REDONDO BEACH, Calif. -- College basketball's elite gathered in Chicago last week during the NBA's combine. It was a who's who of the sport's most decorated players, from All-Americans like Brice Johnson to potential top-five picks like Jamal Murray. From players simply testing their stock like Nigel Hayes, to seniors like Malcolm Brogdon. It was, as always, an event swarming with coverage from media, everyone looking for their angle into telling the story of the best players in the sport for the umpteenth time.

But what happens when you're not a member of the college basketball's select few who get to strut their stuff in front of NBA teams? What happens when you're plying your trade at places like Lindenwood or Angelo State, and don't really get looks from NBA teams?

Well, one option occurred last month in Southern California, when the Australian Football League gathered in Redondo Beach to conduct a combine to see if there were any college basketball players who would be willing to take a chance on making the leap out of their comfort zone and into a whole new world of athletics and wonder. A group of 18 players -- gathered by professional scout Jonathan Givony of DraftExpress fame -- traveled from around the country to perform in front of a group of AFL scouts. By the end of the event, those 18 would be whittled down to three who get a chance to move to Australia and prove their worth.

The craziest part? None of them had ever even so much as picked up an AFL ball before, and here they were trying to earn a chance to go to Australia and justify a team giving them a contract.

Here are a few of their stories.

***

Australian rules football is a pretty complex game. Imagine the organized chaos of basketball's fluid run of play paired with American football's punting and rugby's physicality stretched out over a field that is on average about 150 meters long and 140 meters wide. It's a skill-heavy sport where you need to be able to pass the ball off -- by punching it out of your hand -- and punt it to teammates accurately while on a full sprint. You need to be able to stay upright and poised while dealing with near-200-pound players sprinting for your body, and stay contained enough to punt a ball upwards of 40 meters through a set of uprights to score points for your team.

Most of the players in the combine were there to be scouted as "ruckmen," a position that is responsible for winning possession for his team in a jump-ball like setting that occurs around 60 to 70 times per game. As one scout explained to me, in Australia they can find tall players and they can find athletic players, but it's rare to find tall and explosive in the same person. Plus, it's even more rare to find a true 7-footer, let alone one that isn't planning a career in basketball or is willing to take the punishment associated with the game of football.

That's where Stanislas Heili comes in.

Heili, at 7-foot-1, is the tallest player ever measured by the AFL in over two decades of statistics kept at combines both domestically and abroad. And undoubtedly, he's got one of the most interesting tales into how he got into the AFL's pipeline.

Heili is from Lyon, France, and was always more focused on his schoolwork than on athletic endeavors throughout his adolescence. In fact, he actually didn't begin playing basketball at all until he was 17 years old, having just graduated from high school over there.

"I wanted to try something new as a student, so I met the coach from my university in France, and he told me 'You should definitely try, you're like 7-foot tall,'" Heili remembers from those days. "So I was like, okay, let's do it."

Over the next year, Heili learned the game from scratch. After that year, ASVEL -- a team owned by Tony Parker that has had players drafted into the NBA recently -- asked him to join their youth team. From there, he began playing in the Espoirs league while also attending classes at INSA, one of the best engineering schools in the country. Eventually, he got too old to play in the youth Espoirs league, and didn't want to give up getting his degree due to his focus on academics. That's where college basketball came into play, as it would allow him to do both.

Stanislas Heilii, left, at the AFL Combine. AFL Media

His school had an exchange program with the University of Nebraska, so he came over in 2014 to study and play. One day, he got in contact with Nebraska coach Tim Miles, who let him try out and was impressed enough to allow him to play for the team. However, the NCAA's rules came into play and it was a struggle to get him eligible in the first semester despite his grades. Despite weekly meetings with compliance, eventually he decided to give up on it. But instead of giving up on his hoops' dreams, he transferred down to Lindenwood University in Missouri.

At the Division II level, he found that the rigors of eligibility and compliance were easier. He thrived there, becoming the first ever player in the university's history to make the league's all-defensive team. He averaged 2.5 blocks per game to go with 8.5 points and 7.9 rebounds. He called what will be his lone season playing American college basketball a success, but still was likely to head back to INSA in Lyon to finish his degree in engineering once his school year here ended. That's when he randomly received the email from Givony, outlining the reasons why he was believed to be a worthwhile prospect. He decided to go with it, and there he was in the outskirts of Los Angeles trying to make his mark.

"I've changed my plan for studying like four times already, so I figured one more wouldn't change all that much," Heili said about his decision to try out a new game.

He didn't yet have an objective in the new game he was learning that weekend, only to go 100 percent and to see what would happen at the end of the week.

***

Shane Henry had the most traditional college background of any player in attendance. A senior at Virginia Tech, the 6-foot-6 Henry played in all but four Hokie games over the last two seasons, averaging right around 10 minutes per game. He imposed athleticism on the game in college, and at this combine he would end up tying the record for highest vertical leap in the event's history at approximately 40.2 inches. However, his road to becoming a solid rotation piece for Buzz Williams was anything but normal.

Henry grew up in Decatur, Georgia, and started playing organized basketball in middle school but wasn't very good. When he was a freshman in high school, Henry admitted that the only reason he made the team is because his coach was that same middle school coach that happened to like him, was sympathetic to him, and let him play. But when that coach left after the season, Henry didn't make his high school team as a sophomore. Instead, he hung around as a team manager.

"I just wanted to be around the game and everything and get better," Henry said. "I ended up playing in the last two games because a couple of players quit. Then after that, I just stuck with basketball."

Henry made his high school team in each of the final two years, performing well enough to get some Division II offers. However, his grades in high school weren't good enough, so he had to go the junior college route next.

Henry attended Georgia Perimeter College, a school which now no longer exists in the iteration that it did when he was there (since leaving two years ago, the school has been usurped by Georgia State University as a type of branch campus called "Perimeter College"). He performed well there, and was recruited by Williams and Steve Roccaforte.

It's a route fairly common to many in Division I. Go to junior college, go Division I, then see what happens afterward. Henry though will now be trying to make the uncommon leap to Australian football from college basketball, something that has only recently been accomplished by players like Mason Cox of Oklahoma State and Matt Korcheck of Arizona. One thing he has going for him: the fact that he already wants to live in Australia.

"That's the place I've wanted to live after everything is said and done," Henry said. "Just relax in Australia because it's a beautiful place. I did a project on it my junior year of Virginia Tech. I just learned a lot from doing that, we had it planned day by day. In doing so, I saw there are so many things you can do, and it's beautiful out there with the beaches and everything."

Before he'll get his chance to go to Australia though -- if he makes the cut -- Henry got the chance to do something that he thought was unlikely when he finished high school and didn't have the grades to make a four-year institution. He graduated from Virginia Tech this past weekend with his degree in psychology. Henry lives by what Williams taught him over the last two years -- not to get ahead of yourself, achieve your goals first, then look back on it. That meant he didn't want to comment on what graduating would mean to him when I caught up with him in California. However, as he said it, a knowing smile glimmered across his face, and the importance of the upcoming moment in his life was evident.

Henry has overcome some crazy long odds to become a Division I basketball player and a college graduate, so why wouldn't he do it again while transitioning to a new sport?

***

One of the longest shots at the camp was undoubtedly Ikem Eriobuna. A 6-foot-8 forward who has played for three colleges during his short time in America, the Lagos, Nigeria native would deserve a film made about his life if he can find success halfway across the world from his home.

Eriobuna grew up in a house of six in Nigeria, where he lived close to National Stadium in Lagos, a massive multi-sport facility that was home to World Cup qualifiers and Africa Cup of Nations games as recently as 2000. Now though, it is considered a destitute building in massive need of renovation. Articles state things like "the swimming pool is a death trap" or the stadium is "a cesspit and venue for criminal activities about the complex, a clearly needing building in massive need of repair.

It was here that Eriobuna honed his basketball game after outgrowing soccer when he was young. He was pushed toward the sport due to his height, but he didn't really like it all that much. For the entire first year he tried to play, he didn't really take it seriously and simply just coasted along. However, during the second year, he saw how basketball could be his way out. That's when he began to take the sport seriously. He'd go to school at 8 a.m. in the morning, get done, then wouldn't come home until around 11 p.m. every night because he would be working on his game. He noticed rapid improvement in his game, and tried to test himself against the best despite the fact that he wasn't considered among the best in the country.

He heard about this camp called the Top-50 camp, and tried to make the cut. However, he was unable to do so. Afterward though, he got a visit from maybe the most famous person in African basketball.

"So I was pretty young, and I was there on the sideline of this camp crying my eyes out because I didn't make this camp," Eriobuna explained to me. "And I really wanted to because I'd heard of the benefits in how to get the experience and that people from America come to see people play basketball. So I was on the side, and these Nigerian coaches looked at me and said 'he's no good.' Then out of nowhere, this Masai guy walks up to me, looks at me and asked me why I was crying. I told him how bad I wanted to make the camp and be in the camp. He just gave me a shot. He said, 'Come on, join the other guys.'"

That "Masai guy" is Masai Ujiri, the current general manager of the Toronto Raptors, former general manager of the Denver Nuggets, and founder of the Giants of Africa non-profit organization that puts together camps for African basketball prospects around the nation. Few around the world have had the impact on basketball in the continent that Ujiri has, if anyone. And here he was comforting a kid that had just been shattered.

The faith that Ujiri placed in Eriobuna made him work even harder. Instead of getting home at 11 p.m., he would now get home around 1 a.m. every night. We're talking seven days a week of eight-plus hour basketball days. On Sundays, he'd lie to his parents in order to get out of going to church so he could go and play to improve his game. It just never stopped, and it resulted in his parents not exactly being pleased with him at times for breaking curfew.

"My dad would literally whoop my behind," Eriobuna conveyed with a smile and nodding head as if to reassure me that it was water under the bridge. "He'd beat me for coming home so late."

The next year, he went to a big man camp and, again, didn't make the cut. However, the coaches this time didn't deny him an opportunity to at least work out with the other kids. While there, he said that he got a chance to see Ujiri again.

"I told him how much I appreciated him putting me in the camp and told him I wasn't going to let him down and that I was going to keep working hard," Eriobuna said. "I felt like he saw something in me when I didn't."

Eriobuna went back to the camp the next year, made the team, and the work he'd put in finally had begun to pay off. He won the camp's most improved player award. He continued on to further camps and continued to improve to the point that became one of the better prospects in the country. When he went back to the Top 50 camp for the fourth time, he finally made the cut as one of the top-10 players in the country, which earned him an interview with high schools in America to potentially come over and finish his education while playing basketball.

"After the camp, I cried because I really didn't think I was going to do that well," Eriobuna admitted. "It was a great moment and I just felt like I did it."

Eventually, he came to South Carolina to start in order to play some AAU ball. Then, he got hooked up at Howe Military Academy in Indiana. However, it was a military school that wasn't really for him.

"Military was not for me," Eriobuna said. "You had to carry a rifle. You had to wake up at 6:30, where camouflage. It was just so many procedures. I came here to play basketball, not do the military, and they wouldn't let me practice when I wanted to practice. So I just ended staying there for two months before wanting to leave."

He ended up getting a full scholarship to Evelyn Mack Academy in Charlotte to finish high school, but he was unable to play due to transfer restrictions. So instead of getting to go Division I like expected, Eriobuna ended up going the junior college route. But he wasn't particularly successful there, and was asked to not return. It was at that point that he decided to take a semester off to work on his game and try to improve to the point where he'd be able to get another offer. After that semester, he got a scholarship offer to play for a school in Colorado, but again redshirted so as to not lose a year. Before his next year started, he went to a showcase in Texas, and earned small Division I offers there and eventually committed to UMKC.

But within the year that it took him to play, the coach who recruited him under Kareem Richardson was fired, and Eriobuna never really clicked with Richardson. That led to him transferring again, this time to Allen University in South Carolina. After getting to Allen in the fall, he got a message Givony asking if he'd be interested in trying out for the AFL.

"The first thing that came to my mind is that this looks like a scam," Eriobuna said honestly, echoing many of the same thoughts people have when Givony initially reaches out to them. "Football? I don't play football. They want tall people to play football?"

But after contemplation (and some research), he realized that the thing was real, and decided to give it a shot. After all, you miss 100 percent of the shots you don't take, right?

Former UMKC player Ikem Eriobuna hopes for a shot in the AFL. AFL Media

***

To a man, everyone who attended the combine sees the immediate benefits of it. More than anything, it's a good time getting to essentially be a part of a team again that has relatively low stakes.

"I like it," Eriobuna says to me on the second day of the combine. "It's fun. The fact that we look like fools out here and don't know what we're doing is great."

Imagine being able to go back to pee-wee football and learning the technique of the game again. Or what about the lowest levels of baseball? Or youth basketball? That's essentially what these players were doing, except they got to do it at 22 to 24 years old instead of as a child.

The players learned the technique of how to kick a football properly to make it go where you want to go. How to drop it ever so perfectly onto your foot so you can control its speed and distance. How to punch the ball in order to pass it to a teammate. Timing leaps to attack the football. They also did all of the regular combine stuff, where Henry was a big winner.

However, only three of the 18 prospects get to move forward to Australia for a tryout at the highest level. And while it didn't happen for Eriobuna or Henry, Heili is among the three planning to move to Australia for a couple of months to ingratiate himself in a new culture and new sport to see if he can move forward with it professionally.

Whether or not he'll actually get a chance to play in the AFL is up for debate. After all, only two players from an American background have played in the AFL in the last 20 years, and only one player in AFL history was born in France (and even that player is the son of an Australian national).

But one thing is clear: the AFL is certainly beginning to assert itself as an alternative for college basketball players that aren't quite good enough to play professionally. And it's going to be fun to watch as an option for players moving forward.