Fordham coach Tom Pecora has several drills that he uses to develop toughness in his basketball players. One of his favorites is known as "Rebounding League," in which a trio of three-man teams engages in a simultaneous scramble for the ball. It can get physical.

Junior forward Chris Gaston, who is from Union City, N.J., averaged 11.3 rebounds last year, the most of any player returning to a Division 1 team. Associated Press

The revealing part for Pecora is that he lets his players choose who participates. That means six players are left out, which is a sort of indictment. "It lets those guys on the sideline know, 'Hey, I'm not telling you that you're soft—your teammates are,'" Pecora said. "Needless to say, Chris Gaston has never not gotten picked."

That's because Gaston, a junior forward from Union City, N.J., who plies his trade far from the spotlight of top-tier college basketball, is the country's best rebounder. Though Fordham has struggled in recent seasons (and that's putting it mildly), Gaston has established himself as an absolute wizard when it comes to feasting on other players' errant shots.

Last season, Gaston ranked fourth in the country in rebounding, with 11.3 per game. The three players ahead of him are now professionals, and that includes former Morehead State standout Kenneth Faried, a first round pick of the Denver Nuggets—and a Newark native who was, for a brief stretch, Gaston's AAU teammate. "That's motivation, right there," Gaston said. "Watching him get drafted, that was a really big thing for me."

Like Faried, who was known to wield his 6-foot-8 frame with all the finesse of a bulldozer, Gaston is relatively undersized at 6-foot-7. As a result, he can't rely on sheer size to pluck rebounds off the rim. Sure, there is his determination, grit and hustle—basketball clichés that do have some truth to them. But he also takes an analytical approach to his craft.

For Gaston, the rebounding process almost always starts before the shot even goes up. He explained how he positions his body based on percentages. Say a player launches a baseline jumper with an average-looking trajectory. Gaston knows there's about a 70% chance the ball will carom long to the opposite side of the court. But if a player has a flat jump shot, there's a greater likelihood that the ball will strike the front of the rim. Gaston said his goal is to remove as much guesswork from the process as possible. Rather than react, he wants to anticipate.

"He's just mastered that skill," said Ben Gamble, one of his former assistant coaches at St. Anthony High School in Jersey City.

Gaston has a particular advantage when it comes to offensive rebounding because he has a feel for his teammates' shooting tendencies. As a freshman and sophomore, he averaged 3.77 offensive rebounds per game. That put him in some elite company. Since 1996-97, just three Division 1 players have averaged more through their first two college seasons—a list headlined by former Pittsburgh star DeJuan Blair, who now plays for the San Antonio Spurs.

Pecora, whose young team will open the season against Syracuse on Nov. 12, stresses offensive rebounding with his players, and he cites a statistic from last season: The Rams shot about 15% better from the field after securing offensive rebounds. It makes sense. Even if an offensive rebound doesn't lead directly to a layup or a dunk, it extends the possession and wears out defenders. Nobody on the team—and perhaps in the country—got more easy layups or extended more possessions than Gaston.

This all comes with a caveat, of course. As Pecora put it: "We missed a lot of shots, so there were a lot of rebounds to be had." The Rams were lousy last season, Pecora's first as head coach. They went 7-21 overall, their lone Atlantic-10 victory coming on the final day of the season—an upset of Massachusetts, which snapped a 17-game losing streak. Fordham shot 39.6% from the field, which ranked 315th out of 335 Division 1 teams.

Gaston was one of the team's only bright spots. He averaged 15.9 points and blocked 41 shots. As a freshman, he averaged 18 points and 11.4 rebounds. He hopes to have help this season. Point guard Devon McMillan, a Brooklyn product, is one of six freshmen who could contribute.

Gaston wasn't exactly a can't-miss prospect. At St. Anthony, he seldom vacated the bench as a member of the freshman and junior varsity teams. He finally got some playing time with the varsity as a junior, then blossomed as a senior—though his season was interrupted for six weeks because of a knee injury. The roster was stocked with elite talent—Tyshawn Taylor (Kansas), Travon Woodall (Pittsburgh) and Mike Rosario (Florida) were all elite recruits—but coach Bob Hurley said he considered Gaston his "best player" that season.

The problem was Gaston's unwillingness to apply himself in the classroom, an issue exacerbated by Attention Deficit Disorder. Gaston makes no excuses. "I just didn't work at all," he said. "I thought basketball would take care of everything. And then I'm seeing all my boys graduate, getting scholarships, coaches coming to the gym for them. After my senior year, I had to go to summer school and they said I still wasn't going to get my diploma. I started crying. I felt like I'd wasted my entire high school career doing nothing."

He attended two prep schools as he sought academic eligibility, and even then Fordham was the only school that showed interest. Though he's made the most of that opportunity, there have been other obstacles. After his freshman season, he was involved in a car wreck. Gaston was a passenger, and he said he can remember counting the number of times the car flipped: eight. "That messed me up for a long time—I was always having flashbacks," Gaston said. "But it was weird, because even as it was happening, I had this feeling that I knew I wasn't going to die, that I was going to be OK."

This season, Gaston wants to continue to do what he does best while helping his team win more games. His rebounding prowess is aided in no small measure by his Inspector Gadget-like wingspan—a full 7 feet. Gaston makes use of his length by tipping rebounds to himself over the outstretched arms of opponents. He just needs to get a "piece" of the ball, he said, before he can secure it for good.

This isn't a technique that coaches teach. In fact, it's usually discouraged by the sport's old-school practitioners, who decree that players go after the ball with two hands. And in theory, that's the way it ought to be. But Gaston is an exception: Because he's usually going up against taller opponents, he often to rely on guile and his impossibly long arms. So he'll tap at the ball—once, twice, three times—knowing, in the end, the effort will be worth it.