Bigger Than You

JAMAICAN BORN-AND-BRED PROSPECT KOFI COCKBURN WORKED HIS WAY TO BECOMING ONE OF THE BEST HS PLAYERS IN THE US AND A STANDOUT IN HIS CURRENT HOMETOWN OF NYC

- Alex Squadron

RED 1! RED 1!

Kofi Cockburn, then a freshman in high school, heard the play called but stood frozen. It was his first ever organized basketball scrimmage. His first ever experience playing within a system. His first time ever competing in front of a serious crowd.

“Yeah, it was horrible,” Kofi, who just finished his junior year and is now ranked No. 23 on ESPN’s Class of 2019 prospect list, remembers with a smile. “I had no idea what I was doing, basically. I was just nervous.”

The 6-11, 248-pound big man had recently travelled over 1,500 miles from his hometown of Kingston, Jamaica, where he had never been on a real basketball team before, straight to the historic Christ the King, one of the best hoops schools in the state of New York.

Lining the halls outside the gym are the jerseys of current and former pros who once thrived there: Lamar Odom, Speedy Claxton, Khalid Reeves, Sue Bird, Tina Charles. The list goes on.

One day, Kofi plans to see his own NBA uniform encased in glass and hung up.

But of course, when he first arrived, that seemed like a stretch. A foreigner to New York and to structured basketball, Kofi found himself having to adjust to a completely new environment. At 15 years old, he had to get accustomed to an alien lifestyle while also dealing with the pressure of upholding his school’s tradition of winning on the court.

So yeah, there were bound to be some bumps along the way.

When he boarded that flight to NY in November of 2014, Kofi was leaving behind everything he knew. The neighborhood in which he grew up was far smaller and quieter than Queens. Basketball wasn’t a big part of the culture there, so Kofi took up other sports.