and Ella is 6, and she's in the first grade now. She's a handful. She keeps me on my toes."

Winchester says that his bride-to-be was OK with him traveling halfway across the world two months before their wedding to seek out key pieces for the Wildcats. By then, most of the gears were in motion for a fabulous late-May wedding and celebration.

Meanwhile, the work among the K-State men's basketball coaching staff continued inside the Ice Family Basketball Training Center. They had their top prospects lined up. They had the plan. And it was executed to perfection.

"In recruiting, you're always dabbling in different areas," Winchester says. "I have some connections overseas, as does (assistant coach) Jareem Dowling, and Coach Tang does, too. Me playing international basketball over there, Coach Tang leaned on me a little bit to organize this undertaking. I had a good idea of the leagues and competition levels, and that gave us a good grasp on the countries to visit. We had always talked about looking more overseas, but we knew we had to get the right ones. We feel like this year that's something we got in all our recruits. We have some really good kids."

K-State secured the services of 7-foot-2, 254-pound junior transfer center Dorin Buca from Perugia, Italy. K-State secured 6-foot-9, 225 junior transfer wing Elias Rapieque of Berlin, Germany. And K-State secured Kostic.

The trio joined junior guard Mobi Ikegwuruka (Galway, Ireland), who enters his second season at K-State, while the Wildcats also picked up Stephen Osei, a sophomore transfer from Casper (Wyoming) College, whose hometown is Toronto, Ontario.

That gives K-State five international players on its roster for the first time in history, and it means that 24 foreign-born players have now worn a Wildcat jersey in history, including seven players from Europe.

The question becomes this: How do you convince an international basketball player, who perhaps has never been to the U.S., to leave his homeland and fly sight-unseen to northeast Kansas to play at K-State?

"For me, when I'm having conversations with a recruit, maybe their parents, maybe their advisor, I sell them on Coach Tang," Winchester says. "At the end of the day, it's about the people, and the people you're going to be around, and that's what really helped us in recruiting these international kids. Then there was Coach Tang, and he was over there with me, and he was going to see those kids and do everything possible to make it work.

"Then there's a lot of timing in college basketball with the NIL, and things are different than how they were a few years ago when you tried to get a kid to come over and play. Now there are incentives that play a huge part in all this. That obviously helps. Even though it's an international kid, and it's hard to get to know him because you don't see him all the time, it's all about relationships. If you tell him the truth, most of the time it's going to work out."

Timing was absolutely critical.

"Some of the places I went to, it was a certain event you'd go watch, and it's a tournament, essentially, so you're watching games all day," Winchester says. "A lot of times, you already knew who you were going to see. If you didn't already have a plan before traveling that far, you probably weren't doing it right. So, we mapped it out and hit as much as we could because if you're over there, it's a heck of a lot easier to get from Germany to Serbia than flying back to the U.S. and hitting Serbia a few weeks later. You map it out and try to see as many kids as you can."

There was Elias Rapieque in Germany. The 6-foot-9, 225-pound junior transfer played 53 games with the ALBA Berlin organization between the EuroLeague (27 games) and the German Basketball Bundesliga, which is the highest-level league of pro basketball in Germany. A member of the German under-18 and under-20 National Teams, Rapieque played at the 2022 European under-18 Championship as well as 2023 and 2024 European under-20 Championship.

"We saw Elias in person," Winchester says. "He played in the EuroLeague, which is the second-best league behind the NBA in the world. He was on the same team as David McCormack from Kansas and Matt Thomas from Iowa State. He was on a team with pros, who showed him the way. Elias is a player who can pass, dribble and shoot. He gets everyone involved and can connect guys in a certain way on and off the court. He just knows how to play. He has a really good feel for his game."

There was Dorin Buca, the 7-foot-2, 254-pound terror from Perugia, Italy.

"The first thing is his size. I mean, he's huge," Winchester says. "A lot of times with a kid with that size, they might not run well or have good hands. Dorin has all the tools. He's been really good, a pleasant surprise for all of us, in how he's adapted. He has something you can't teach, and it's a cliché, but it's true, and the way he moves and handles the ball and has really good touch, he has a chance to be really good."

And there was Andrej Kostic, the 6-foot-6, 210-pound freshman wing, the pride of Belgrade, Serbia, who lit it up that night in that sweaty small gym with Winchester and Tang shaking their heads.

"Andrej had the talent," Winchester says. "He would say that he doesn't speak English well, but he speaks great English. And he is a character. He is just hilarious. He's 18, so, he's still young, but you could just see the talent."

K-State is one of more than 15 high-major college basketball programs that brought in at least two international newcomers for 2025-26, according to CBS, which projected that between 70 and 80 or more international prospects could land on the rosters of high-major basketball teams for this season.

"We have a really good group," Winchester says. "It's interesting that this might be the biggest group of international kids we've gotten in a season, but their approach and everything that they bring collectively, I mean, we have a special group, and they're going to have a big part in our success."

There was a time, and Winchester doesn't recall the exact day, when the final player's name was added to completely fill the 2025-26 roster, making it official. The lengthy process, which spanned more than a year and encompassed thousands of travel miles across the U.S. and international waters, and that featured hundreds of prospects, dozens of top tournaments, and a few hot, sweaty gyms, trickled down to names and heights and weights on a piece of paper. The roster was complete. And that feeling, man, that feeling was…success.

"We were excited everything was going to get done, and it did," Winchester says. "It was a good feeling because we felt like our roster was complete. We had been working on the roster the whole year. The portal now is different. Some kids were coming back, and then they weren't coming back, and it's just a process, and it felt like a long process. And it took a long time to get it done. Getting it done was the main thing. We looked at our roster and felt it was complete, and we felt really good about it. We were really excited."

This was in August. Before things really started firing up. And Anthony and McKenzie Winchester needed to unwind and celebrate before the official start of practice. So, the Winchesters drove to Estes Park for five days.

"We've gone there for two years now, because it's close," Winchester says. "Man, during that time, it's really relaxing. We didn't hike or go into the mountains. No, we chilled. We had a beer with dinner. We put the phones down for a little bit. We also took naps when we wanted to."

And so, for five days, the world traveler, an integral part of K-State's overseas success, and first-time husband and stepfather, laid his head upon a pillow, and shut his eyes, momentarily halting memories of the flights and the roads that he took during his journeys across the ocean — and putting on hold the thoughts and dreams of what the future could hold for the Wildcats, international talents and all, heading toward this coming March.

Kansas State University Athletics

Players Mentioned

Dorin Buca

Mobi Ikegwuruka

Andrej Kostic

Stephen Osei

Elias Rapieque

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