Despite Unlikely Beginnings, Ampim Rises to Ivy Ranks

The way he tells it, it’s a minor miracle that Asenso Ampim ended up choosing to play basketball.

It’s further remarkable that he could come back from fracturing multiple vertebrae during his senior year and still manage to lead the league in scoring and be the first player from his high school to score over 1,000 career points. In fact, it’s a pretty remarkable story that a kid from Ghana found his way to the United States at all.

“But,” Ampim said, “don’t over-glorify it.”

The surprise certainly isn’t that Ampim has found collegiate success playing a sport. The freshman forward lived in Ghana until he was seven, and then moved to England to attend the Blue Coat School, a boarding school, where he stayed until he was 14. While in England, he was a five-sport athlete, playing rugby, cricket, soccer, track and field, and “a little bit of swimming.” Although he played so many sports, he had never played a game of basketball on an organized team.

“My older brother used to play basketball a lot,” Ampim said. “I watched him all the time and started learning. Occasionally I’d go shoot around the basket when they were taking a break.” His older brother, Nana, is in his senior year as a point guard at the University of Massachusetts.

By his teens, Ampim was playing on high-level soccer and rugby teams and entertained the possibility of playing for a highly-renowned cricket team. However, his most impressive achievements came in track and field, where he went to the national championship for his age group andwon—in both the 100-meter and the triple jump. Ampim broke a 25-year-old’s record by 49 centimeters as a 13-year-old with his triple jump victory.

With such success in track and field, it seemed only natural that Ampim would continue to pursue an athletic career in the triple jump.

However, Ampim’s family decided to send him to the a high school in the United States to finish out his education, and among other sports that he had played in grade school, the Groton School didn’t have track and field.

“Everything happens for a reason,” he said. “My dad was planning on me going to school at an American university, and for that, it would be advantageous to go to high school in America.”

At the Groton School in Massachusetts, Ampim was looking to try out new sports. He intended to play hockey for his high school. In fact, Ampim never intended to play basketball at all.

“I was walking around lost looking for the hockey changing area, and I saw an old man. He said ‘We’re really looking forward to seeing you out there’. I said ‘What?’ He meant basketball, and I didn’t want to tell him no—I felt guilty. So I went and tried out in what I was wearing, my normal casual stuff.”

Of course, Ampim made the team. This time, however, it wasn’t based on his natural talents.

“I found out that I was very, very bad at basketball—I had no idea what I was doing. I couldn’t dribble, I couldn’t shoot. Up to that point, I had so much success in sports, and it was the first time I found a sport that didn’t come naturally to me. I took it as a challenge to get better at it, and that’s how I got into basketball.”

Ampim talked about studying old videotapes of Michael Jordan, attempting to imitate his style and moves. The work paid off—he played varsity all four years and led the league in scoring by his junior year.

All the while, Ampim had been able to hang on to one sport from his childhood: soccer. He played varsity as a striker for the high school, and during his senior year he was on a team that would compete for a championship.

That’s when he fractured the L4 and L5 vertebrae in his back. With a laugh, he said: “I don’t know exactly how it happened. After one game it was really hurting, and I went to kick a ball in a game and fell and couldn’t get up. That took me out of the rest of my amazing soccer season. We were contending for the championship and I couldn’t help out.”

But, when asked if he believes in fate, he said, “I guess I do.”

“It would have been a toss up [between soccer and basketball] if I didn’t get hurt. I would have had the chance to do some big things. Sometimes I look back and I think about it, and I had all these things in England, and after I left, all of them dropped. Now I look at it, and basketball has taken me so far.”

After attending a camp his junior year, becoming camp MVP and attending a national showcase, Ampim had interest from about 30 schools. The biggest basketball school was Providence, but ultimately Ampim’s choices for college fell down to the Ivies. He chose Columbia over Penn and Princeton based on the quality of the coaching staff and the amount of care they put into recruiting him.

In terms of playing time, Ampim has mainly seen minutes to relieve the other main post players, seniors John Baumann and Ben Nwachukwu. But he did get to play a significant amount of time in the game versus Cornell this past weekend.

“Did you see it?” he asked. “Cornell was a poor performance for me. As bad as it looked in that game, I feel like I improved a lot.”

He may not have a long time to make the improvements—the men’s basketball team will suffer the loss of six seniors at the end of the season, and he will have big shoes to fill.

“I am a freshman,” Ampim said, “I mean nothing right now. But I have a pretty good future ahead of me if I do what he’s [head coach Joe Jones] teaching me to do. He looks to the big picture, and I’m starting to see that myself.”