By Sarah Maslin Nir
Even though he was 6-foot-6 by the time he was 14 years old, when an aspiring basketball star in Senegal picked up a ball for the first time, his friends were skeptical: In this soccer-mad region, why bother with a ball you dunk, when everyone else is kicking?
“My friends thought I was weird in the beginning,” said the young player, Mouhamed Lamine Mbaye, now 18 (and 6-foot-9), as he stood on the court of a new basketball academy, the first to be built by the NBA in West Africa.