Ulrich Chomche is cut from a new African cloth
Never mind being the next Pascal Siakam or Joel Embiid, he is already the first of his name.
Daniel Ekonde
Eighteen-year-old Cameroonian Ulrich Chomche has not played an official league game in the United States yet. But the 2.11m-tall centre player has already made history in its National Basketball Association – the NBA. In June he became the first player from the NBA’s global academy to move directly into the league.
Selected in this year’s draft by the Memphis Grizzlies, he was immediately transferred to the Toronto Raptors and signed a two-year contract. He is the seventh Cameroonian to join the league and the youngest NBA player currently, only turning 19 at the end of December.
It’s quite an achievement for a player who was running around his village, Bafang in western Cameroon, just a few years ago. At 13, he left for Saly in Senegal, where where he spent four years at the African branch of the NBA Academy.
He played for Cameroon’s Forces Armees et Police in the inaugural season of the BAL – the Basketball Africa League – in 2021 and made another appearance with Rwanda Energy Group in 2023. He also helped the Cameroonian men’s team get to its first Olympic qualifiers in 16 years, though it didn’t make it to Paris.
A raw talent
“Ulrich is a rare talent,” Alfred Aboya, Chomche’s coach at the academy and Cameroon national team, told The Continent. “He is a young, long and athletic player who can do a lot of things. He can shoot, he can pass and most importantly, he is a sharp blocker and great defender.”
Movers in the sport have been watching this talent keenly. “We’ve been following Ulrich for a long time,” Patrick Engelbrecht, the Raptors’ director of global scouting told The Continent. “We’ve seen that the African player is getting access to high level competition at earlier ages.”
Early exposure to elite training and competition has been extremely rare for African basketballers yet it is often decisive in getting players into the professional leagues where talent isn’t rare.
Typically, young players who join the NBA are coming in with American college basketball experience which eases them into the hyper-competitive and hypervisible professional life. Chomche doesn’t have that but has embraced Toronto and it’s warming up to him. “What I’m really really impressed with is that he’s learning really quickly, adjusting to [his] new style High society: Global stardom is firmly within Ulrich Chomche’s reach. Not much isn’t, tbh. Photo: Candice Ward/ Getty Images incorporate Chomche’s blend of height and athleticism into their rim-protection of life. He’s gonna be a great addition for us in Toronto,” Raptors’ head coach Darko Rajaković told The Continent.
NBA fans were treated to flashes of Chomche’s defensive, passing and scoring game in the first two games of the league’s preseason tournament: the Summer League in Las Vegas. “I am so excited for him,” said Jama Mahlalela, Raptors assistant coach.
Mahlalela admits that as a coach, he still needs to move Chomche around a bit. His height gives him real potential for close shots and his defensive talent is undeniable – he averaged three blocks and one steal per game in last year’s BAL. He may need “two or three years to be perfect” noted FAP head coach Kevin Ngwese, but no one doubts his ability to get there.
The team will certainly look to incorporate Chomche’s blend of height and athleticism into their rim-protection strategy. But Chomche might also want to follow in the tracks of contemporary centres like Joel Embiid and Nikola Jokić, who have revolutionised their defensive roles through their incredible shooting.
But whatever he chooses or turns out to be in the league, Chomche has opened a whole new path from Africa to the NBA: being drafted directly from the continent without having to move to the US first.
“It’s a new day. It’s a game changer,” said Engelbrecht, who hopes the next generation of African kids who dream of being basketball stars will see that “we have the full ecosystem here on the continent” – elite youth academies and a professional continental league, the BAL, where they can catch the eye of global scouts.