Ohio Hoops: Ghana’s 15-year-old 6’2 female basketball player who wants to be the

8,983 kilometres from Accra, Benedicta Frimpongmaa Asare has created for herself a sizeable fandom – dominated by her coaches and teammates in Ohio, where she is lighting up high school courts.

“The difference of Benedicta from when she first came here, to what she’s showing now, is what we call the ‘Spire difference’. Her progress is quite impressive, considering how long she’s been here,” Krista Phillips, a former WNBL star and current Women’s Basketball Management Consultant at Spire Academy said.

Perhaps a perfect synopsis of the burgeoning quality of a 6’2 15-year-old centre, who has dazzled, only four months after landing in the USA as a student-athlete with Spire Academy. And as brilliant as the opening verse sounds, her life has not always been wrapped in the 94x50ft-sized basketball courts.

Her story is far from romantic – more of humble, beginning from a 12-year-old, who did not even have any idea a game like basketball existed in the first place.

“Coach Oxy met me on the roadside and called me,” Benedicta told JoySports. “My mom had sent me at the time, so I asked who he was. He simply told me to come and then asked if I could play basketball. I asked ‘what is basketball?’ and told him I don’t know what he’s talking about.”

Pretty mind-boggling, but who can fault her? She grew up at Dansoman last stop in Accra – a locality dominated by trading, fishing and then, football – she was her school’s goalkeeper at a point. There was [and still is] almost no, or very little space for an ‘idea’ like basketball.

In fact, there are very few spaces available to bounce or even throw a ball – the basketball way – with every acre of space occupied by homes, businesses or transformed into very sandy football parks. And, it is from such a zero-tolerance community Benedicta has grown and now wields dreams of becoming Ghana’s first WNBA star.

“I want to be the greatest player of all time. I want to achieve my dream by getting a good college to attend, and then play in the WNBA after.”

So in a space of some five years, she has moved from a girl with zero basketball knowledge, to dreaming of starring in the WNBA – one almost exclusive to kids in America and probably, Europe.

Ironic, no? 

But on a flip side, that is the beauty of life, and basketball – a sport which has proven to provide many opportunities, and Benedicta’s came within that same non-tolerating environment.

Once again, ironic, isn’t it?

One sunny afternoon, Benedicta, while running an errand for her mother, was halted by a stranger and asked what she knew about basketball. It was at that moment she delivered the shocking, yet not-so-shocking response: “what is basketball?”

And it was one which surprised her questioner because her height was one which perfectly fit the description of a potential superstar.

“It was her height,” Coach Oxy blurted out. “I met her on the street – on the way to see the parents of one of my…