AUBURN, Ala. – Abdul Bashir traces his sharpshooting skills to his childhood.
“I fell in love with shooting the basketball early,” he said.
Other kids were bigger and stronger, so Bashir found his sweet spot away from the basket.
“I grew up a pretty skinny kid, wasn’t the most athletic so I had to find ways to put the ball in the basket without relying on physicality or athleticism,” he said. “Shooting the basketball was always something I relied on because it was something I was able to do better than everybody else.”
It helped that Abdul has a twin brother, Abdi, who transferred to Kansas State from Monmouth, for whom he scored 15 points last season at Neville Arena.
“Me and my brother would go to the gym, go to the park and shoot all the time,” Abdul said. “All those reps, all those shots we got up really helped turn us into the sharpshooters we are now.
“We’d rebound for each other all the time, play one on one all the time. Iron sharpens iron. Whenever he was at the gym, I was there. Whenever I was in the gym, he was there. We put in work all the time together. It built us into the men we are today and the talented basketball players we are now.”
After a recent gameday shootaround, Bashir stayed to practice his marksmanship, working his way around the 3-point line from the corners to the wings to the top of the key.
“I feel I can put the ball in the hoop from anywhere,” he said. “I don’t really need that much space. As long as I can see the basket, I feel like it’s going to go in.”