Hong Kong-born basketball players found their feet in the US, and now they’re shooting for the stars
- Nicole Leung was a wayward child until she found basketball. Now she’s shooting for glory in US college games. So is Hong Kong hoops star Yannie Chan
Seventeen-year-old Hongkonger Nicole Leung Wai-laam has come to represent a combination of passion and determination, having excelled in a sport not much associated with the city, receiving rave reviews for her first few months playing high-school basketball – not at home, but an ocean and a continent away, in the United States.
Last September, Leung started at The Woodward School in Quincy, in the US state of Massachusetts.
“In its 130-year history, The Woodward School has never had a basketball player quite like Nicole Leung,” the local newspaper Patriot Ledger reported in January.
“In 28 years, she’s the best all-around player I’ve seen. I don’t say that lightly,” Woodward athletic director and basketball coach Bob Giordano was quoted as saying in the article.
Not only is Leung firing up the basketball court, but she is scoring academically, too, with a 3.9 GPA – not bad for a teenager who once considered quitting school in Hong Kong.
“I was a bad student because my parents divorced when I was very little,” she says on a video call from Quincy. After her parents split up, her mother worked long hours, making it hard for her to keep tabs on Leung and her older sister.
