Monmouth star Abdi Bashir Jr. driven by family, faith and heritage
The two best 3-point shooters in the country this season are Somali-American twins Abdi and Abdul Bashir.
WEST LONG BRANCH – Another night, another huge game for the breakout star of this college basketball season, Abdi Bashir Jr.
Bashir knocked down 8 of 13 attempts from three and finished with 30 points Monday in the Hawks’ 78-73 win over Northeastern. The seventh and eighth threes were particularly crucial for Monmouth during a back-and-forth second half.
Bashir set a new program record for 3-pointers in a season (110) with multiple games to go. His contribution to this win added to a full season’s worth of highlights – from dropping 10 3-pointers and 38 points on Rutgers to scoring 28 in an upset of Seton Hall on Nov. 30.
While Monmouth coach King Rice drew a reaction that day by commenting that he expects Bashir will transfer to a bigger program at season’s end, something said by Bashir himself flew under the radar.
“I just stay blessed, stay prayed up and control what I can and let God control the rest. And that’s what I try to do, but I’m representing a lot. I’m representing my last name, I’m representing a whole country. There’s not no Somali Division I basketball players. You know, there’s only one, there’s a young guy at Arizona State (Amier Ali), and my twin brother and all of us, we’re just trying to represent. We’re trying to represent a whole country. So I wear that on my sleeve every day.”
That twin brother, Abdul Bashir, is headed to Division I in a few short months. After two terrific seasons at Casper College, a junior college in Wyoming, he’s committed to transfer to Auburn, right now the No. 1 team in the country.
1,900 miles apart, from the High Plains to the Jersey Shore, these brothers are putting the college hoops world on notice with their 3-point range that seems to know no bounds. But being that far away from your twin has its challenges. FaceTime is a major help.
“Yeah, it’s been hard. I haven’t been seeing him a lot the past couple of years,” Abdi told me in an interview this month. “We bump into each other when we’ve got off time or in the summer or something like that. But we talk almost every day, just try to keep each other’s heads on the right path. You know, we both got a mission of what we got to accomplish, so I keep his head straight, he keeps my head straight and it kind of works both ways. But it’s tough being away from him for so long.”
Abdi and Abdul’s mother came from a Somali refugee camp to Minnesota, where the brothers were born in 2003. Their father spent multiple years fighting in a war for Somalia before rejoining the family. “He had to do what he had to do,” Abdi said.
They settled in Omaha, Nebraska, soon after the twins were born. The family took their Muslim faith seriously, something that remains true for Abdi to this day.
“It just kind of keeps my head straight,” he said of Islam. “It’s a really tough religion to follow and to practice, but once you get the hang of it and once you learn what’s right and what’s wrong … it’s pretty easy. My family is very, very religious. That’s just who we were as kids, that’s who we were growing up. It’s kind of an inherited thing.”
Abdi and Abdul, of course, also gravitated toward basketball as they grew up. “We play identically,” Abdi told me of their styles, and the numbers bear that out: At the National Junior College Athletic Association Division I level, Abdul is the second-leading scorer at 27.2 ppg and has made a nation-best 111 3-pointers – exactly one more than Abdi, as of now. (Casper College did not grant requests to interview Abdul for this story.)
Having a twin brother to train with was the ultimate iron-sharpening-iron setup.
“We used to play against each other, one-on-ones and all this different type of stuff,” Abdi said. “I’ll learn new moves and he’ll teach me some stuff. We would just bounce off each other, really.”
They played together at Minnesota Prep for their junior year before transferring – Abdi to a prep school in Phoenix, Abdul to one in Colorado. Abdul went the juco route in part because he wasn’t academically eligible for Division I right away, but he was always a D1-caliber athlete, his brother said.
“He got his grades back up and now he’s going to the No. 1 team in America,” Abdi said. “It’s a quick turnaround.”
As for Abdi, he found his way to Monmouth thanks to former George Washington, Siena and Mount St. Mary’s head coach Jamion Christian. He knew about Bashir but didn’t have a head coaching position in 2023 and wanted to connect him with Rice. The Monmouth coach and the talented guard started to build a relationship, and as Bashir tells it, “As soon as they came with the offer, I didn’t waste no time.”
Bashir played 13 minutes per game in a reserve role last season while Monmouth’s offense ran through Xander Rice. He wasted no time maximizing his starting role as a sophomore, scoring 20 points in an opening night loss at Michigan State. His explosion at Rutgers was the Hawks’ fourth game of the year. He’s now matched the school record with five 30-point games this year and helped Monmouth climb into sixth in the CAA.
He’s more than a 3-point bomber. At Stony Brook earlier this month, when his shot wasn’t falling, he racked up seven assists. Standing at 6-foot-7, Bashir likes to employ an overhand pass that feels like “second nature” to him when a trap or double-team is coming.
“I draw so much attention now, nobody wants me to get a shot off so it’s easy for me to just make that (pass),” Bashir said. “Plus I’m taller than a lot of people trying to guard me, you know, so I could just pass it right over their head. So if I got to make that pass, I’m gonna make that pass and I can see the floor pretty well.”
The Somali community online has shown abundant support for the Bashirs, and Abdi has heard from fans not only back in Somalia, but as far away as Australia. He said it means a lot to represent the country and be a role model for kids who may not have had a Somali athlete to look up to.
Omaha is where he calls home, but Abdi has enjoyed his time at Monmouth.
“Probably just building the relationships I’ve got with everybody,” he said of what he has liked the most. “I’m not from New Jersey, you know, it’s different being out here. But it’s for the better. I like it out here. It’s a great environment. Coach Rice, he treats me like his son.”
He went on to say that Rice doesn’t let him slide on anything, making sure he is reaching his full potential. Bashir also gave Rice a specific shoutout Monday night in a postgame interview on CBS Sports Network.
“He knows how to be a role model and a coach,” Bashir said. “It’s great playing for him. There’s no other coach like him. He’s the best coach I ever had, and I hope we’ve got a long stint together.”
Others might want to fast-forward to transfer portal season and, for example, project what Auburn would look like with both Bashir brothers pouring in 3-pointers next year. Abdi told me they haven’t discussed playing together yet, joking that they would both want to take all the shots if they were teammates.
For now, Abdi is hyper-focused on Monmouth and the rest of the current season. He’s on a mission, after all. And a war-torn nation is pulling for him every step of the way.