Senegal native Maurice Ndour's life and basketball future suddenly changed when he was 15 and received an offer to play high school basketball in Japan. It proved to be an unforgettable experience that he cherishes to this day.
Maurice Ndour, Valencia: 'I have fond memories of Japan'
Interviews
7 Mins read
It is common for promising young basketball players from outside North America to spend part of their high school education in the United States, developing their talents and learning the sense of responsibility that comes with moving away from home at an early age. Valencia Basket forward Maurice Ndour, however, took a very different route to success. After growing up in Senegal, Africa, the teenage Ndour elected not to head west but instead to go east, to Japan.
Ndour started playing basketball at a young age: "I grew up in M'Bour, a small city about eight kilometers from the capital, Dakar. We call it the small coast – lots of fishermen, nice beaches, a really nice city," he explained.
"On the very first practice, I fell in love with the sport."
"I started playing soccer first, but then I stopped when I was eight years old and I was just hanging out with my friends. My mom got tired of that, and she asked me one day if I wanted to play basketball. She had a friend who was a coach at the local club, so she wanted me to go there. On the very first practice, I fell in love with the sport and from that day on I never stopped playing."
Ndour's devotion to basketball allowed him to become one of the region’s most outstanding young talents and at the age of 15, his abilities attracted unexpected interest, which led to a moment that changed his life.
"I was playing in a local tournament and a guy approached me and asked me if I wanted to go and play high school basketball in Japan," he recalled. "He was called Assane Badji and was working for the SEED Academy, a non-profit basketball academy that helps a lot of kids in Africa. Through them, he had links with Japanese high schools. He saw a talent in me, and wanted to give me the opportunity to take that talent somewhere."
You can imagine the reaction of Ndour's mother when her 15-year-old son returned home from a basketball tournament and told her that he wanted to move to Japan, but she was soon convinced by the idea – even though it meant young Maurice committing to moving for three years without any chance to visit Japan before making his decision.
"Taking a 15-year-old boy from Senegal all the way to Japan was not easy."
"At first my mom thought I was joking, she didn't believe me!" he laughed. "But then she said: 'Okay, you've got to call Assane Badji, he can come here and speak to me.' So he came down to our house and talked to my mom, and then she let me go.
"I saw it as an opportunity to go to a completely different continent, learn about their culture, learn their language and play basketball. At that point, I hadn't really thought about my future and the approach came totally out of the blue."
Within weeks Ndour was on the plane to Japan, en route to the Gakugeikan High School in Okayama, a city of 700,000 people in western Japan, and he quickly realized that his new life in Asia would provide a completely fresh set of experiences.
"Somebody met me at the airport and the first thing I remember noticing is that a lot of people were wearing masks," he said. “But I soon realized it's just a respectful thing to do. If you have a cold, you wear a mask because you don’t want to pass it onto anyone else."
Ndour’s settling-in process was helped by the fact that he was not the only young athlete from overseas and it did not take him too long to feel comfortable in his new surroundings.
"I lived in a dorm with other athletes who were on sports scholarships at the school. We had a couple of guys on the soccer team from Brazil, a tennis player from Taiwan who was actually the number 2 in Asia. And we had another guy from Senegal who was already on my basketball team before I got there, so he showed me the ropes and the ways of life in Japan," Ndour explained.
"Culture-wise I picked things up pretty quick. I just watched and learned, and saw how people did things. But basketball-wise it was a totally different game for me. Coming from Senegal where we practiced a couple of hours a day with 100 kids, joining a team of 15 to 18 guys where we practiced four hours a day with real structured and disciplined sessions, it was kind of hard at the beginning.
Organized basketball for the first time. It wasn't easy, but after a while, I got used to it." Even more than the basketball lessons he learned, though, the greatest long-term benefit of Ndour's move to Japan were the life lessons – the personal development he was forced to undergo.
"The first six months, I was homesick," he admitted. "Taking a 15-year-old boy from Senegal all the way to Japan was not easy. I only spoke to my family once a week on the phone, so it was not easy, but in the end reality hits. I thought: 'Okay, I'm here, I'm a man. I've got to leave my parents' house and make a living of my own.'
"I learned so much about hard work, discipline, respecting people, challenging myself."
"I had to grow up real quick and start taking responsibility for myself, knowing that whatever actions you take there are consequences and you've got to live up to that. I was very young to learn that, but it made me feel mature compared to other kids my age. Whenever I went back home and was talking to the friends I'd grown up with, or even with kids my age in Japan, I could see that maturity level was different. I learned self-discipline and hard work. They were things I really had to develop in Japan and it was a very valuable experience to me."
He enjoyed success on the basketball court, becoming an Okayama all-star selection two years in a row and eventually doing well enough to earn a college scholarship in the United States at the end of his three years in Japan.
Even now, though, he looks back on his time in Asia as a pivotal moment not only in his career, but also in his life.
"I'm so grateful," he concluded. "It was the best thing that could have happened to me, not only as a basketball player but as a human being. I learned so much about hard work, discipline, respecting people, challenging myself. Just being somebody who is responsible at a young age.
"I really have fond memories of Japan. It was an amazing learning experience for me and I wouldn't change it for anything in the world."