A Shot at an Education

This article originally appeared in The Athletic. © 2023 The Athletic Media Company

Question: What challenges do young people in Mali face?

A truck rumbled over bumpy dirt roads in the West African country of Mali this past spring. Sitting in the back seat, Mady Sissoko (MAH-dee see-SOH-koh) watched the familiar scenery of his home country roll by. He had left his village of Tangafoya as a 15-year-old to play basketball in the United States. Now, seven years later, he was a star center on Michigan State University’s top-ranked team. He was returning to Tangafoya to celebrate an even more important accomplishment: the opening of the first-ever school in his village. 

It was all thanks to Sissoko, now 23 and a college senior. He started the foundation that funded the school in Tangafoya—and he was about to see the school for the first time. 

As the truck rounded the final corner to the village, children dashed out to greet Sissoko with a hero’s welcome. Hundreds of people gathered around, thanking him. The 6'9" athlete almost cried tears of joy seeing how many lives he had touched.  

“People there, they don’t have the opportunities,” he says of Tangafoya. “I got an opportunity. Ever since I came to the United States, I wanted to give that back.”

In Mali, many children are not able to attend school (see “Mali’s Education Crisis,” below). One reason is that the nearest classroom is often hours away. 

Sissoko knows that firsthand. Plenty of his childhood friends did not go to school simply because Tangafoya didn’t have one. But though Sissoko’s parents never had the chance to get an education themselves, they were determined that their son would get one. And so every morning, Sissoko left his house by 6:30 a.m. to walk 90 minutes to class. Sometimes the temperature would top 100 degrees Fahrenheit. He would not get home from school until nearly 6 p.m.

Thinking about the future helped him stay motivated, even on hard mornings, Sissoko says. “You wake up in the morning and you can just think, ‘Nah, I’m not going today,’ ’’ he recalls. “You definitely have to have a vision that no matter what, I’m going to do this.’’

When not in school, Sissoko—the youngest of 10 children—had to weed and plow his family’s cornfields. Tangafoya is a farming village whose 900 residents grow all the food they eat: corn, beans, peanuts, rice, and millet. Sissoko, too, expected to become a farmer.

One day in 2015, Sissoko got a huge surprise. His older brother Souleymane, a soldier in Mali’s military, had met two Americans who were volunteering in Mali. Souleymane told the men about Sissoko’s height and basketball skills. They agreed to meet him. 

Sissoko had only recently picked up a basketball for the first time. He knew little about the rules and had never played in an organized game. But he could dunk.  

The American men—Paul Olson and Michael Clayton—were impressed with what they saw. With his family’s approval, they began the process of bringing Sissoko to the United States to play high school basketball. 

“We said, ‘Well, let’s give this kid an opportunity,’ ” says Clayton, who became one of Sissoko’s guardians. 

By 2016, Sissoko was headed to Utah for high school. There, he lived with a host family. It was a hard transition. Sissoko felt homesick and wondered if he’d made the right choice. He spoke Bambara—the local language of Mali—and French, but no one around him understood those languages. He often had to act things out in order to communicate.

Sissoko’s basketball skills became good enough for him to be recruited by Michigan State University (MSU) in 2019. But he failed the language test given to all non-English-speaking students. In order to enroll at MSU, he had to take weeks of English classes. He spent up to six hours a day tackling the coursework—and he succeeded. Sissoko has since maintained good grades. 

After taking the court for the MSU Spartans in 2020, Sissoko announced a new goal. He wanted to share his good fortune with his home village. But how?

The answer soon appeared. In July 2021, the National Collegiate Athletic Association began letting college athletes profit from the use of their name, image, or likeness. Though the rules don’t permit international students to make money that way, they are allowed to start foundations and seek charitable contributions.

That’s what Sissoko did. He created the Mady Sissoko Foundation to open a school in Tangafoya. He set a goal of raising $50,000 and exceeded it by “quite a lot,” he says. He was also able to fund a well—providing fresh drinking water for the village for the first time—and an irrigation system to help the farmers water their crops. 

In September 2023, classes began at the one-story school. The four classrooms—filled with long wooden tables and chairs—can hold up to 70 students each. The school is the only structure with electricity in the village. (And, of course, it has a basketball hoop!)

Sissoko isn’t done yet, though. He also hopes to someday build a hospital in Tangafoya.

As Sissoko toured the school for the first time, children tugged him into classrooms. Adults talked to him about the new well. Everyone was thrilled at what Sissoko had become.

Even more, they were grateful for what he had done.

—Dana O’Neil is a senior writer for The Athletic. With additional reporting by Brendan Quinn.