How South Sudan Built a World Cup Team From Scratch
premier grinders, with a reputation for studied, sweaty defense. Away from the floor, Deng, born in what is now South Sudan to a family who fled to Egypt and then the United Kingdom to escape the Second Sudanese civil war, immersed himself in service work, winning the United Nations Refugee Agency’s Humanitarian of the Year Award in 2008. So in 2019, months after his last game with the Minnesota Timberwolves, Deng returned to the comfort of a challenge.
He ran for and won the presidency of the South Sudan Basketball Federation, while the young country endured a protracted and bloody coda to its own civil war. Since gaining independence in 2011, South Sudan had never qualified for a top-flight international basketball tournament, a fact Deng attributed to a deficit not of ability but of direction. “I knew that the national team would be great for a long time," Deng said in a recent interview, “if we did things the right way." Less than four years after Deng’s election, the Bright Stars are among the 32 teams competing in the FIBA World Cup, starting with a game against Puerto Rico Saturday in the Philippines.
Deng and his players consider reaching the tournament a triumph and a salve, for a region battered by strife. It is also a proof of concept—evidence of how quickly gaps in the global game can narrow, with the right investment. South Sudanese athletes are renowned for their height; the Dinka people, a significant portion of the country’s population, are believed to be the tallest in Africa.
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