University of Tennessee at Chattanooga men's head basketball coach Lamont Paris looks on from the sideline during UTC's game against Furman Wednesday, Jan. 10, 2018 at Mckenzie Arena in Chattanooga, Tenn.Ramon Vila both saw and understood the process University of Tennessee at Chattanooga men's basketball coach Lamont Paris and his team were going through - and Vila wanted to be part of it.
Turning away overtures from Hofstra and Santa Clara, the 6-foot-8 native of Barcelona, Spain - who spent his freshman season at Arizona State - visited UTC on Dec. 9-10 and witnessed the Mocs' win against Charlotte. He later checked out Hofstra, but he pretty much knew after his visit to Chattanooga it was where he wanted to be.
When asked what led to him finalizing his decision, Vila quickly answered, "Coach Paris."
"What I like most is when you start running a play, you never know who's going to end up shooting," Vila said before a recent practice. "Other teams have a couple of players score 20, but the next-highest scorer has four, and I don't think that's good. I'm not used to that, because in Europe we move the ball a lot and everybody scores.
"I feel like this team is like that."
Vila averaged 2.6 points and two rebounds per game as a freshman with the Sun Devils, earning four starts while playing in all 33 games. He played with Spain's national team in the U20 European Championships the past two years, winning gold in 2016.
Although enrolled at UTC, NCAA transfer rules mean he won't be able to contribute on game day for the Mocs until after the completion of the first semester of the 2018-19 school year, which is usually around mid-December. He'll have three seasons of eligibility remaining.
But he has already been trying to help the Mocs while working his way back into playing shape this winter.
"He's got good size and a good feel for the game," Paris said recently. "He brings depth at a position right now we're pretty thin at. He has experience, and he's played and competed at a high level.
"He just has a really good feel for the game of basketball."
Although he saw the Mocs win when he visited last month, Vila has been on the bench during recent games at McKenzie Arena, witnessing portions of the seven-game losing streak the second-youngest Division I team in the country is on in Paris's first season as coach. The lack of on-court success for the Mocs (6-13, 0-6 Southern Conference) could have been a major obstacle when it came to recruiting Vila - Hofstra is 11-7 overall and 4-2 in the Colonial Athletic Association - but he understands the situation his new program is in and still wanted to be a part of it.
Vila noted the team's youth and a run of injuries that have severely cut into the Mocs' depth during the current struggles, and he remains optimistic.
"I think we're just going to get better," he said. "We lost against ETSU because the other team was playing hard, but they also had a bunch of seniors and juniors. In a couple of years or next year, we're going to be a really good team. We'll be older and we've got some good recruits coming in, so it's going to be nice.
"I won't play until second semester, so I'll do all I can is practice and work hard until then."
Contact Gene Henley at ghenley@timesfreepress.com. Follow him on Twitter @genehenleytfp.