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Season Two of NBA Africa’s “Born & Bred” Original Content Series Featuring Raptors’ Ulrich Chomche and Jazz’s Babacar Sané Premieres on the NBA App

Advertorial:
Season Two of NBA Africa’s “Born & Bred” Original Content Series Featuring Raptors’ Ulrich Chomche and Jazz’s Babacar Sané Premieres on the NBA App:

Second Season Tells the Stories of Five Current and Former NBA Academy Africa Prospects from Cameroon, Central African Republic, Egypt and Senegal; All Five Episodes Will Be Available on the NBA App with One Episode Releasing Weekly Throughout September. 

NBA Africa announced the return of its first original documentary series “Born & Bred” which will premiere its second season on the NBA App today.  The docuseries returns with five episodes telling the stories of current and former NBA Academy Africa student athletes from Cameroon, Central African Republic, Egypt and Senegal as they pursue their basketball dreams at the academy and beyond.

Season two of “Born & Bred” features the first NBA Academy Africa prospect drafted to the NBA Ulrich Chomche (Toronto Raptors; Cameroon), former NBA G League Ignite players Babacar Sané (Utah Jazz; Senegal) and Thierry Darlan (Central African Republic), and current NBA Academy Africa prospects Ali Assran (Egypt) and Modou Fall Thiam (Senegal).

Chomche became the first prospect from one of the three NBA Academies around the world to be drafted directly to the NBA when he was selected 57th overall by the Memphis Grizzlies and traded to the Toronto Raptors in the 2024 NBA Draft.  During his time at NBA Academy Africa, he was named the Defensive Most Valuable Player (MVP) at the 2022 Basketball Without Borders (BWB) Africa camp and participated in the Basketball Africa League’s (BAL) Elevate program, representing Rwanda Energy Group Basketball Club (REG BBC) in 2023 and Cameroon’s Forces Armées et Police in 2022.

The first episode, “Small Village. Big Dreams”, features Chomche and is available to watch today on the NBA App.  All five episodes will be available to stream on the NBA App, with one episode releasing each week throughout September.

Descriptions of each season two “Born & Bred” episode are included below:

  • Episode 1 (Aug. 29): “Small Village. Big Dreams” features Ulrich Chomche, an 18-year-old forward from Bafang, Cameroon, who is set to make his NBA debut later this year during the 2024-25 NBA season.  Chomche joined NBA Academy Africa in 2019.  He represented Team World at the 2024 Nike Hoop Summit in Portland, Oregon in April, before declaring for the 2024 NBA Draft.  He became the seventh Cameroonian to be drafted, joining Ruben Boumtje-Boumtje (NBA Draft 2001), Luc Mbah a Moute (NBA Draft 2008), seven-time NBA All-Star and 2022-23 Kia NBA MVP Joel Embiid (NBA Draft 2014), two-time NBA All-Star Pascal Siakam (NBA Draft 2016), Christian Koloko (NBA Draft 2022) and Yves Missi (NBA Draft 2024).
  • Episode 2 (Sept. 5): “Birth of Young Ossoko” features Babacar Sané, a 20-year-old forward from Ziguinchor, Senegal.  Following his breakthrough performances during the BAL’s second season, he spent two years with NBA G League Ignite, before going undrafted in the 2024 NBA Draft and signing with the Jazz earlier this month.
  • Episode 3 (Sept. 12): “Breaking Ground” features Ali Assran, a 17-year-old forward from Cairo, Egypt.  Assran represented the U17 Egyptian national team at the 2024 FIBA Basketball World Cup and joined the NBA Academy Africa in 2023.  The episode follows him as he continues to discover his passion for basketball while channeling his struggles into determination and finding solace on the court.
  • Episode 4 (Sept. 19): “The Quiet Leader” features Modou Fall Thiam, a 19-year-old from Senegal who joined NBA Academy Africa in 2023.  Hailing from Yeumbeul, the athletic dunker faced an early injury which saw the young point guard sidelined in his second year at the academy.  Thiam details his journey of playing in several international tournaments, participating in the BAL’s third season as a BAL Elevate member of Nigeria’s Kwara Falcons, and the adversity of dealing with an injury as a young athlete.
  • Episode 5 (Sept. 26): “Against All Odds” features Thierry Darlan, who as a 20-year-old guard from Bangui, Central African Republic became the sixth NBA Academy graduate and third from the NBA Academy Africa to sign with NBA G League Ignite.  Named the MVP of the 2022 BWB Africa camp in Egypt, Darlan also led the academy team to a championship at the NBA Academy Games in Atlanta, Georgia the same year.  Following his BAL debut with Angola’s Petro de Luanda in 2022 as part of the BAL Elevate program, Darlan returned to the BAL in 2024, making his professional debut during the Nile Conference for Central African Republic’s Bangui Sporting Club.

“Born & Bred” season one premiered on the NBA App last November, featuring current and former NBA Academy Africa prospects Nigeria’s Rueben Chinyelu, Egypt’s Seifeldin Hendawy, South Sudan’s Khaman Maluach, Senegal’s Khadim Rassoul Mboup, and Angola’s Aginaldo Neto, spotlighting each prospect’s basketball journey, including the communities where they were raised and the moments that have shaped them as players and young men.

NBA Academy Africa is an elite basketball training middle in Saly, Senegal for the top high-school-age prospects from across Africa and the first of its kind on the continent.  Since its launch in 2017, more than 40 male and female participants have committed to NCAA Division I schools in the U.S. or signed professional contracts.

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Top Star Drive-In: The Cinema on the Mountain of Gold

The Ferreira Dump began growing in the late 1800s, composed of the crushed rock and chemical residue left over after early, inefficient mining processes had extracted as much gold as the technology of the time allowed. By the 1960s, it was a flat-topped, man-made mesa overlooking the city. In a stroke of entrepreneurial genius, the surface was tarred and the Top Star Drive-In was opened. It quickly became a South African institution. Its appeal was not just the movies, but the unparalleled view: as the sun set, the massive white screen would flicker to life against a backdrop of the glowing skyscrapers of the Central Business District, separated from the viewer only by the elevated M2 highway.

In the decades before television arrived in South Africa (1976), the Top Star was a primary social hub. It was a democratic space in an undemocratic time; while the city below was strictly segregated, the “car” served as a private bubble that allowed a degree of social freedom not found in traditional theaters. For many Johannesburgers, the Top Star was a site of nostalgic rites of passage—first dates, family outings where children were piled into the back of station wagons with blankets and flasks of tea, and the Saturday “car market” where the parking lot transformed into a sprawling hub for buying and selling second-hand vehicles.