The stories that shaped a coach

"You have to understand people's stories. The more you do that, the better relationship you have with them, the more likely they are to grow around you and you around them."”

Coach Adeniyi Amadou

The boy didn't travel very much. His parents saw to that.

Growing up outside Paris after his family emigrated from Benin, Adeniyi Amadou wasn't allowed to disappear for an afternoon with friends or wander the neighborhood until sunset. His parents had crossed continents because they believed education could create opportunities they never had, and they intended to protect those opportunities with the same determination that had carried them to France.

"They wanted to make sure they had a tight hold on my sister and me," Amadou recalled. "I wasn't running the streets. I wasn't going outside that much. For me there were two ways to sort of escape and see the world. One was, 'You're allowed to go to basketball practice.' That was great. That was my social time. And I could read books."

He smiles when he remembers it, as though the restrictions that seemed so confining to a young boy now make perfect sense to the man looking back. It wasn’t so much restraint, but direction.

He read everything. French literature. Napoleon. The First and Second World Wars. American history. Anything that carried him somewhere beyond the apartment where he lived.

"It was like I was traveling," he said. "I could spend five hours reading."

That habit never disappeared. It is just as much a part of his life today as it was during his youth.

"If I cannot carve out 50 pages in a day, it's not a good day."

It is an easy sentence to overlook. It is probably the most important sentence in understanding who he became.

Long before books filled shelves in his office or lined tables beside his bed, they quietly taught him that every place has a history, every decision has context and every person has a story that begins long before anyone else notices it. He just didn't know yet that one day those stories would wear basketball shoes.

Spend an hour with New Mexico State's new women's basketball coach and the sport that is his professions repeatedly tries to become the subject of the conversation but rarely succeeds.

Ask where he grew up and eventually, he's talking about journalism. Ask about recruiting and somehow Martin Luther King Jr. enters the discussion. Mention leadership and he starts describing stereotypes, curiosity and human nature before ever diagramming an offense or discussing a press defense.

Nothing about the conversation feels rehearsed. It feels... explored.

Almost every answer begins with a pause, but it’s not an uncomfortable silence. It’s more like someone reaching backward before speaking, trying to remember where an idea first began before explaining where it eventually led.

By the end of an afternoon, it becomes difficult to separate the coach from the student because Amadou doesn't seem to have stopped being one.

He begins his story in Paris.Then he stops himself.

"Actually..."

The correction matters. He was born in Cotonou, Benin, before moving to France at age three. His father, a linguist who earned his doctorate, and his mother had left home believing education could change the course of a family's future. Their children would understand what that sacrifice meant.

"My parents had immigrated from Benin," he said. "Education meant what it meant. There was no way they had sacrificed this much, and I was going to quit school, even to become a basketball player."

Years later, when a professional basketball club wanted him to sign a youth contract, there wasn't much debate inside the family. Basketball could open doors, but education would determine which ones stayed open.

America became the compromise. He could have both.

Basketball brought him across an ocean. Books had already taken him much farther. His childhood dream had almost nothing to do with coaching.

"I wanted to be a big-time reporter," he said.

Not a sports reporter. The kind of reporter whose work introduced readers to places they had never seen and people they otherwise might never have known. Basketball carried him through Fork Union Military Academy, West Point and Indiana University of Pennsylvania, but journalism remained the destination.

He earned degrees in journalism and political science before arriving at Syracuse University, where graduate work led him into communication, anthropology and political theory. He eventually began doctoral work examining communication and democracy in France's former African colonies.

"I have very fond memories of that time because I experienced what it was to just be a student. I wanted to be a big-time reporter. That was a true passion."

Life, however, has a way of introducing people to careers they never thought to pursue.

Jim Jabir, then coaching women's basketball at Dayton, had gotten to know Amadou while recruiting a French player. Their conversations rarely centered on basketball. They talked about politics, history, and shared ideas.

Eventually Jabir asked whether he had ever considered coaching.

"I had no idea what it was to coach," Amadou said.

He visited Dayton almost out of curiosity. Met the players. Walked around campus and listened.

He still wasn't convinced. Journalism remained the dream. But he accepted the job anyway. Years later he remembers almost nothing about the salary. He remembers something else.

"I remember those years with fond memories because I was very rich in dreams."

The revelation came surprisingly. Coaching and journalism were asking him to do many of the same things.

"I quickly understood that the qualities required to be a good journalist, listening and carving out stories of people, places and environments, were the same qualities required to be a good teacher," he said. "You have to understand people's stories. The more you do that, the better relationship you have with them, the more likely they are to grow around you and you around them."

That sentence quietly explains nearly everything that followed, from the way he recruits to the power of his leadership. It even extends to the way he answers questions.

"I behaved like a journalist," he said. "I would speak to kids and their families, and I'm not trying to sell them. I'm trying to understand your story. What is it about you that got you to this point? This is fascinating."

He never says he loves recruiting. He says he loves understanding people. There is a difference.

The coaching stops that followed look impressive on paper. He was an assistant coach at Dayton, Kentucky, Syracuse, and Rhode Island. Amadou doesn't remember them as career moves. He remembers them as classrooms, especially Rhode Island.

By then he understood recruiting. He understood player development. He had worked around successful programs and successful coaches. What he had not experienced was the loneliness that comes with making every final decision.

Head coach Tammi Reiss decided to change that. The two of them left Syracuse together, her as Rhode Island’s new head coach, and Amadou as her assistant. Rather than shielding him from those responsibilities, she intentionally pulled him closer. From meetings and difficult conversations, to decisions no assistant coach ever fully owns, he experienced all of it.

"She told me, 'I'm going to let you as close to this seat as possible,'" he recalled. "You can feel the fire. You never exactly know until you're sitting there."

Then comes perhaps the most revealing thought of the afternoon.

"The job reveals yourself to you."

It is a remarkable way to describe leadership, not as authority, but as a type of discovery.

For seven years he watched, listened, and learned. There is no hint of impatience in the way he tells that story.

Preparation had always been the pattern of his life. His parents prepared him. Books prepared him. Journalism prepared him. Now another coach was preparing him.

When New Mexico State Director of Athletics Joe Fields began searching for the next leader of Aggie women's basketball, Amadou wasn't simply another successful assistant hoping someone would finally give him a chance.

He knew who he was. More importantly, he knew who he wanted to become.

"I was ready," he said. "I was primed."

Toward the end of the conversation, basketball almost disappears again. Amadou begins talking about stereotypes, about how easily people reduce one another to first impressions because the world is simply too complicated otherwise.

"When you shed that habit and try to understand where people are from and who they are," he said, "you realize there's much more complexity than what you first thought."

He talks about hiring assistants with different life experiences. He recalls Martin Luther King Jr.'s story about the master shoe shiner whose pride in his work prompted King to say the man had earned "a Ph.D. in shoe shining."

"I'm attracted to people that have a passion," Amadou said. "People that are really passionate about what they're doing."

Eventually someone has to ask about winning. His answer sounds inevitable.

"For some people, if you seek winning, it's stressful," he said. "To me, winning is the byproduct of everything else."

Topping that list of everything else for Amadou are relationships, growth, former players who still call years after graduation, and young women whose lives are larger because they crossed paths with the people leading the program.

That, he says, is winning.

It is tempting to leave an interview with a new basketball coach thinking about offenses, defenses, recruiting philosophies or conference championships. After spending time with Adeniyi Amadou, those things somehow feel less important.

You find yourself thinking instead about a boy who escaped into history books because they allowed him to see a world beyond his own, and about the man those books quietly helped create. They taught him to ask questions before reaching conclusions. To search for context before passing judgment. To believe that every person arrives carrying a story no one else can see.

Today, the books are still there, the pages still turn, and perhaps most importantly, the student is still learning.

Only now, many of the stories he spends his days reading happen to walk into a gymnasium wearing New Mexico State across the front of their jerseys.