Every summer, Toronto Raptors GM Masai Ujiri travels to Africa to train young players. The goal: to change the continent.

By Evan Rosser in Lagos, Nigeria, and Accra, Ghana
Photography by Adrian Armstrong

From their first glimpse of Masai Ujiri—the man himself, in the flesh—they’d be hard-pressed to recognize the Raptors GM. The generator has yet to be switched on; the gym is dark. Ujiri is backlit, coming in from the eye-aching wash of morning sunlight, betrayed only by the skinny legs his closest friends have always made fun of, the small shaved head he himself targets for jokes, and his distinctive, hip-rolling gait. It’s quiet—only the swollen rivers of Lagos traffic audible in the distance—and cool despite the lack of air conditioning. Sunlight trickles around slats high up the walls and peeks through openings under the top four rows of seating. Ujiri walks a lap of the court, surveying the space. Admittedly, the camera crew following him is a bit of a giveaway on the identity front. Still, the elite youth basketball players grouped on the bleachers keep silent as he passes, watching him.

Workers only began setting up last night after a church group finished with the gym, but the court is down—plastic sports floor laid over kicked-to-pieces hardwood. The main uprights are in place, gleaming white at the base of either key, but have yet to be raised. Two more baskets, portable ones on blue metal stems, are parked on either side of half court. On Ujiri’s loop past all of it, people approach him for the nod on finishing touches; old friends greet him already laughing, as though “hello” is an inside joke; others seem only to want to shake his hand, to touch his shoulder, to confirm that he’s really come back home. He follows the boundary lines around to a heap of brand-new shirts piled behind the basket nearest the door. There he stoops and, by the light of a cellphone, begins sorting clothes.

Along with every other person in the gym, Ujiri is here at the National Institute for Sports in Lagos for a basketball camp put on by Giants of Africa, an organization he founded in 2003. The best youth basketball players in Nigeria have been selected in a scouting process that began a year ago. The 50 boys will spend the next three days working shoulder-to-shoulder with African-born NBA coaches and scouts, brought over from North America by GOA to help improve every aspect of their developing games. Then the camp will pack up and move on to similar stops in Ghana, Kenya and Rwanda. The whole four-country whirlwind will span just two weeks in early August. And though this is what passes for vacation in the life of the Toronto Raptors GM, his goals for the camp don’t leave much room for downtime: Ujiri is determined to use the sport he loves to lift an entire continent.

By the time the lights come on, the pile of shirts has long been dealt with, and GOA coaches are on to a new sorting job, organizing gear at centre court. GOA has had apparel sponsors, in one form or another, since it launched in Nigeria, and the current arrangement sees every player kitted head to toe in fresh Nike, much of it unique to their particular camp. Divided in rows by shoe size, each bundle contains a jersey, shorts, a warm-up tee, a pair of sneakers and a pair of athletic socks. Blue drawstring backpacks are handed out later in the morning to hold it all.

Like the gear, the boys are divided by shoe size. They leave their own footwear—a 50-50 split between thin rubber flip-flops and basketball shoes—on the bleachers and pad to centre court in single file, the floor rising and falling slightly in places under their bare feet. The NIS gym has no change rooms (the hallways that may once have led to them are boarded up and filled with debris), so the campers dress on the court, quietly pulling on their jerseys and shorts. When each of them is in full uniform, they’re arranged in roughly equal lines on the floor underneath an end basket, sitting tight together with their arms on their knees and their feet on either side of the player in front of them. Just the other side of half, more than a dozen coaches gather to introduce themselves, and are partway through when the generator fails. In the cool and the dark, Ujiri walks to the top of the arc and, in front of the boys, he begins to sing. Just three tones—bah, bah, baaah; high, low, high—the last held for an extra beat. It’s a call, and the boys already know the response: baaaaaaaah, low and sustained. Ujiri calls again: bah, bah, baaah. They answer: baaaaaaaah. Claps echo through the gym, unstructured at first and then falling into a rhythm. He varies the melody—ee-yay, low to high—and the response still comes—ee-yay-ay-ay, following his pattern then stepping lower. Bah, bah, baaaaah. Baaaaaaaah. The song sends the boys out of the darkened gym and off to breakfast. While they’re eating, the lights come back on—just in time for the scheduled start of activities.

Giants of Africa ran its first camp in the indoor gym of Ahmadu Bello University in Zaria, Nigeria, in December 2003. ABU was a no-brainer for the host venue. Mike Akuboh, GOA’s director and the man who has taken the lead on scouting and day-to-day logistics since the beginning, had been an assistant coach at the school for a few years already, and the campus’s outdoor courts were the place where he, Ujiri and the rest of their high school crew had been introduced to basketball and fallen in love with the sport. According to Akuboh, the first GOA clinic drew 25 kids, all of them six-foot-eight or taller, and “close to 80 percent” went on to play abroad.

Pinning down where the idea for the camps originated is more difficult, if only because it seems to have existed somewhere in the dreams of GOA’s founders long before it was put into words. Ujiri created the organization with another high school friend, Godwin Owinje, and in the GM’s recollection, the spark first flickered to life in 2002, in a studio apartment the two shared just outside of Washington, D.C., in Bladensburg, Md.

“We were used to sharing a studio,” Owinje recalls. “We shared a studio in Bismarck, too.” A big man in both the literal and basketball senses, Owinje is GOA’s director of basketball operations. The short version of how he and Ujiri ended up playing junior college ball together in Bismarck, the pristine capital of North Dakota, goes like this: When he was 20, Ujiri went to Seattle on an exchange program, where he completed his final year of high school. Owinje, meanwhile, impressed a Canadian university coach at an international high school tournament in Sheffield, England, and after saving money for a plane ticket, made his way first to Brandon, Man. He’d expected to find a full-ride scholarship waiting for him on the Prairies, but it never materialized, so he moved on to Bismarck State College. He talked Ujiri into enrolling, talked the coaches into talking to Ujiri, and the two moved into their first shared studio in time for the beginning of the fall semester in 1993. “Just like we tell these kids,” Owinje says, laughing, “basketball will take you places.”

The apartment in Bismarck didn’t have proper beds, just a pair of mattresses side by side on the floor. It was also short a kitchen, but they made do with a camp stove. “We cooked all the time. The rest of the team, they came to eat African food,” says Owinje, clarifying that he was the one in the chef’s hat, because “Masai can’t cook.”

When the two again became roommates in Bladensburg in the early 2000s, their playing days had just ended and, Owinje says, they’d been kicking around the idea of running a basketball camp in Nigeria for years. “I was [playing] in Spain, Masai was in Belgium,” Owinje explains. “One weekend I would drive to Belgium, the other weekend he would drive to Spain. It’s a long drive, but we didn’t have anything else to do.” While hanging out together in Europe, the two got to talking about how good basketball had been to them and all the places it had taken them. “We wanted that same opportunity for kids back home,” Owinje says. “We wanted to simplify the process for them, because the way we got [where we did] was really tough.”

They only started to plan in earnest after Ujiri landed his first job in the NBA, as an unpaid scout for the Orlando Magic. Despite covering his own expenses out of the savings he’d pieced together during his playing days, Ujiri didn’t worry about how he would balance the commitment of the camps. “You just want to figure out ways to get things done,” he says.

By the time they were ready to launch the camp, Ujiri had been hired to scout for the Denver Nuggets—his first paid position in the league. He approached Kiki VanDeWeghe, then the Nuggets GM, for camp uniforms and was pointed to the team’s equipment manager, who ordered “the cheapest version of our practice gear,” which Ujiri describes without a hint of sarcasm as “great.” Those first shirts were powder blue, without branding of any kind. For shoes, he turned to the Nuggets players. “I just put a thing in the middle of the gym and Melo and Kenyon [Martin] and all those guys just put in shoes for me,” he says. Some pairs the players got through sponsorship deals and connections, but many had been worn by the Nuggets themselves. Fortunately, having a stock of NBA player–sized shoes turned out to be a blessing, “because we did that big-man camp the first time.” The second year, Marcus Camby simplified things by donating 80 pairs of AND1s.

Minus the plane tickets to get them over from America, Owinje estimates the first camp—put on with money personally donated by himself, Ujiri and a friend named Ugo Udezue, who’s now an NBA agent—cost roughly $3,500. That’s a drop in the bucket compared to the outlay for a single camp in 2015, which Ujiri says has climbed to “about $40,000 to $50,000,” the price of his ever-rising standards and broadening vision for the organization. After running its first camps outside of Nigeria in 2014, in Nairobi and Mombasa, Kenya, this year Giants of Africa stretched its schedule to include stops in Accra, Ghana, and Kigali, Rwanda. Each new addition takes months of advanced planning—scouting kids, locating facilities and building a fresh network of on-the-ground contacts. But Ujiri never intended to stick only to Nigeria. “My home country was my base and where we started, but I wanted to expand and explore more of Africa,” he says. “This camp is my way of figuring out a way to bring, you know, like, maybe, the continent together.”

After breakfast, the kids are run through an energetic warm-up by Raptors assistant coach Jama Mahlalela and then broken into groups to work on fundamentals. Each of the “foreign coaches,” as they’re called with varying degrees of accuracy, takes a station devoted to a given aspect of the game. Owinje handles layups and post play, Mahlalela takes defence, Raptors director of global scouting Patrick Engelbrecht is on ball-handling and former Nuggets assistant Patrick Mutombo leads passing drills. The campers are nervous, eager to prove they belong, and the result is a sloppy morning. The effort is there, though, along with a seriousness that lends the drills a do-or-die intensity. Addressing the kids ahead of the lunch break, Ujiri asks which of them are tired. After three hours of all-out exertion, not a single hand rises. He next asks how many are hungry, and a few admit they are. “OK, guys who said they are hungry can go eat,” he jokes. “The rest stay here and keep playing.”

The boys settle into team drills and then games in the afternoon, and the level of play improves as they become more comfortable with the camp and one another. By the next morning, they’re joking and laughing together, waiting for the camp to start. The change in demeanour is an obvious contrast to the previous day’s charged silence, but not quite as stark as the change in location: The boys are packed on a pair of rickety pressboard bleachers to one end of the pockmarked concrete courts in front of the NIS.

Around 7:45 a.m., when the kids were supposed to be getting into the gym, Ujiri’s phone lit up. It was Akuboh, calling from the NIS to tell him the facility’s doors were locked and the staff refused to open them. The way the explanation filtered through Ujiri, the person in charge of the NIS gym saw pieces of the first day of camp and decided that GOA thought too much of itself. “Apparently, they said they saw a lot of white people here from the NBA and [wanted to know], ‘What is that about?’” he says. “I think the person felt, I don’t know, that he needed to show a little power, a little ego, to us.” Ujiri got off the phone with Akuboh, took a car to the office of the gym’s director and waited there for about 20 minutes only to have the director emerge and walk past him on his way to the gym. “After a lot of people had, maybe, given him attention,” Ujiri says, “he came and approved that they open the gym.”

The boys are back in their rows in the paint, where they sat when Ujiri first sang them off to breakfast. They sit closer today, tucked together, the boundaries between them diminished, but the air of playfulness that surrounded them on the bleachers outside is gone. They know that whatever Ujiri has to tell them, it’s serious. “This is why you have to listen and be leaders,” he’s saying, pacing the floor in front of them. “This country is bullshit. We have bullshit people who do bullshit things to us—that’s why we’re late.”

His voice trembles slightly, shot through with frustration and urgency. “We’re headed the wrong way,” he tells the kids. And then, emphatically: “You hear me?”

The answer comes loud, but automatic: “Yes, sir!”

“Don’t say yes just to say yes,” he pleads with them, waiting a beat to let it sink in. “There are millions and millions of kids in Nigeria. Many of them would love to be in your position. You must be special.”

Those last words carry the weight of a lifetime of faith in the transformative power of sport. They feel personal, both in the sense of demanding accountability from each player individually and of revealing something hidden in Ujiri—the belief that his measure of success or failure for everything Giants of Africa does lies in the ability of the campers to buckle down and improve not just themselves and their immediate surroundings, but entire countries, all of Africa. The frustration of being locked out of the gym isn’t that it puts GOA’s ability to teach basketball at risk—day two of the camp starts more or less on time—it’s that the example set by a man willing to bar kids from a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity just to have his ass kissed puts everything Ujiri hopes to impart about respect and hard work at risk. “We’re not changing those men,” he’ll say later. “It has to be the youth that we affect, that we teach to do things the right way. They have to know. They have to be better.”

Mahlalela lets Ujiri’s words hang in the air for a few moments before stepping in and starting the warm-up. Lines of campers criss-cross the court, and Mahlalela tells the players to high-five each other as they pass. He runs alongside them, clapping and shouting encouragement. “Let’s blow the roof off this place!” he yells, seeming to mean it literally. The kids holler back to Mahlalela, reflecting his energy.

Though there are some 19- and 20-year-olds in the mix, GOA’s interest in developing younger players skews the camp’s roster toward 14, 15 and 16. Despite those fresh faces, they’re big—not necessarily filled out, but tall and long-limbed with hands laid out in the same proportions as the paws on a months-old German Shepherd. Even among the players who only picked up the sport in the past two years, most of the boys have solid experience on school and academy teams, and the games that close out day two are played with an impressive blend of control and creativity.

Hassan Abdullahi is a veteran not just of camps like GOA, but of GOA itself, first spotted by Akuboh in an academy tournament in his hometown of Kaduna in northern Nigeria. Last year, he was second runner-up for the camp’s MVP award, and the strength of that performance landed him a spot in the NBA’s Basketball Without Borders program, which in late July brought 100 of the best under-18 players from across the continent to South Africa. Abdullahi turned 17 the day he landed in Johannesburg, where San Antonio Spurs head coach Gregg Popovich took a strong liking to him.

Abdullahi is luckier than many African players because there’s a court on the housing estate where he lives with his father. When he was small, his dad would take him to watch games there every evening. Eventually, he developed an interest of his own and started going alone. Most of the facilities in Kaduna are half courts. “Some are shaky, some are slanty,” he says. All, like the hardtop at the estate, are outdoors. He says it was difficult for him to adjust to playing inside, but in the games at GOA, he looks to have managed just fine.

A smart and skilled point guard bearing a more than passing resemblance to Chris Paul, Abdullahi is one of the few players at the camp capable of taking over a game—and the only one who can do it with something other than sheer physical dominance. He’s unflappable with the ball in his hands, running his team through plays and dictating the tempo of the game, and a classic floor general without it, guiding off-ball action and orchestrating the defence. “I’ve learned a lot here,” he says of the camp, watching a day-two game from the stands, “especially leadership—the ability to have that control, even when you’re losing. How to play under pressure and knowing how to believe in yourself—that’s what I’m taking home.”

He’s also planning to bring the new drills he’s learned back to Kaduna, where he’ll work with his academy coach to implement them. Once a week, he and his teammates walk the grounds of their estate picking up trash and cutting the grass. “We’ll keep doing that,” he says, “to show people we really learned something from outside.”

The final day of camp in Nigeria is given over completely to games, culminating in an all-star contest featuring the top 20 players, as selected by the coaches. Abdullahi is the second player picked for the Green All Stars and ends up teamed with another standout. Charles Bassey lacks Abdullahi’s polish, but that doesn’t stop him from being the most dominant player in camp, an athletic six-foot-nine with arms that could wrap around a mature redwood and the skill to knock down his jumpers and lead the fast break.

A youth coach discovered Bassey at 12, selling fried chickens by the side of the road. Already up around six and a half feet tall, he was wearing flip-flops several sizes too small for him, and his feet and ankles were cut up and caked in sand and gravel. The coach invited him out to a three-day camp, his introduction to the game. “I’m two and a half years in basketball thanks to him,” Bassey says. He now trains seven hours a day and is due to head to a high school in Austin, Texas on scholarship in the new year.

Bassey establishes himself early in the all-star game, finishing a bounce pass from Abdullahi with a big two-handed flush to open the scoring and swatting a baseline layup attempt out of bounds on the next sequence. After two minutes of scrambling play, he finishes a fast break with another dunk to extend the lead to 4–0. Thanks to some quality deep shooting from the White All Stars, it’s not a runaway, but Green is up 11–8 at the half. Abdullahi and Bassey connect again early in the second in highlight-reel fashion, the former tossing the latter an alley-oop off the glass. Bassey ultimately sinks the dagger with a minute and a half left, hitting a three off a sideline inbounds pass to ice it. Green wins 30–16.

In an unsurprising turn, Bassey is named the camp’s MVP. Minutes later, standing on the tan gravel of the parking area outside the NIS, he shows that in at least one respect, he’s already prepared for an NBA locker room. “I don’t believe I was the MVP,” he says. “Without my teammates, I would not be. Thanks to my teammates.”

As robotic as team-first humility can sound from young athletes, Bassey comes off sincere, especially so when he switches to the subject of Ujiri. “He was once like this, once like us,” Bassey says. “I wish him good luck in his life. And us, too, so we can do better and do like this for other people, too.”

The story of Ujiri’s life in basketball begins with a government-issued Volkswagen Beetle painted in the Nigerian national colours making its way from Lagos to Zaria. It was 1978, and the driver was a native of Washington, D.C., named Oliver Johnson, who at 38 had already done three years of military service, worked the line at Lockheed, studied agriculture, joined the Peace Corps, spent a year as a therapist at an orthopedic hospital and served as Nigeria’s senior men’s national basketball coach for seven years. As Johnson tells people: “All basketballers should be able to do at least five things for money.”

The trip north took two days by car, and OBJ, as Johnson is universally known, was making it because the country’s director of sports had just named him the head coach of Ahmadu Bello University. “Some armed robbers stopped me on the road. I didn’t even know they were armed robbers because they were dressed in police uniforms,” Johnson says. They went through his possessions and looked the car over before telling him to get on his way. “They weren’t going to steal a Volkswagen,” he laughs.

OBJ arrived at ABU to find a school equipped with what were the best indoor and outdoor basketball courts in Nigeria at the time. “I always made our facility available to anybody who had the feel for basketball,” he says. “And if I saw a player who showed an interest and had skills he wanted to develop, I would just talk to him.”

Ujiri was eight when OBJ arrived in Zaria, and the ABU courts were something he and his friends passed on their way from school to the soccer pitch. “We would always shoot baskets with the soccer ball on our way,” he says. “Slowly, it just became where we started staying. Then there just came a time when we fell in love with the game and we started playing basketball more than soccer.”

The scales tipped when the boys were about 13, and they tipped hard. “Our lives were on the court,” says T.J. Tijjani, a childhood friend of Ujiri’s who went on to play at Southern Methodist University and now works as an attorney in Phoenix. “We’d get there at 10 a.m. and play until the lights went out.”

At first, the boys coached themselves, Tijjani says. “We did three-man weave, layup drills”—anything they saw on TV or videotape, they took to ABU and practised. They played in the rain and the heat of midday. If there was too much water on the court, they adjusted the rules to eliminate dribbling and played with just passes. If they happened to pass by the court in jeans and flip-flops—or slippers, as they’re known in Nigeria—they played in jeans and flip-flops. “T.J. can tell you, Mike can tell you: We only had one pair of shoes and we played on [outdoor] courts,” says Owinje. “If you don’t have shoes, you play in your slippers—regular slippers. And when we play, after a while, the sole of our shoe wears off. What we do, we go to a cobbler. The cobbler will put tires—car tire, rubber tire—they’ll cut it in the form of the shoe and put it on the shoe. That’s what we play with. We always improvised, just because we wanted to play the game.”

Ujiri remembers between 10 and 20 kids regularly hitting the ABU courts. Their initial introduction to OBJ came without much fanfare—“One time, he just came and started teaching,” Ujiri says—but their first exposure to proper, organized instruction was another story. “[OBJ] had a camp like this,” Ujiri recalls. “I remember he gave out T-shirts that were this exact same colour,” the forest green of the Nigerian flag. “They were ‘Hakeem the Dream’ T-shirts. Those T-shirts were unbelievable. I’ll never forget them in my life. I’ll never forget not even trying to wash that T-shirt, because I didn’t want it to fade.”

In a group that couldn’t exactly be called meaty—Owinje was six-foot-seven and only 175 lb. by the time he went to North America—Ujiri was always the skinniest, and he was mercilessly mocked for it. “We used to call him ‘Mosquito Legs,’” Owinje admits. Akuboh remembers being set up near the baseline in a pickup game and watching Ujiri catch an inbound pass in the corner. “He was going to shoot the ball, and he had the ball up here,” Akuboh says, cocking his arm. “Then he saw me from the corner of his eye and he said, ‘I know why you’re laughing. You’re laughing at my ribs.’”

Then, as now, Ujiri was far from defenceless. “Masai could play,” Owinje says. “Don’t let those skinny legs fool you. He could play. You’d look at him and say, ‘Ooh, what is this skinny guy going to do?’ If you didn’t protect yourself, Masai was dunking on you in a second. And then he’d talk trash. If Masai dunked on one of us in practice—oh my God! You wouldn’t hear the last of it. He would tell you how he prepared, how he got up. He would break it down to you step-by-step.”

He pauses to collect himself. “But in a good way, though.”

The upbeat frenzy of a marching band drifting in from somewhere beyond the soccer field to the west of the courts almost puts the whole scene over the top. Giants of Africa arrived in Accra last night—escorted by a police pickup, cherries flashing, to a small hotel tucked down a street well on its way from pavement back to dirt—and the first morning of the first-ever GOA camp in Ghana has been, well, fun. The sun is tucked behind a thin but protective layer of cloud, which, combined with the breeze cutting across the soccer pitch and over the red dirt of the parking area, is enough to keep the temperature bearable. There’s room to move: two full courts stacked end-to-end and divided by a mini-court with overlapping three-point lines. The surrounding streets, lined with tall, reaching mahogany trees and the terracotta-roofed, white-walled dormitories of the University of Ghana’s Legon campus, lend the comfortable quiet of a moneyed suburb. And the grey asphalt courts, their keys painted with faded and overlapping ads for Nestlé Milo and Tigo SmarTalk, provide a physical reminder of the unstructured joy of playing the game as a child.

And the attitude of the campers is different from that of the Lagosians. The energy and intensity are still present, but the feeling is closer to the excitement of kids who have just discovered an all-consuming new game. Ujiri picks up on the difference early. “You know Drake is my boy, right?” he jokes, encouraging them to up the volume of their cheers. “Maybe if you don’t make it in basketball you can make it with your voice.”

As the fundamentals drills begin, the band loops around the bottom of the soccer field and comes charging up the street beside the courts, surrounded by stutter-stepping, strutting dancers. Very few of the players look over; either they’re already too focused on improving or this type of thing happens all the time in Accra.

Mahlalela caps the first day with a challenge he didn’t break out in Nigeria. It’s called the Impossible Catch and it comes with its own mythology. In his years of running basketball clinics all over the world, he tells the campers, he’s probably seen 10,000 kids attempt the Catch, and of all those many thousands, only 17 have ever succeeded. Mahlalela is an artist at fuelling and directing the energy of a large group—“One of the best I’ve ever seen,” Ujiri says—and he introduces the challenge piece by piece, gradually stepping up the difficulty and with it the shared intensity.

Stage one is simple. “Throw the ball up in the air,” he says, miming the act for the 50 kids in front of him, each holding a ball at the ready. “Clap three times.” He follows his own instruction. “Catch the ball.”

On Mahlalela’s “go,” 50 balls are sent airborne and the court comes alive with clapping that ripples and swells like rain on a barn roof. “Not bad. Not bad,” the coach says, watching the tosses for a few seconds before whistling them to an end. “Next level, GOA Impossible Catch: Ball goes up in the air, touch the ground, catch the ball. Ready?” Scattered nods. “Up, touch, catch. Go!”

Stage two takes a bit more effort. A few campers misjudge their early tosses, collapsing into short bursts of laughter as they scramble after dropped balls. They recover quickly, though, and soon all 50 balls are being caught pretty reliably. Mahlalela again whistles the game to a halt.

For stage three, he has them spread farther apart. “Safety first!” he yells, and the warning turns out to be warranted. The step involves tossing the ball and spinning 360 degrees before catching it, and some of the early attempts are truly out of control. Boys spin without taking their eyes off the ball, losing all orientation and crashing off into the rest of the group; tosses are underthrown, fumbled and dropped or launched erratically to one side. Gradually, though, the collective effort regains a sense of stability, the whole thing soundtracked by occasional cries of victory.

Mahlalela takes them through further progressions. The three claps are added to the ground touch and then paired with the spin. The final feeder stage assembles all of the component parts into a single three-part sequence that sends balls and players bouncing all over the court. Mahlalela runs the kids through two sessions of it to allow as much practice as possible. Then comes the big reveal. “All right, ladies and gentlemen—or just gentlemen,” he begins, “the Impossible Catch looks like this: Throw the ball in the air, clap three times, spin around, touch the ground and catch the ball… behind your back.” The last bit is greeted with a sustained groan. Mahlalela sets them off practising, picking his way through the hailstorm of basketballs to shout encouragement. “Try it, try it, try it,” he urges. After 30 seconds or so, the practice session is whistled to a close and Mahlalela asks if anyone got it. A camper in the back left corner raises his hand. “You got it over there?” he asks. The answer is an honest one: “Almost.”

Mahlalela organizes the campers into a wide circle. For a catch to count as the Catch, he says, it has to have witnesses. Players who think they have a legitimate shot can head into the centre of the circle, one at a time, where they’ll get three chances at it—with everyone watching.

Three boys try and fail before Mahlalela opts for a new approach, calling on “Coach Masai” to pick the last two contenders. Ujiri lets the campers make the first pick. Their selection loses his third attempt off the tips of his fingers. Coach Masai’s choice, wearing No. 19, steps into the circle.

Mahlalela calls on the other campers to help pump him up, leading a rising cheer—ahhhHHH—that crescendos—AH!—with the attempted catch. No. 19 has the sequence down cold, but his first two tries skip away off his back, the cheer shifting abruptly from “ah” to “oh.” As he retrieves the ball for his third and final attempt, Ujiri starts a chant of his own: “Gha-na! Gha-na! Gha-na! Gha-na!” Like the two before it, No. 19’s third toss slips out of his hands and hits the asphalt.

“He’s so close,” Mahlalela yells. “One last chance.”

Ujiri’s chant begins again. Gha-na! Gha-na! It rises with the toss and then continues rising as the ball slows and reverses back the way it came. Gha-na! Gha-na! No. 19 claps, spins, touches the ground and rises. Gha-na! Gha-na! He looks up, finds the ball and tracks it until it disappears behind his head. Gha-na! Gha-na! It falls into his hands and stays there. Ohhhhhhhh! Ohh! Eighteen people have completed the Impossible Catch.

“How many of you think you can play in the NBA?” Ujiri asks. Somewhere between 40 and 45 of the 50 kids sitting on the asphalt in front of him raise their hands. He tries the question another way. “How many of you don’t think you can play in the NBA?” Zero hands.

It seems like a tough place to begin a speech. Ghana is a soccer nation, massively behind the curve on basketball and desperately short on facilities and competent coaches. The players at the GOA camp in Accra are, generally speaking, older, smaller and less polished than their Nigerian counterparts. Most found the sport late, often around 16, and to play it they have had to fight the prejudice, sometimes held by their parents, that every second they spend on a court is a wasted one. But if the unanimity of the answers throws Ujiri, he covers it well. “That’s great,” he says. “It shows me that you’re confident.”

Behind him, the camp’s six foreign coaches stand in a line. Ujiri turns to them as he finishes telling the kids just how hard it is to make the NBA, how only one player in the program’s 12-year history, the seven-foot-one Solomon Alabi, has done it. He notes that not a single one of the coaches played in the league, then adds himself to the tally, because he didn’t make it either. “But all of them used basketball as a tool,” he says, employing a GOA slogan. “And basketball took them places.”

He gestures at Franck Traore, anchoring the left end of the line of coaches, and tells the kids that Franck was born in Burkina Faso, that he went to the U.S. for high school, played Div. I ball at Manhattan College and now works for NBA Africa. “This big-ass dude can fly a plane,” Ujiri adds to close out the resumé. “I wouldn’t get on it, but he can fly a plane.”

Engelbrecht is next. “Sometimes he calls me and I don’t even know where the hell he is,” Ujiri says of his scout. “And I don’t know what the hell kind of player he’s finding. For all I know, he could be bringing all of you to the Raptors. And then I’ll get fired.” Engelbrecht played at the University of Maryland, Ujiri notes, and was born in South Africa.

He walks past Owinje, who played in Europe and with Allen Iverson at Georgetown. “Godwin does real estate now, scouts for NBA teams, he works with Nike,” Ujiri says. “So many things have opened up, OK? Godwin is from Nigeria.”

He continues along the line: Mahlalela, born in Swaziland and coaching for the Raptors; Tijjani, another Nigerian, a lawyer who played college ball in the U.S.; Mutombo, winner of two NCAA Div. II titles at Metro State, a veteran of Europe and the D-League, an NBA assistant coach and a native of the Congo. “Africans who have used basketball as a tool,” Ujiri summarizes. “That’s what we’re trying to teach you. Play the game as hard as you can and give it your all. Something is going to open up.”

In the stands at the NIS three days earlier, Ujiri had looked out over the gym. “This is how I grew up,” he said. “The way those kids sit down, I sat down like that. The way their eyes open when they see new Nike shoes being given to them, I sat down like that.” He explained that many people have told him to conserve himself by raising money for Giants of Africa and paying for the camps but skipping the trip itself. “No,” he said, replaying his answer with genuine indignation. “I’m trying to be an example for these kids. Not just an example they hear about, not just an example they read about—an example that they see, that they can interact with.”

The smallest kids can just barely get the ball up on the rim. They shoot from so close that Ujiri can hand back their rebounds without moving from his spot under the basket, and they launch the ball with the every-ounce-of-strength, full-body heave universal with kids their age. Like Ujiri, they’re all wearing black T-shirts with “Ghana Dreams Big” printed across the front in yellow and white, a present from GOA, given out when Ujiri and the coaches first arrived at the SOS Children’s Village in Tema a couple of hours earlier.

On the sidelines, the youngest of the group—a boy of about four in blue jeans and scuffed white Velcro sneakers—has commandeered a ball all for himself. He coaxes a few wobbly dribbles out of it then slaps it hard into the ground, bouncing it above his head then spinning around on one foot and grabbing it with both hands, his own Impossible Catch. He’s been working on the move for a while, keeping himself busy straight through the pickup game the GOA coaches played with some of the older kids, but it’s still a ways from second nature. As he loses the ball off his foot and runs after it, Ujiri proposes a game.

Arranging the coaches, GOA staff, camera crew and kids in a queue stretching back from the free-throw line, Ujiri announces that Giants of Africa will donate $10 to SOS for each make. The coaches are automatic from the stripe, and the kids get a couple as well. After two full cycles, the total is up to $200, and Ujiri corrals a rebound and heads to the line himself. The group spreads into a half-moon around him to watch. “If it goes in, we’ll make it $1,000,” he says. He takes a couple of dribbles, stills himself and calmly drains the shot.

The boy in jeans and scuffed sneakers may not remember the moment when he’s older—the late afternoon sun spilling across the burnt orange of the SOS court, as the general manager of the Toronto Raptors hits a shot for him. But, introduced to the sport so young and in such an exciting way, maybe basketball will turn into a vehicle. Maybe it will lift him up from his beginnings in a home for underprivileged and orphaned children and help him grow into a man who in turn lifts others—in Tema, in Ghana, in all of Africa.

This story originally appeared in Sportsnet magazine.