On paper, the process might not have seemed so foreign.
Play over the summer to stay sharp. Arrive in August to meet with the team. Start practice on the first day of September.
But former Penn women's basketball standout Joey Rhoads was a long way from the Palestra.
"It's a local recreation gym. No big seating," Rhoads said of her new digs. "You don't think of it as being a professional basketball stadium."
And yet it is, just as Rhoads is a professional basketball player.
After attending a summer tryout camp in Germany, the 2007 Wharton grad signed on with the Finnish club BC Nokia in August. Based in Nokia, Finland (of the eponymous cell-phone company), the team belongs to a nine-club federation known as "Division I," the highest level of competition for Finnish hoops.
Right away, Rhoads recognized that her new peers were nothing like the Ivy League archetypes to whom she had grown accustomed.
"If you've seen NBA European players, it's like that," she said. "They can't exactly create their own shot, they're not great ball-handlers, but they're always really good shooters."
Adjusting to the more physical nature of the international game has also been a challenge for the 5-foot-4 Rhoads.
"Here they just basically ride you up the court," she said. "They can push you around a lot."
Despite the learning curve, Rhoads has enjoyed a strong rookie campaign. With her team clinging to a two-game lead for the sixth and final playoff spot, she has poured in 12.9 points per game - good for second on BC Nokia - and is the current league-leader in free-throw percentage at over 87 percent.
"I'm not surprised," said Penn coach Pat Knapp, under whom Rhoads played for three of her four seasons. "She was the heart and soul of our program."
Of course, there have also been non-basketball adjustments to life across the Atlantic.
"It's a lot simpler lifestyle," Rhoads said. "If you go to a restaurant and ask for a large coffee, they hand you a cup that's half the size of a small at Starbucks.
"And they don't have a Super Size menu at McDonald's."
Dining aside, Rhoads has found that the life of a pro ballplayer leaves her with plenty of hours to fill.
While practices at Penn often totaled three hours a day - not to mention game-tape sessions and the minor nuisance of schoolwork - her daily responsibilities for BC Nokia usually only amount to an hour-and-a-half of practice.
In her spare time, Rhoads uses her playing salary - roughly $1,500 a month, plus housing and meal stipends - to explore the country's frozen terrain.
When she's not indulging in undersized lattes and McNuggets, Rhoads is often on her computer, checking in with friends from back home.
"I'd say we probably e-mail each other on a daily basis or G-chat on Google," former Penn teammate Monica Naltner said.
Naltner was exposed to the international game last October. While working for Macy's in her native Cincinnati, Naltner received news from her agent that a club team in Mozambique was looking for a player to fill out its roster for an upcoming 10-day tournament.
The following day, Naltner told Macy's she would need two weeks off. Three days after that, she was in the starting lineup for Ferroviario, one of 10 teams in the Africa Cup.
En route to her squad's third-place finish in the tournament, Naltner learned many of the same lessons as Rhoads about the foreign brand of play.
"At Penn, we're taught fundamentals and the proper form in doing things," Naltner said. "In Africa, it's more free-style. Any way you can score, you score. A lot of our teams in the Ivy League were physical, but it's not really the physicality that there was in Maputo [the capital of Mozambique and host city of the tournament]. Fouls were not called as often."
Though she says she would be opened to the possibility of playing again, Naltner has no plans to suit up in the near future.
Rhoads, on the other hand, will spend her summer fielding offers from international clubs.
"I have an agent right now who works out of Germany, so she'll help me out, send my information to different coaches and see what kind of offers I get," she said. "I'd like to go somewhere else. I know I'm not going to get rich off of playing basketball. I'm using it more as an excuse to travel."
