Dear Basketball,

I came here from Nigeria when I was two, and I fell for you before I could explain why. My parents loved me, but you weren't their world yet. They didn't grow up with you. They didn't know a kid needed training, needed coaches, needed someone who believed the game was worth that much. So I taught myself. I read everything, listened to every podcast, studied every player, every box score, every system, and broke you down until I started seeing what other people couldn't. And I didn't keep it to myself. I brought you home until my whole family fell for you too. My brothers, my sister, all of us ended up inside the game.

Then I spent my life making sure no one around me went without what I had to find alone.

What I loved was the teaching. Showing a kid how to see the game, then catching the exact moment it clicks, when his face changes and he finally gets it. Then the part that never got old: watching him earn a scholarship, the thing so many kids I coached were chasing, and watching a few of them take it all the way to the pros.

I took a year off college and put my school money toward my brother's hand surgery, so the game would stop slipping out of his hands. I drove a kid to 5:30 a.m. practice every morning, 45 minutes out of my way, up at 3:30, because everyone said he might drop out and I'd heard he could play. We watched wrecks and fires go by on that freeway in the dark. He graduated. He played college ball. That is the part of you I love most.

I worked between practices, then went back to the gym until 10. I moved in next to the gym just to get more time on the floor with them. I coached every level there was, all of them at once when my head coach got sick. Forty kids went to college off those gyms. Pros came out of those gyms. NBA players came out of those gyms. My own brothers and sister won on the floor, and one of them set a record in a Division I building.

Then you sent me to the proving grounds of college basketball. Lincoln. No scholarships, no gym, no money, players paying their own way. I came from a program that sent players to the league, and now I had nothing. So I built the thing I needed: a way to see any player, anywhere, the way you taught me to see. No film software I could afford, no recruiting budget, no system to even reach my own players. I built it out of necessity, and it won. Back-to-back titles, players from more than 10 countries, wins over teams that had everything we didn't.

That is when I understood what you'd been showing me my whole life. The game already belongs to whoever can afford to see it clearly. Everyone else is guessing, the way I had to guess before I taught myself, the way that kid would have been left to guess, the way too many programs with nothing are forced to guess.

And it isn't just the seeing. Somewhere along the way you stopped being free. They charge kids to play now, families to watch their own kids play, and wall you off from the ones who have the least. So I built KaNeXT to give it back: so a program with nothing can see what I had to claw for.

You gave me everything before I had anything to give back. I'm not done paying you.

Love,
Sammy