ShareThisBy ANDREA COHEN
The Oklahoman
Saturday, July 21, 2007
Ibrahima Thomas' dad is an elementary-school teacher in Senegal. Ever since his oldest son started playing sports -- even back before he grew so very tall and his main sport was still soccer -- he had a message.
"He was always telling me, no matter what sport I do, don't let the ball use you," Thomas said. "Use the ball to get an education, but don't let the ball use you."
For the last couple of years it's been hard to say who was using whom in Thomas' relationship with basketball. The 6-foot-11 20-year-old has taken a strange and winding road from his native Senegal to Oklahoma State, in Stillwater. He will be a freshman in the fall. The route included a stop in Florida at a prep school where, he says, attending class wasn't an option, and then a move with his teammates to another prep school across the country. After that, there was a starring role in an HBO "Real Sports" episode about corrupt "diploma mill" prep schools.
"It is strange," Thomas said, summing up the last two years of his life.
"That's what everyone says."
But after more than a month of playing pickup games with his new teammates and attending summer-school classes, Thomas thinks he may have finally found what his dad was talking about.
"I step out of my country when I was 17, 18, and my parents was really expecting me to have a real education and people who care about me so they're not going to have to worry about anything," Thomas said. "I think that's what I have so far. I think this is good."
Like most kids who grow up in Senegal, Thomas started out on the soccer field.
Then one day, when he was about 15, he went to watch a friend play basketball.
"I was a little bit tall and they were missing a player," he said. "I played with them, so that's how everything started."
Soon Thomas was attending a basketball school run by Babacar Sy, a Senegalese coach who played in France and was an assistant coach at the College of Southern Idaho. In 2005, Sy accepted a job at a school called Florida Prep and recruited a number of foreign players -- including Thomas -- to play at the school on full scholarship.
Thomas said he didn't know what to expect at Florida Prep, but it certainly wasn't what he found upon arrival.
"The house, it was like, whoa," Thomas said. "The only thing we have to eat was frozen pizza. That was my first experience in the United States. There was some players who went to the school and some who didn't -- we didn't have a choice. I was really upset why I don't go to school. So one day I asked (a school administrator), 'Why don't we go to the school?' And he didn't answer the question."
According to The Washington Post, Florida Prep didn't have enough beds for every player, and three African players lost five pounds each because of the shortage of food. Florida Prep administrators told the paper they gave the players $250 a week for food but they budgeted poorly. Six-foot-nine at the time, Thomas said he weighed just 185 pounds.
Sy and Florida Prep parted ways on bad terms, and one night in October, about two weeks after Thomas arrived at Florida Prep, an assistant coach took Thomas and his teammates to the airport.
Sy, with whom Thomas remains extremely close, had accepted a new job at Stoneridge Prep in Simi Valley, Calif. And Stoneridge Prep, which wasn't part of the state high-school athletic federation and instead played a national schedule, wasn't just looking to hire a coach -- it was looking to enroll an entire team after coach Ron Slater and his team left for another prep school, Calvary Christian in the San Fernando Valley.
Stoneridge Prep Principal Maria Arnold told the Post that Slater's players stopped attending class, and Slater said he received a better offer with dorms and cheaper tuition.
As chance would have it, Sy had a ready-made team on hand.
At Stoneridge, Sy continued to bring in international players -- at one point, the team featured three players from three different countries who were all 6-11 or above. The team also continued to play a national schedule, traveling for weeks at a time throughout the winter.
But Thomas said the players attended class regularly, and that he did well in school and saw his English improve dramatically. He could stop lying to his parents, who didn't know how bad things had been at Florida Prep.
The Oklahoma State staff was familiar with Sy through the recruitment of Jamaal Brown at Southern Idaho. After seeing Thomas play last July, OSU coach Sean Sutton knew he wanted him.
"We thought he had a tremendous upside and as he gets stronger and develops he had a chance to be a really good player," Sutton said. "He's a hard worker and he's got such a great personality -- he's a spirited kid -- and he made really clear that he wanted to be a really good player."
The more Sutton got to know Thomas, the more he wanted him at OSU.
"He's just got that personality," Sutton said. "I thought, we've got to have this guy because I want to have a chance to coach him and be around him every day."
Because of NCAA rules, Sutton isn't allowed to be around Thomas and coach him yet, but teammates and people dealing with him on the academic side are enjoying him so far.
"He's real funny," senior Marcus Dove said. "He's always got us laughing. Sometimes it's not what he says, it's his accent."
Thomas's accent -- he grew up speaking French and a local dialect, and said he can also understand Spanish and Portuguese -- is especially amusing during pickup games. When guys make a good play, guys on the sidelines often yell "I see you." Thomas caught onto that method of cheering for his teammates, and his heavily accented "Ah seee you" is usually the loudest and often makes everyone laugh.
Don't be fooled, though -- his English is very good. In fact, it's better than Thomas would have some people believe.
"He kept saying, 'I need an interpreter,' " said Marilyn Middlebrook, OSU's associate athletic director of academic affairs. "I told him, 'You speak beautiful English; you don't need an interpreter.' "
