UM African students leaders on and off the court

Coco Barry was doing some community work in Orono one day when a woman buttonholed him. Her daughter, it seemed, had taken her husband’s nightly glass of wine and poured it down the sink — the result, she said, of a talk Coco had given at the girl’s school about the dangers of drugs and alcohol.

Before Coco had time to worry about what he had done, the woman began to thank him profusely. “If you can have an effect like that on her now, it will stay with her for the rest of her life,” the woman told him. “Thank you for all you are doing.”

“That is my favorite story,” Coco says, stretching his 6-foot, 8-inch frame across a dorm-room bed that hardly seems equal to its task. “That really made it all worthwhile for me. It encouraged me to speak more and more at schools.”

If public service is a nice gesture for most athletes, it is a badge of honor for Coco, who spoke so little English when he arrived at the University of Maine in 1985 that he found inventive ways to hide.

“I bought myself a Walkman and walked around campus with it on so nobody would try to talk to me. If people said, `Hey Coco,’ I would just walk by like I didn’t hear,” remembers the native of Dakar, Senegal, a city on Africa’s west coast.

Coco — along with teammate, countryman and best friend Guy Gomis — will graduate next Sunday. Originally an experiment in basketball recruiting, the University of Maine’s Senegal connection has indeed made its mark on hardwood courts around the Northeast. After a redshirt freshman year plagued by injuries, Coco played basketball for four years and became team rebound leader. The irrepressible Guy, who arrived a year later, played the same four years and was voted co-captain by his teammates last fall.

Along the way, however, Guy and Coco have surprised themselves and a few others outside the gym. Both have found academic success. Both have spent a good deal of time speaking to school children from Orono to Rockland. And this year, the pair helped found the 35-member African Students Association — Coco as vice president, Guy as treasurer.

“I am proud to know that when these kids finished their eligibility, two months later they are getting a degree,” says former Maine basketball coach Skip Chappelle, who recruited the pair. “They are not playing in the NBA, but they accomplished what they set out to do.”

Guy — a lanky 6-foot, 7-inch 22-year-old who friends swear has not stopped smiling since he arrived four years ago — will graduate with a bachelor’s degree in economics. He has been accepted to the university’s Master of Business Administration program, which he will begin next fall.

Coco will graduate with a degree in political science, and the following week he will marry an American woman studying veterinary medicine in Boston. He hopes to pursue an M.B.A. as well, although he has not yet chosen the school.

Both men plan eventually to take their achievments back to Senegal, where their talents and education are most needed. “This is a great country — the land of opportunity,” Guy says. “But I think we owe something to our country. We’ve got to go back and pay our dues.”

When the champagne corks fly at next Saturday’s commencement, there will be no shortage of people to congratulate on the success of the Senegal connection.

The list has to start with Coco and Guy, who pushed on through periodic bouts of homesickness and constant frustration with learning a new culture and new language while carrying a full class load and spending three hours a day playing basketball.

“If it takes you an hour to read what you are assigned in class, and study it, it takes me five hours to cover the same assignment,” Coco says. For his first year, he taped each of his lectures, then played them back at night bit-by-bit, translating them with a French-English dictionary as he went.

Guy had it a little easier, because he could turn to Coco, who is a year older and arrived a year earlier. But both were driven on by the same combination of desire, obligation and fear.

“If we flunk out, we go home, and going home without anything would be a disgrace. It would be an embarrassment not only for ourselves, but for our families. Nowadays in Africa it’s not any more who has money, it is what kind of degree did you get and where did you study,” says Coco.

Their first lines of defense were the two men who brought them to the United States, Chappelle and John Benoit, who is now the university’s director of International Research and Education Programs. Benoit, who was in Dakar while on sabbatical from the university, saw Coco play and recommended him to Chappelle. When Coco came to Maine, both men served as surrogate parents — people who Coco could talk to about everything from classes to a fast growing addiction to pizza, which caused a 30-pound weight gain.

Chappelle and Benoit, in turn, directed Guy and Coco to a wealth of services available through the university: tuition waivers through the student aid office, tutoring through the Onwards Program, support through the Office of International Students.

“And the people in my department were great,” says Guy. “Teachers that you don’t even have come up to you in the hall and ask you how you are doing.”

Guy and Coco give a lot of the credit to the community itself, both on and off campus.

“I never, never felt awkward being in a crowd. The people didn’t make me feel uneasy. I would go to class and I would be the only black person there and it didn’t make me any different. Never in my five years here did anybody say anything bad to me about being black,” Coco says.

As he and Guy prepare for final exams, it strikes them how near they are to graduation, the day Coco calls the most significant of his life. They talk mostly about the future, but looking out the window at the pine trees stirring in a warm breeze, a little nostalgia creeps in, too.

“When we got back from a road trip, we were so glad to be home — we even call it home,” Coco says. “I love this place, really. It’s kind of sad, a little bit, that we are done with our years here.”