It’s a little over 5,000 miles from Bamako, the capital city of Mali, to Auburn, Alabama.
Add in stops in Spain, Washington, D.C., and Florida, and that trip gets a little longer.
That’s been the path for Auburn women’s basketball junior Aicha Coulibaly – with a few bumps in the road along the way.
For one, she spoke almost no English when she arrived in the United States at age 15.
“It was ‘hello,’” Coulibaly said. “That’s all I knew. That’s all I was saying to everybody. I would use my phone to translate every time I was trying to talk to people, but I speak a little bit of French, so it was kind of easier for me to learn.”
Now in the U.S. for five-plus years, she speaks three languages – English, French and her native tongue of Bambara.
But back to the beginning. It was a schoolmate, wearing her basketball jersey to class every day, that sparked Coulibaly’s interest in the sport when she was 10 or 11 years old.
“I asked her one day, ‘Where are you going? Are you always in your basketball jersey?’” she said. “And she said she played basketball. And I was like, ‘Oh, let me go with you.’ After that, I started playing basketball, and I loved it.”