Nebraska commit Blaise Keita is chasing his basketball dream for his family and country | Men’s Basketball

COFFEYVILLE, Kan. — Snow is coming. Six inches overnight, another 2-4 in the morning. Wednesday’s junior college basketball game between the hometown Red Ravens and Barton Community College may have to be rescheduled.

That’s big news In the town of 8,800, where you can drive through in eight minutes and the closest major airport sits across state lines in Tulsa, 60 miles away.

Besides a few restaurants and hotels, “This is Coffeyville,” guard A.J. McBride says, gesturing toward the Red Ravens’ parquet floor. “For the most part, this is it right here.”

If the gym is Coffeyville’s main stage, then sophomore center Blaise Keita, a 2022 Nebraska commit, is the lead actor. Keita led Coffeyville Community College to a juco national title, championship last season. And after missing 13 games with a stress fracture in his foot, Keita has led the Red Ravens to a 13-5 record after returning on Jan. 5.

Fans, coaches and teammates love Keita for the way he teases teammates during rap battles, performs traditional Malian dances, and wears what former Nebraska assistant coach Matt Abdelmassih calls “a million-dollar smile.”

Behind the grin is a quiet, steadfast determination. He plays basketball for his family in Mali, where half of the population lives below the international poverty line ($1.25 per day). Blaise’s family owns a home, and he grew up with his own room. But they support a lot of family members. And as Blaise says, “It’s too hard to get money,” which is how he ended up here.

“If you can play here,” reads a sign in Coffeyville’s east gym, “you can play anywhere.” Blaise plans to test that theory at Nebraska — and, eventually, in the pros — so he can help his family.

“They took care of me,” Keita says. “They’ve done everything for me. So now I have to do something for them.”

Sunrays blistered over the cracked cement courts at the 2016 Mali Hope Camp in Bamako.

Thermometers read triple digits. Camp director Jason McMahan’s skin swelled pink from sunburns.

“It feels like the sun is mad at us today,” an assistant coach said.

Around 60 kids showed up anyway for a chance at visas, scholarships, a new life.

If any of these players were pros, this was their first chance to prove it.

“This isn’t an opportunity these kids carry for themselves,” McMahan said. “It’s you carrying it for your cousins and everybody (in your family), man. “It’s something they just have to do.”

The first obstacle was the language barrier. Players learned from “straight demonstration,” as McMahan called it. No coaches spoke the native Bambara or the commonly spoken French, and the camp featured only one translator.

The second obstacle was beating the heat. McMahan, a former varsity coach at Bentonville High School in Arkansas (McMahan coached Lakers’ guard Malik Monk), and his three fellow coaches wanted the Malian players to understand what it meant to play through fatigue.

“So that’s what we did,” McMahan said. “It was a tough camp.”

Four days. Eleven hours per day. And besides the two-hour lunch breaks, nobody stood still for long. Coaches divided players into four stations and designed drills so players either had the ball, defended the ball, had just finished the drill or were up next.

As the camp dragged on, players’ spirits faded. They stopped boxing out and fighting for post position. They made mistakes during passing drills.

Among the weary stood a spindly, awkward forward named Blaise Keita. Coaches were excited by his size (6-foot-7), but his skills were “as raw as they could possibly be,” McMahan said.

Keita had grown up playing soccer. He’d only picked up basketball one year earlier, when he began walking two hours to the nearest gym each day after school. He couldn’t catch. He couldn’t win post position. He couldn’t finish. Keita could jump high enough to dunk but couldn’t slam the ball through the net. He would perform a move correctly then airball the layup.

But while his fellow campers lost steam, Keita never faltered. He chased every breakaway ball handler after turnovers. He pursued every rebound on both ends. And he challenged every dunker at the rim.

“Sometimes he fouled people,” McMahan said. “Sometimes he got dunked on. But he went for it every time.”

Still, coaches debated over putting Keita on a developmental path toward international basketball. He was so raw, so skinny. And he spoke more Bambara than French, which would make it a challenge to tutor him in English.

Normally, McMahan didn’t participate in those conversations. But after witnessing Keita’s motor, McMahan vouched for him.

“He was the hardest one to decide (on),” McMahan said. “And we bet on his heart.”

The new kid waited at Wichita’s Dwight D. Eisenhower National Airport equipped with jeans, a jacket and a half-empty backpack filled with warm-up pants and a few shirts.

The house parent in charge of transporting Blaise Keita to Sunrise Christian Academy, a K-12 religious school with a Nike Elite-sponsored basketball program, assumed more luggage was waiting in baggage claim.

“Let’s go pick up the rest of your stuff.”

Keita didn’t have any bags.

Sunrise coach Luke Barnwell and his former assistant, Achoki Moikobu (now an assistant at Drake), had discovered Keita during the summer of 2017. The Buffaloes needed a big man, and Keita generated buzz playing for Mali in the U-19 FIBA World championships that July.

He’d learned a few moves — Hook shot, spin move, drop step — training with the national team, but Barnwell and Moikobu were most impressed by his defensive tools.

“He’s long, he plays hard, he’s got a motor,” Barnwell remembers thinking. “He could help us.”

But first, Sunrise needed to help Keita. Barnwell took Keita to Dillon’s to buy food and toiletries upon Keita’s arrival. The school provided extra athletic attire, and Barnwell scheduled an appointment with his dentist to remove stains from Keita’s teeth, which Barnwell believes resulted from years of chewing sugar cane back home.

Sunrise also introduced Keita, along with several other international students, to Judith Richards, a since-retired English as a second language instructor. Moikobu said Keita “couldn’t put a sentence together” when he first arrived on campus. Sunrise relied on multiple French-speaking players to translate Keita’s broken French into broken English.

Richards said teaching high school students at their grade level takes five years on average, but she didn’t have that kind of time.

“I re-wrote my curriculum,” Richards said. “Everything those boys did was basketball language … and I bought or ordered every children’s book that I could find that was a basketball story.”

That language barrier, coupled with Keita’s “stick arms,” as Moikobu called them, hurt Keita’s playing time during his first season at Sunrise. Starting center Isaiah Jasey, who would later play at Texas A&M and SMU, rarely left the game, anyway. So when Keita wasn’t in class, he spent most of his time at the Buffaloes’ gymnasium, weight room or dining table building for next year.

Sunrise’s strength and conditioning staff taught Keita how to lift weights. The school provided three meals a day, and the coaches brought extra fuel — KFC, Popeyes, lunch meat and more — to Keita’s dorm. And Keita stayed behind after practice to practice layups while assistants body-checked him with blocking pads. Every miss meant more running.

Keita remembers sitting on the floor dead tired, dreaming of a shower and sleep. But when he arrived home, he knew to expect another text from the team group chat a few hours later.

“We have to get back in the gym.”

By the summer, coaches were noticing results from Keita’s long hours. His arms bulged first, followed by his back, chest and legs. By the end of his second season, Moikobu said Sunrise’s coaches absorbed most of the pain during the blocking-pad drills. And Keita battled newcomer (and fellow Malian) N’Faly Dante, now a starter at Oregon, to a draw in practice each day.

Dante earned the starting job, but he and Keita split Sunrise’s center minutes.

“It was like flash and thunder almost,” Barnwell said. “Dante was super athletic and you could throw crazy lobs. Blaise would come in the game and beat you up. They complemented each other so well.”

Even more impressive, Keita stopped relying on his French teammates to communicate with coaches. Keita graduated from one-word answers to prepositional phrases to full-length conversations.

By the end of the 2019-20 season, which Keita spent as a starter on Sunrise’s postgrad team, Richards said she and Keita could talk about anything when she met him for tutoring sessions.

“But to tell you the truth,” Richards said, “We talked a lot about basketball. We always got back to basketball.”

Keita and his roommate, Alhousseny Diallo (also from Mali), spent last summer cleaning dorm rooms, painting hallways and resurfacing the same court they play on every day.

When they received their first checks from Coffeyville’s maintenance department, which Herkelman estimates were worth $500 apiece, they sent every dollar home.

“Guys, you gotta keep some of this for yourself,” Herkelman told them, but Keita and Diallo disagreed.

“They need it back there,” they responded.

Keita hasn’t returned to Bamako since 2017, when he played his second summer tour with the Malian national team. Even then, Keita said, he had to leave for Egypt, that summer’s tournament site, one day after arriving home. He flew straight back to the States from there.

He sees his family members’ faces every day through his iPhone screen. Keita FaceTimes during his afternoons, his family’s evenings. Technology soothes their separation.

But on Jan. 4, one week before Keita’s scheduled return from a broken foot, his uncle and “Daddy,” called early. They had grave news: Keita’s mother had died.

Keita had FaceTimed his mother the day before. He knew she was sick, but he didn’t know how bad. She died from a complication from diabetes, something Diallo told coaches wouldn’t kill a person with access to American health care. Keita was about to leave his dorm for a rehab session when the phone rang.

“I wasn’t going anywhere,” Keita said.

He broke down while relaying the news to his coaches. Herkelman told him to forget about basketball for a while, to grieve as long as he needed.

The next day, Herkleman ran into Keita in the hallway outside the coaches’ offices just after 8 a.m. The Red Ravens had a game at Cloud County (268 miles away) that evening.

“Coach, I want to play,” Keita said.

Herkelman tried to argue but couldn’t gain any ground. He relented. Keita walked into the gym and practiced ball-handling, jump shots and jump hooks for the next hour. His shirt’s collar was stained with sweat when he left.

Herkleman planned to play Keita in three-minute segments that night — Keita’s conditioning hadn’t returned yet, even though doctors had cleared him to play. But the game was close, and Keita waved off most of Herkleman’s attempts to bench him.

“I’m good, coach,” he kept saying. “I’m good.”

He was right. The Red Ravens won 93-89 in triple overtime. Keita tallied nine points, nine rebounds and two blocks in 43 minutes, his family’s words ringing in his head.

They’d called again the previous day, after Keita’s meeting with the coaches, and told him to “keep working hard.” Keita said their message soothed his pain and ignited his fire.

Family, after all, is the reason he’s made it here. They bought him his first basketball gear and counseled him through his most severe bouts with homesickness. They’re also the reason he plays so hard.

Keita will buy them a huge home one day, he says, equipped with a pool, a basketball court and a home theater. He’ll buy a giant truck for himself. And he’ll spend another chunk helping his fellow countrymen find better opportunities like he did.

“I want to help the poor guy, too,” Keita says. “I want to help the poor people in Bamako. I want to help the younger players back home.

“I wanted to come here because I want to take care of my family, to get a lot of money (and) do something for the future.”

The snow has arrived and the roads are icy, but the team from Barton drove up a day early.

So while every other gym in the Kansas Jayhawk Community College Conference is closed, Gilmer K. Nellis Hall opens its doors. Students sit on wooden bleachers behind the visitors’ bench. Locals sag into red seats labeled by section (left, center, right), row letter and seat number.

Check your ticket. One white-haired fan ousts a reporter from seat B 42 in the center section.

“I’ve had this seat for years,” he says, disregarding the ticket that proves B42 belongs to somebody else.

They haven’t seen a big man like Keita in this gym for even longer. Maybe since Reggie Evans, the 6-8 forward who played two years at Coffeyville (1998-2000) before he spent 13 years hogging rebounds in the NBA. Coaches say Keita reminds them of Evans – only taller, more skilled and more athletic.

Against Barton, Keita finishes 3-11 with nine points and three fouls, but he still grabs 12 rebounds. He still takes three first-half charges. And two months after losing to Barton by 26, the Red Ravens win by 10.

Coffeyville assistant Kyle Campbell says Keita has the most potential of any player he’s coached. Herkelman, who coached Evans and several players that played overseas, thinks Keita is “right up there,” among the best he’s seen. And assistant coach Abdul Olusesi believes, “He’s a pro.”

Not because he can dunk over every opponent (he can), or because he’s an expert shooter and passer (he’s working on it) but because they know he’ll maximize his potential.

Keita has played through sorrow, a language barrier and sweltering heat to get here. With those challenges behind him, his next step doesn’t seem so steep.

“When it’s all said and done,” Herkelman said, “he’s gonna make money one day.”