Daniel Uthman

USA TODAY Sports

EUGENE, Ore. — It was an otherwise forgettable July day in a long line of forgettable days in Chris Boucher’s life.

He was 19 years old, and he spent his days in his mother’s Côte-des-Neiges neighborhood of Montreal or in his father’s neighborhood of Montreal North. But he spent most of his time doing very little. “Not really anything,” he says.

He had been out of school for a year, not possessing the academic record to be admitted into Canada’s Collѐge d’enseignement général et professionnel, or CEGEP, training that many Canadian youth count on entering for two years after 11th grade.

He worked as a cook and dishwasher at a Saint Hubert rotisserie restaurant to contribute to the family income, but most of his time passed idly with his younger brother Maxime and sister Christel at his mother’s apartment.

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“My sister would say, ‘This is my older brother, he’s just at the house,’ ” Boucher says. “I was not a model for her. I knew I needed to find a way to make her proud of me, and there was something further than working every day.

“I was just thinking, I don’t know how I’m going to end up. What am I supposed to do? I’m working, but I don’t like the job I’m doing. And if you have a bad day at the job, then you go back home and you have issues, I was just in a bad mood. Then I would go out with a friend to a party or whatever. I’m not doing anything productive.”

One of the only positive diversions in Boucher’s life was basketball. And though his turbulent family situation made it nearly impossible to play organized basketball for a secondary school team, the fact he grew more than nine inches from age 16 to 20 drew him more and more frequently to the Kent Park courts in Côte-des-Neiges.

He had played soccer and ice hockey ever since moving to Canada with his mother, Mary MacVane, from St. Lucia at age 5, and his basketball mainly consisted of standing around and shooting three-pointers. As he grew, he began playing games with friends and eventually felt good enough and comfortable enough to join pickup games with strangers. He also registered with a local basketball web site, providing two essential facts: His name was Chris Boucher, and he was 6-8.

His interest in the game is what led him to a Little Burgundy rec center by himself on a rainy July day in 2012 when his friends were too busy to join him. There weren’t many watching as Boucher scored 44 points, mostly on tip dunks, in a single game, but Igor Rwigema and Ibrahim Appiah were there. And that was all that mattered.

Rwigema and Appiah at the time were in the latter stages of creating a program that would take basketball players away from hardscrabble backgrounds and into an instructional setting in Alma, Quebec, 300 miles north of the dangers of their neighborhoods. Alma Academy was a program meant to give hope to young, talented people who were lacking in it.

It was a program for players and people like Chris Boucher.

Hardship to hardwood

Three and a half years later, Chris Boucher has an associate’s degree and is a junior academically in college, working toward a bachelor’s degree in sociology.

At 23, he is no longer confounded about his future in Montreal North, one of the most dangerous and impoverished wards in North America. He wants to build on his sociology degree and have a career as a therapist because, he says, “After everything I’ve lived and noticed, I think I could help people who have had the same life as me. I feel like I could listen to them and find better ways. Because I got out of there. Maybe people who are still in there they could find another way.”

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But before then, he plans to find out how far basketball can take him. It’s already brought him here, a city that sits on a similar line of latitude as the neighborhoods where he grew up but is different in almost every other way.

On the other side of the continent, the now 6-foot-10 Boucher is playing on courts of the Pac-12, not Kent Park. He is starting for Oregon, the No. 13 men’s basketball team in the country, and leads the Pac-12 and is second in Division I in shot blocks per game.

He once told Appiah that he had been stopped by and questioned by police on the streets of Montreal North because he resembled a criminal on the loose. He recently told Appiah, “Now I’m walking in Eugene and people know my name.”

Like many of the players Rwigema and Appiah gave a chance, Boucher went without food some days growing up. It’s partly why he weighed just 150 pounds until he was 20. At Oregon he has an unlimited meal plan and supplements it with visits to the Subway next door to his apartment.

It all is in sharp contrast to what he experienced growing up, particularly after his family split up in 2009. Then began a two-year period when his father took care of his son’s belongings but not his son, and his mother wanted to see her son but her boyfriend did not. He moved in with an aunt, but many days and nights, home for Boucher was whatever friend’s house opened its doors to him.

“Chris’s entire childhood was unstable,” MacVane, his mother, said via e-mail. “We were always moving and living under tough conditions. It pained me because I knew Chris was a smart kid dealing with other people’s problems/issues that were beyond his control.”

So when total strangers Rwigema and Appiah came to see her in August 2012 to ask her permission to take her son to live six hours north, she didn’t hesitate in granting it. She had seen her son lose a friend to a fatal shooting. She had seen other of his friends jailed, driving drunk, stealing cars. In an e-mail, she said her son always put his family ahead of himself, and that he pledged to never join a gang or be influenced by street life. But trouble was ever present.

“Basically she didn’t even ask any questions,” Appiah says. “She was like, ‘I’m going to trust you guys as long as you guys are getting him out of the city, and you guys promise me that he’s going to be going to school, I have nothing to lose by pretty much giving you my son.’ ”

One game of observation led to one conversation and one potentially life-changing opportunity.Appiah said that after talking with MacVane, he and Rwigema felt like they had to give Boucher a chance. Rwigema remembers telling Boucher, “I’m going to make sure that if you come, you’re never going to have to be in that situation again.”

“They just came to see players,” Boucher says. “I was lucky I was there.”

Built to endure

By the spring of his lone year with Alma Academy, Boucher’s talent was being recognized in the United States. James Miller, then the coach at New Mexico Junior College, spotted him on tape while scouting another player. “I watch it, and on the first possession he gets a tip-back dunk without barely jumping,” says Miller, who signed Boucher in spring 2013. “It’s like Manute Bol out there.

“Schools would come and say, ‘He’s so skinny!’ And I’d say, ‘Who cares? He can play.’ ”

Boucher played so well that the next year at Northwest (Wyo.) College he was named the National Junior College Athletic Association Division I Player of the Year. Oregon assistant Mike Mennenga, Boucher’s primary recruiter for the Ducks and a person Boucher considers a mentor, says, “Seriously, if you look at his JuCo numbers, nobody in all of basketball — I’m talking NBA — did what he did. “If you look at the amount of threes, the amount of blocked shots, the percentages, statistically he was the player of the year in all of basketball.”

He’s also one of the fittest. He was one of two players on Miller’s 2013-14 team to complete the “20 in 20,” a test of 20 suicide sprints in 20 minutes. He has the graceful gait of a 200-meter sprinter, and a resting heart rate of 36 beats per minute. “I think it’s from playing soccer,” Boucher says. “It’s kind of hard for me to get tired.”

Boucher’s ability to run, make three-pointers, rebound, defend against players of different sizes and alter even more shots than he blocks makes him a perfect fit for Oregon’s style of play, and that’s why Mennenga left the team for a day during the 2015 NCAA Tournament to scout Boucher at the NJCAA Elite 8. It’s why fellow Ducks assistant Kevin McKenna and head coach Dana Altman were so enamored with signing him.

And it’s partly why Oregon wants Boucher, who is in only his fourth season of organized basketball, to be able to remain here for his fifth.

Oregon's cause

Boucher picked Oregon over TCU, Minnesota and Texas Tech following a campus visit last spring. But Oregon officials knew before he got to campus in August that there were questions about how long he would be able to play with the Ducks.

The NCAA’s eligibility center requires that all prospective intercollegiate athletes supply a timeline accounting for all of their activities prior to college competition. Boucher’s timeline included a final year of high school as a junior in 2010-11, a year of inactivity in 2011-12, and a year of what would equate to postgraduate study that included 13 games of competition in 2012-13.

The NCAA, however, has deemed the end of his junior year as his high school graduation date, leaving 2011-12 as a postgraduate “gap year” and the time at Alma Academy and the 13 games he played against other prep schools as his first year of college competition. Thus, it views Boucher’s two seasons of junior college play as his sophomore and junior seasons of eligibility and this season his final, senior year.

Oregon sees it differently, and five members of its compliance staff have put together a request for a waiver that they plan to submit to the NCAA as soon as the end of this week. The request, which seeks a final season of eligibility for Boucher in 2016-17, includes a series of documents known as statements of fact, such as transcripts and other documents, and statements of mitigation in the form of letters from Boucher, Rwigema and Appiah, and Boucher’s parents.

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Oregon is arguing three points, according to Jody Sykes, the school’s senior associate athletic director for compliance:

► That if not for his family hardship, Boucher would have been more successful in his ninth through 11th-grade years and would have qualified for a 12th-grade year. That would make 2012-13 a postgraduate year (a common waypoint for many college basketball prospects in the states), and not a season of college competition.

► That the 13 prep school games he played with Alma Academy in 2012-13 do not equate to a full season of collegiate competition.

► Third, that if he is allowed to remain participating in basketball at Oregon next season, he will be able to finish his undergraduate degree at the same time, becoming the first person in his family to graduate college.

“Look, this kid is capable of doing this,” Sykes says. “He’s succeeding. So give him an extra year, don’t penalize him because of his situation. Give him that time to see what he can do.”

Altman says Oregon is committed to helping Boucher earn his degree regardless of what happens with the waiver request. “He’s a motivated young man,” Altman says. “We get daily reports on study halls and his tutorial work. He’s always there. It’s not just basketball he’s motivated with. He’s got an opportunity here, and he’s trying to make the most of it.”

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Four years of hopelessness and inactivity have given way to the exact opposite for Boucher. And the sister who used to have to explain away his lethargy is about to become the second member of his family to pursue a college degree.

“I feel like this has helped our whole family because we used to have a lot of issues, and now everybody’s together,” Boucher says. “I feel like everybody’s living through this.

“Now they see me on the TV and they see me doing well, it’s like if you keep the faith, anything can happen. Because they saw where I was, and look where I am right now.”

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