That time I was a D1 College Basketball Player

Some days I wish I could go back to being a no life degenerate HRL member.

In August of 2020, I committed a Felony. What started as a harmless joke became my worst nightmare for the next 11 months. Shoutout Mosey btw.

During the pandemic none of us had lives. Well maybe you did, but I certainly did not. I would wake up, log onto zoom for class, and spend the rest of the day playing Madden, 2k, GTA, and Fortnite. That’s it. There was also that time I got THE buzzcut, but really nothing else.

I used to play in these Madden leagues with my friend. Lets call him “Mohammad” because I don’t wanna say his real name in case y’all snitch. Idk how the legal system works. Basically, the game lets you create your own league where one individual user can control one team. We used to play in leagues with 30 teams controlled by the computer, me controlling one team, and him controlling another. Eventually, it got pretty boring so we went searching on the internet for online leagues with 30 other human controlled users. We found a league in may and joined the discord created for league communication.

From there we bounced around different leagues until we found the perfect one. HRL. HRL was the perfect league. Super fun community, realistic gameplay, and people with “real ball knowledge”. Yes it was 30 other mostly grown men so kinda weird but it was the closest thing to paradise possible during such a perplexing time. Every user had an account name and mine was of course, Bilo. Me and “Mohammad” were in the league for about a month when one day he had a genius idea.

He went to 247Sports, a common recruiting webpage and found a guy. “Jared Billups”. It made sense because my nickname had ‘bil’ in it. But there was one problem. I didn’t want my first name to be Jared. So we kept searching. And from there a legend was born.

My life now changed forever. Literally. Every time Trey had a high school basketball game, I would go offline. Every time he went on vacation, I also went off the grid. I changed my spotify username, my profile picture, and everything. Like I kid u not when I say I had no life. Every time Trey posted on Instagram, I prayed to Allah the league members wouldn’t comment. But of course they commented. For context I lost to a user named Donny in the playoffs in a heartbreaker.

I thought it was over. Doomed. Hopeless. But one of them decided to comment. “If you’re the real Trey Bilo Fais, like this comment”. And he liked it. I had never seen, spoken to, interacted with, or even known Trey. Yet, I was him. For the next several months the group got off my back.

At the time Trey was ranked around 60th in the country with several offers and shortly after I claimed I was him he narrowed down his schools to 5. Certain that he was committing to Oklahoma, I started hyping them up, but then out of nowhere he decided to go to Auburn. I thought the act was over, yet the league was still convinced. So I started hyping up Auburn and then he decommitted. Once again I thought I was done so for fun when asked where I might go next. I jokingly said “Creighton” because wtf even is a “Creighton”. 6 days later. He commits to Creighton.

I continued my concerning and obsessive tracking of Trey to make sure I didn’t slip up. As hard as it is to become a 4 Star D1 Athlete, it is MUCH harder to PRETEND to be that athlete. Especially when you have little fan boys.

The league owner was a man in his early 30s who was a “police officer” and pretty broke. He still tried to give me financial advice one time. His nickname was “Womb****” Long story short, one day out of nowhere “Womb” had his friend tell everyone “Womb” killed himself. I guess he was expecting us to get sad and start crying, but everyone hated him so we started celebrating. Some discord detectives found out the death was fake, but womb also purged the league and deleted the server so we had to start back from scratch. It was mid 2021 and Trey left for college in just 2 months so my time was coming to an end.

The league rebooted, but it never felt the same without “womb” the dictator so I announced my madden retirement.

In college Trey became a household name for Creighton. Following his freshman year he declared for the NBA draft while retaining college eligibility and I received this message.

Trey didn’t get drafted so he returned to college for one more season with increased productivity and efficiency. And in January this year, after over two years of vanishing from the league. I made a return.

But people weren’t sure if it was actually me.

I thought it was over. It was a two-edged sword. If I send a selfie, everyone will know I’m not Trey Alexander, and that I’m actually Tahir Al Eshkar. If I don’t send a selfie no one will believe it anymore. But then I remembered. In early 2021, I sent Trey a snap. He snapped back. I saved the snap.

The mission was saved.

Trey redeclared for the draft and announced the end of his college career last month. With him league bound, — or I guess me league bound — one question remains. Do I tell them the truth now?

Thanks for reading and I hope you enjoyed. Here are some of my basketball highlights.