Mouhamadou Gueye doesn’t think often about where he would be were it not for the delicate merger of physical gifts, talent, perseverance and kismet that brought him to where he is now, as a starting forward on an ACC men’s basketball team.
When asked to imagine such a world, the Pitt graduate student pictures himself, at all of 6 feet, 10 inches, walking around his native Staten Island, passing by stranger after stranger who ask if he played basketball. It’s hard for Gueye not to chuckle pondering that scenario, bleak as it might seem.
“At some point, something would have come together,” he said. “Really, it’s something I was kind of destined to do.”
Whether it’s destiny or his own toil, Gueye is excelling in the final season of his college career, averaging 8.6 points, 6 rebounds and 1.7 blocks per game. On a team with only a handful of reliable, consistent playmakers, the Stony Brook transfer is unquestionably one of them.
It very nearly wasn’t this way.
Gueye’s path to Pitt was as narrow as it was fortuitous, with the right opportunities emerging at the right times to help him avoid a much less desirable fate. Were it not for the friend who asked about his interest in joining an AAU team his senior year of high school or a YouTube mixtape happening to catch the attention of a junior college coach, it’s hard, if not impossible, to believe a player who missed his final two years of high school basketball would be where he is now.
Taken together, those factors make Gueye’s success story more than just the typical low-major standout finding a home and a role at a higher-profile program. Had it not been so hard-earned, his career would have seemed almost accidental.
“In recent years, especially coming into this year, I kind of took a belief that this is what I’m meant to do,” Gueye said. “Not necessarily be an NBA player, but basketball is something I was meant to do for however long I was meant to do it. Honestly, I don’t know what I would have been doing right now if it wasn’t for basketball.”
Gueye’s belief in destiny is understandable. His life in basketball was being formed before he was even born.
In 1987, Gueye’s father, Ababacar, arrived in New York from Senegal with $100 in his pocket. He found a job in construction, where he would work from 7 a.m until 4 p.m. before going to school to learn English. Many days, he’d only eat one meal. Thousands of miles from all he knew, Ababacar found comfort in basketball, a sport he grew up playing. He became a fan of both the Knicks and the player who would spend much of the early 1990s tormenting them — Michael Jordan, whose relentless intensity he admired.
Through his determination and sacrifice, he saved money and a couple of years later, his wife, Souwadou, made the trek from Senegal to join him.
When Mouhamadou was born in July 1998, Ababacar’s passion for basketball was transferred to his son. As he grew older, Mouhamadou had other interests — he was an accomplished violin and viola player, among other things — but basketball was a constant in a way nothing else was. Ababacar would show him the same cassette tapes of games featuring the Knicks or Jordan that he once spent hours watching himself, a number of which are still in Mouhamadou’s room at his family’s house. He played constantly with friends at local parks and rec centers. For years, his father paid for him to work with a trainer. After entering Curtis High School as a 5-foot-9 guard, he grew 10 inches over the next four years.
By his junior year, though, his grades had slipped. Ababacar was informed at a parent-teacher conference that his son, whom he saw leave for school every day, had been missing classes. Because of those issues, Mouhamadou didn’t play his junior or senior year. Basketball was once the thing Mouhamadou said “kept me in check.” Without it, his dream of going to college to play the sport he loved was dangerously close to vanishing.
“You’ve got a blessing. You’ve got talent,” Ababacar said. “You have to know what you want to do in life. If a kid doesn’t have any vision in life, they just get dragged down. At that point, he realized, hey, I just need to take a different approach. He started looking at himself in the mirror and started changing. Sometimes, you push too hard. You can’t force them to be who you want them to be. It’s never going to happen. As a parent, you can see it, but the kids, they’re not going to see it. Sometimes, it’s too late. I didn’t want that to happen to him.”
In the second semester of his senior year, one of Gueye’s good friends messaged him on Twitter to see if he wanted to play for iWork Basketball, a local AAU team. From March through July, they competed in a number of tournaments throughout the northeast. By the end of that stretch, a teammate put together a highlight reel he uploaded to YouTube, showcasing an array of Gueye’s thunderous dunks, forceful blocks and clever passes.
Among those who watched it was an assistant coach from Monroe College, a for-profit school in nearby New Rochelle, N.Y., who messaged Gueye on Facebook. Though Gueye had never heard of Monroe, he came to campus for a workout in August. Intrigued by what they saw in a tall, lanky teenager with unusually strong ball-handling and passing for a player his size, coaches offered him a spot on the roster. Within two weeks, he was enrolled.
“It was at the end of the summer. Our scholarship money was running low,” said Monroe coach Jeff Brustad. “I don’t even think he was on a full scholarship at the time. He took a leap of faith with us, as we did with him. We were just going to see what would happen.”
Success didn’t come instantly or easily. The informal, unstructured settings Gueye played in while not competing in his final years of high school left gaps in his game. As a freshman, he averaged 2.1 points and 3.6 rebounds per game. The following season, he was unable to compete, derailed by academic shortcomings Brustad said stemmed from time-management issues. There were people within the school, Brustad said, who thought Gueye wasn’t “a college-caliber” kid, but those with the program advocated for a young man they knew to be kind, intelligent and thoughtful. He had too much potential to be discarded.
That year changed Gueye.
“As he started to mature as a young man and understanding his responsibilities and what he needed to do, you could see the turnaround,” Brustad said. “When you take something away from somebody that they have a passion for, you’re going to do what you need to do to get it back.”
With a renewed commitment to his schoolwork and some added refinement to his game, Gueye’s numbers increased in 2018-19 and attracted the interest of several colleges. He chose Stony Brook, where a still-raw player learned how to effectively play within a system. He picked up on when to set screens, take shots and make certain passes.
In his second season there, he blocked 3.1 shots per game and was named the defensive player of the year in the America East Conference.
“He was doing things he just wasn’t doing at Monroe,” said Lenny Kadisha, a close friend of Gueye’s who played with him at Monroe and Stony Brook. “That was the scary thing about it. You see him getting better day by day, doing things you didn’t see him do the game before.”
Armed with a degree and one more season of eligibility, Gueye entered the transfer portal, believing he could compete in the sport’s biggest conferences. Between the allure of playing in the ACC and the promise of being a veteran presence that wouldn’t be so confined to the low post, he signed with Pitt.
“For me, it was more so just proving to myself that I can hang around these guys and not only hang around them — I can play on this level,” Gueye said. “That always stuck with me.”
That confidence has materialized. Even for those like Brustad, who loves Gueye but felt he was chasing a desire that wouldn’t be satisfied, their eyes have been opened.
Over the past month, he has averaged 12.1 points, 6.6 rebounds and 2.1 blocks per game while shooting 37.1% from 3-point range and starting every contest. His ability to defend multiple positions, protect the rim, run the floor and stretch the court offensively has been invaluable for a thin Pitt team that had to replace four of five starters from last season.
“It’s been an honor, man, to have him in our program, not just as a player, but just getting to know him,” Pitt coach Jeff Capel said. “He has gotten so much better in his time here. I wish we had him for longer.”
Beyond the numbers he has compiled this season and whatever professional future awaits — Brustad said he can “guarantee he’s making money overseas for a few years” — this season has allowed the introspective Gueye to appreciate how far he has come.
He isn’t the only one who has gotten to enjoy it. On Dec. 18, Pitt beat St. John’s, 59-57, at Madison Square Garden. Among Gueye’s friends and family inside the venerated arena was Ababacar, watching his son play in the same building as his beloved Knicks. Even for someone who had closely watched every step of the journey, it still seemed improbable.
“I sat there watching the game, but at the same time, you’re crying,” Ababacar said. “It’s something you never thought in life would happen.”
Craig Meyer: cmeyer@post-gazette.com and Twitter @CraigMeyerPG
First Published: January 21, 2022, 4:00 p.m.
