One brother chose basketball. Another picked music. Both paths have taken Ben Wisniewski and Brett Newski all over the world.

The biggest break in Ben Wisniewski's basketball career came at a bar in Saigon, even though he was home in the Midwest at the time.

The former New Berlin West standout played four seasons at Edgewood College, leaving in 2012 with the second-most points in school history. The 6-foot-2 guard still wanted to be involved in basketball, but his highest experience was on a down-and-out semi-pro team in Gary, Indiana, where he was getting $20 a game. His hopes to play in Canada or Mexico sputtered.

Wisniewski's brother, a wandering musician known professionally as Brett Newski, was living in Vietnam at the time, teaching guitar and writing commercial jingles. Newski went on a date to a local bar, but a larger-than-life man in a Wisconsin shirt caught his eye. They started talking about shared Eau Claire roots and the man introduced himself as Jason Rabedeaux, a brilliant-but-troubled head coach of the Saigon Heat in the ASEAN Basketball League whose former gigs included a stint as an assistant at Marquette.

Newski told Rabedeaux about his brother and showed the coach a highlight reel. That led to Wisniewski showing up in Saigon as a practice player and front-office assistant for the Heat. The brothers' paths soon went off in wildly different directions, but their wanderlust came together at exactly the right time.

Wisniewski went from Saigon to outside of Seattle, coaching in high school and then as part of a NCAA Division I staff. He went on to help lead one of the greatest collections of talent in prep basketball history in Florida before landing his current job molding talent in the Czech Republic. Newski has become a popular local artist – and recent book author – who plays gigs around the world.

“Brett led the way," Wisniewski said. "Once you start traveling, it’s addictive. It’s almost like a drug. You want to keep seeing new places, new countries and experiencing new things. Probably, inherently, it’s in us naturally, but Brett paved the way.”

He told his brother that a few years ago.

"He said I was an influence on him to go after the coaching thing," Newski said just before heading to South Africa to start a new tour. "He was going to go corporate and go into like insurance sales and he saw me pursuing these weird paths and unconventional occupations and he said it really helped push him toward that and that it was actually possible.

"It’s awesome and I’m proud of him for going for it. He’s way less of a weirdo than I am. He’s got his head on straight a bit more. He just has less of like a weird brain. It’s nice to see him still going after weird, out-of-the-box careers because he could have ended up a lifer insurance guy. Which, he could have made great money, but probably wouldn’t have been fulfilled."

Basketball was a shared passion between brothers

Newski, now 36, is two years older than his brother. They were indoctrinated into basketball by their father.

“It started when I was probably 3 or 4 years old," Wiesniewski said. "As soon as I could walk and could dribble, that’s what our dad had us doing. I fell in love with it early. By third grade I was playing AAU and traveling to national basketball tournaments and basically playing 12 months a year when I was 8 or 9 years old. I loved it and it never got old. That was the start of it and of course now it’s 28, 29, 30 years later and I’m still doing basketball full-time."

Newski was also a good player at New Berlin West – "spot-up shooter" according to the scouting report from his brother – and he played a season at UW-Eau Claire. But he also spent weekends making music and playing in bands.

“6-foot-1, pretty slow, generic white guy," Newski said. "Ben was like a seriously next-level player. I was above average but limited.”

Not long after graduating from Eau Claire, Newski took off for Southeast Asia with his guitar and no real plans. He ended up in Saigon and that fateful encounter with Rabedeaux.

Jason Rabedeaux set Wisniewski on coaching path

Rabedeaux, who was a standout athlete at Eau Claire Memorial High School, was once one of college basketball's most promising minds. He was the head coach at Texas-El Paso at 34 years old in 1999, but his career soon bottomed out due to problems with alcohol. He died under mysterious circumstances in 2014, and his last troubled years in Vietnam were chronicled in a harrowing ESPN story.

Wisniewski's time with Rabedeaux was short, but Rabedeaux saw that the fellow Wisconsinite was destined to be on the sideline directing the action. Rabedeaux's ex-wife lived outside of Seattle, and Kingston High School, which their two sons attended, needed a coach. Rabedeaux set that move in motion.

“He really convinced me to get into coaching and I am forever grateful to him for that," Wisniewski said. "He taught me a lot. I spent 6½, 7 months with him and he was great. He was a mentor.

"Throughout early in my coaching career, when I was at Kingston, we hopped on the phone once every two months, three months. Obviously gave him updates on how his kids were doing and asked for advice on things. So I’m incredibly appreciative of Coach Rab and that was an incredibly sad story. I stay in touch with his younger son, Cole, who is now in coaching. First he was at Houston, now he is at Winona State.”

Wisniewski headed back to the States, but not before experiencing life as a professional athlete overseas by suiting up for a few games with the Heat.

"I was on a motorbike trip in Vietnam with a buddy," Newski said. "We were up in the mountains. We were staying in some motel that’s like five bucks a night. There might not have been a window in the room.

"I flip on the TV and it’s completely shot and there’s one channel that’s fuzzing in and out and I see my brother on a Vietnamese channel. He’s like covering some 6-10 guy in Singapore. They were playing Singapore and their big guy fouled out, so the next biggest guy is Ben. He’s like playing post defense on this former NBA guy. Just hilarious."

Coaching future NBA players at Montverde Academy

Wisniewski spent four years as head coach at Kingston High School, compiling a 41-46 record. He was paid only a small stipend, so he also sold commercial insurance.

"I knew this was something I wanted to do for the rest of my life," Wisniewski said. "So I quit my insurance job and I quit my basketball job and I just started hunting for jobs.

"I slept in my assistant coach’s spare bedroom for a couple months and I made phone calls every single day and went to Washington practice and went to Seattle U practice and went to Division II practices and kept pushing my way in the door and was trying to find somebody to hire me.”

Washington head coach Mike Hopkins took on Wisniewski as a graduate assistant. Wisniewski learned about Division I hoops while also completing graduate studies in education.

An assistant coach at Washington was childhood friends with Kevin Boyle, a highly accomplished coach at basketball power Montverde Academy in Florida. That became another fortuitous connection.

Boyle hired Wisniewski to help with player development and he later coached Montverde's post-grad team. He also was an assistant for Boyle, including the 2019-20 team considered one of the greatest high school squads of all time. Six players from that roster – Cade Cunningham, Scottie Barnes, Moses Moody, Caleb Houstan, Day'Ron Sharpe and Dariq Whitehead – have since been NBA draft picks.

"It was a great learning experience to learn what it takes for those guys to get there," Wisniewski said. "Because those NBA guys at Montverde were sacrificing when they were 15, 16 years old. They were acting like professionals at that age.

"It teaches you that it takes more than just talent to get there."

Back overseas with the Get Better Academy in the Czech Republic

The Get Better Academy was founded in Jindřichův Hradec, Czech Republic, by former Butler player Julian Betko to develop the talent in Eastern Europe.

Two years ago, Wisniewski was looking for another challenge. He found that at GBA.

“It’s twofold," Wisniewski said. "One, I’ve learned a lot about the game, especially on the offensive end. Because European basketball is predicated on spacing. Most teams are running five-out, read-and-react offense so it’s really creative.

"It’s quick movement. It’s less dribbles. Less one-on-one. I’ve learned a lot, on both ends. The defensive end, too, creative ways of coverages and terminology. I came over with the intent to build a network of people to meet and to build a recruiting network and to get to European championship events and to get to meet agents. And I came away after Year 1 with such a great knowledge and improvement of the game and have learned so much about the game, which has been wonderful."

Wisniewski likes to tell the story about when, five days after he landed in the Czech Republic, he went on a solo, 21-day scouting trip through Bulgaria and Macedonia in which he lost his phone and had to get directions without speaking the local languages. It's still an adventure for him.

"Coaching is always one year at a time," Wisniewski said. "That’s how I’ve taken it. But I do expect to come back to the States and my main goal is to be a Division I coach. That’s part of the reason coming overseas, too, was to help build a network for future recruiting and the point where I come back to college basketball."

Next month, Wisniewski will travel to see Newski perform in Amsterdam.

"That’ll be glorious," Newski said. "Because it’s the last day of the tour, then we’ll have two days to hang together."

Then the brothers will go their separate ways again, back to chasing their dreams the way they have for their whole lives.

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This article originally appeared on Milwaukee Journal Sentinel: Brothers Ben Wisniewski and Brett Newski, a basketball coach, musician