Feature Friday: Aicha Coulibaly's long journey to the Plains

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.”

It didn’t take long for her love of the game to flourish into an ability that caught the eye of national team coaches. So as a 14-year-old, she earned a spot on the Mali U17 national team that won the U16 Women’s African Championship – named MVP of that tournament – and then competed in the 2016 FIBA U17 Women’s World Cup in Zaragoza, Spain. Mali went 1-2 in that tournament with Coulibaly playing significant minutes and scoring in all three games.

“It was an amazing experience,” she said, “learning from all the players older than me. Being the youngest on the team, it was kind of hard to adapt to the team. But I learned a lot from them. Getting to that team, it was a really good experience for me. And it made me grow a lot as a basketball player.”

With a dream of playing in the WNBA, she knew a move to the States would be even more beneficial to her growth. So a year later, she moved to the Washington, D.C., area, where she played at New Hope Academy for the 2017-18 school year. She then transferred to IMG Academy in Florida for her last two years of high school.

But once she made it to Florida, a knee injury shut down most of the rest of her high school basketball career.

 “A lot of people don’t know about this, but coming to my freshman year, I was coming off an injury,” Coulibaly said. “I was out for two-and-a-half years for my ACL surgery.”

Then, towards the end of her senior year, the coronavirus pandemic shut down most of the world – college recruiting and official visits included.

She never saw Auburn until the day she enrolled. But once she arrived and met her coaches and teammates, she knew the Plains was the place for her.

“I didn’t really get a chance to visit any schools,” Coulibaly said. “All of my visits were online. But I knew Auburn was a family-oriented school. And that really brought me in. I really tried to connect with the players online and talk to the coaches about what I want, what I’m trying to get, and how I can help the team out. And I felt like I would fit right in, coming into my freshman year.”

Her freshman year was a good one. She averaged 5.1 points and 3.1 rebounds in the abbreviated, 23-game 2020-21 season, earning seven starts. But the injury was still nagging, and she wasn’t quite at full strength.

“I didn’t really reach my full potential (in 2020-21),” Coulibaly said. “But after the season, I went back in, watched film, reflected on myself, got in the gym and got more shots up every day to get better. And that really helped me going into my sophomore year.”

And what a sophomore year that was. Coulibaly exploded onto the college basketball scene as she led Auburn and ranked fifth in the SEC with 17.1 points per game. She was also Auburn’s top rebounder with 7.5 per night, and she hit double-digit scoring in 25 of 28 games, including five double-doubles. For her efforts, she was named to the All-SEC Second Team.

But she’s not content with just that. She knows there’s more out there. And she believes that she and her teammates can build on several big wins from last season and accomplish even greater things this year.

“The first thing is win more games,” she said. “We had it last year. We were right there. But we just didn’t finish (several games). I feel like this year we have a chance to win more SEC games and make it to the NCAA Tournament. I feel like we have really good potential to make it.