Monmouth's Amaan Sandhu sets his sights on making history for India
Monmouth's Amaan Sandhu sets his sights on making history for India
“I want to put a stamp on something, that I’m from India, and I’m not the only one,” Sandhu said. “There’s a lot of other players who can come play D1-level basketball too.”
WEST LONG BRANCH – Amaan Sandhu keeps a journal in his room where he’s written down his short-term and long-term goals. Like scores of basketball players his age, the ultimate goal is to make it to the NBA, but Sandhu knows there are steps he must take in the meantime. If his first season at Monmouth is going well, one objective is to become a starter as a freshman.
What sets Sandhu apart is where he has come from and the major goal he has already achieved. He’s the first player from India to receive a Division I men’s basketball scholarship.
“I’m trying my best,” Sandhu said. “I want to put a stamp on something, that I’m from India, and I’m not the only one. There’s a lot of other players who can come play D1-level basketball too.”
His previous coaches knew this was what he wanted. His college coach, King Rice, reminds him all the time that he isn’t a “normal” freshman at Monmouth, that so many people back home in his country of 1.4 billion are watching.
“I was telling someone else, I don’t even think he understands the magnitude of it,” Monmouth forward Myles Foster said. “Local kids, we kind of play for our families. I feel like he’s playing for something much bigger than that when you really think about it.”
Yet when you talk to the 7-foot-tall 19-year-old, you come to realize that beneath his easygoing personality, he knows exactly what he represents to his fellow athletes in India – and he takes it seriously.
Ronald Cass arrived in Delhi in 2018 to begin an assignment as an assistant coach and player development coach at NBA Academy India. The NBA had launched the academy the year before, along with locations in Australia and Senegal; Mexico City would receive one in 2018.
It didn’t take long for Cass to notice Sandhu. The saying goes that you can’t teach height, but Sandhu’s size was in focus because he also hovered around 300 pounds. He would go on to shed some weight by following a strict diet that cut out bread and milk, staples of some Indian culinary favorites. As he trimmed down (he’s now listed at 260), he also grew to 7 feet.
But Cass marveled that even as a heavyset player, Sandhu could really move. To this day, his footwork is one of the strengths that anyone who’s coached him will underscore. “He had a knack for basketball out there,” Cass said.
That isn’t a given, even inside an NBA-sponsored academy. These were high school-aged players, and everyone was raw to some degree.
“The fundamentals of basketball, that’s where we as coaches, we’re going back to the jump stops, we’re going back to the pivots, back to the basics as you would maybe with a freshman in high school,” Cass said.
Sandhu’s parents and sister also played basketball, so he came to Delhi from his native Punjab with some familiarity. He could shoot, and Cass helped hone his mechanics and form. Now the 7-footer can knock down a corner 3-pointer or a trailing 3 in transition.
Sandhu got to experience playing in the States via the NBA Academy Games, which were held one year in Atlanta. Cass said Sandhu had a great tournament against American and academy teams – with some Division I coaches in attendance.
But the key moment came in 2020, when the COVID-19 pandemic forced NBA Academy India to shut down temporarily. His academy connections helped Sandhu find a new home outside Pittsburgh, at a prep school called First Love Christian Academy.
First Love fields two basketball rosters, a national high school team and a post-grad team, and normally plays a national schedule every season. The pandemic shook up their plans for 2020-21, but they managed to play about 15 games, according to school CEO and assistant coach Nathan Roesing. The silver lining for Sandhu, Roesing said, was that spending more time in practice than in games that year made him a stronger player.
“I always laugh when I talk to King and (Monmouth assistant coach Rick Callahan),” Roesing said. “They got a sleeper because if he were to have that first year with us – we actually predict him to be a high-major player.”
How does a skilled 7-footer fly under the radar? Again, the pandemic is partly to blame. The extra year of eligibility the NCAA granted most athletes meant more players stayed in college, leading to fewer scholarship spots available for incoming freshmen. Couple that with the free one-time transfer rule, and it became a game of musical chairs.
Reports said Sandhu was offered by Rider, Marist and Robert Morris in 2021 as he played for First Love and Team Takeover of the Nike Elite Youth Basketball League. Mid-major interest was there. But as Rice puts it, “recruiting is recruiting.”
“People see you, they want you, then they back off, all kinds of things,” Rice said. “Just knowing he had gone through it a bunch, when it got to our plate where there was a chance he could come here, I wanted to get to know him as a kid and really spend some time with him, talking with him. We don’t get a lot of 7-foot guys. And for a guy to come from NBA India, that sounds great. But I had to make sure he’s the right type of kid for Monmouth.”
Sandhu came to Monmouth this past summer, thrilled to finally be visiting a D1 campus. He said he and Rice talked for “probably an hour.”
Rice hadn’t spoken with Sandhu before that and didn’t know what to expect. He came away impressed.
“A lot of times kids come in and first time you’re meeting them, they kind of tone down who they are because they don’t want to make a mistake. That was not him,” Rice said. “He was like, ‘Coach, man, what’s happening with you? How’ve you been? Everything good?’ Gave me a bro hug. So it was awesome.
“And I said, ‘I’ll tell you like this, I love your energy. But I’m gonna tell you man, make sure, if this works out, you’re representing a lot of folks. We’re not gonna be the one that’s over here experimenting with who you are. You’re gonna be the kid your parents sent over here.’”
Roesing got to deliver the news to Sandhu that Monmouth had offered him the scholarship.
“The only thing he asked me was, ‘Can I be the one to tell my mom?’” Roesing said. “It just tells you how special a kid he is, that he wanted his mom to hear it from him. Amaan will always be the one that stands out more than anybody because it wasn’t your normal (recruiting) process.”
For now, this is his home, and the Hawks are his family. Sandhu loves how the team “moves as a unit,” going everywhere from the gym to the dining hall together as a group.
Rice said Sandhu will get minutes as a freshman, potentially a lot of them, as long as he’s healthy. He was the starting center in a scrimmage earlier this month. Monmouth is moving from the MAAC to the Colonial Athletic Association this season, and the latter league tends to feature bigger bigs, so Rice is preparing accordingly.
The consensus is that Sandhu, just like most freshmen from the States, just needs to catch up to the speed of the game at the D1 level.
“By the end of his sophomore year, maybe even sooner than that, people are gonna be wondering how he’s at Monmouth,” Rice said.
That potential is only amplified by what his journey represents. News outlets in India have covered his story. As basketball grows in popularity there and around Asia, there’s sure to be interest in whether Sandhu might become the nation’s best hoopster yet.
“It’s a lot of pressure on my shoulders,” Sandhu said. “I’ve got a whole nation back home and they want to see me play and do all the good things. But they don’t know what I do every day and stuff. … But me being the only one, that can’t hold me at a certain place, so I gotta keep fighting through it and keep growing.”
Sandhu knew a few Indian players older than him, but it was rare for them to return his calls. Now youth players back in India text Sandhu or hit him up on Instagram looking for advice. He wants to give back.
“I never thought to myself, like, I’mma get calls from all these younger kids and they’re going to ask me questions like, ‘Yo big bro, can you tell me what happens in your practice? And what’d you do to take care of your body and stuff?’” Sandhu said. “It’s pretty exciting, man.”
“He looks forward to it,” Cass said. “He’d even run around with little Indian kids when we would host camps and stuff like that. He wants to be a role model. He knows what’s on his back. He knows it.”
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Thank you for reading. I visited Monmouth last week for this newsletter and I really appreciated the time that the Hawks, Ronald Cass and Nathan Roesing gave me so I could tell Amaan’s story. This was a lengthy one, so let’s clean the glass with some quick season-preview notes on Monmouth and get on with the week.
As I wrote here in February, the CAA has been a better basketball league than the MAAC over the past decade or so based on average RPI and NET rankings. Rice said during CAA media day that his past experience moving Monmouth from the Northeast Conference to the MAAC in 2013-14 will provide perspective. “I was newer at this and I wanted to come after everybody. I was just ready to fight every coach and every team and everyone,” he said of that transition. “This time, we’ve been through that and I’m a little more mature. I understand that everybody who gets to do this is really good at it.”
As previously noted, the CAA will force Monmouth to get a bit bigger. Foster, listed at 6-foot-7, played some five for the Hawks last year but will be back in his natural position at the four this year. “Now in the CAA, and now with the size that we’ve got too, I think it’s great,” Foster told me. “I get to play inside out. It’s my natural position. And in Coach Rice’s offense, the forward does a little bit of everything, kind of runs through them. I can be a really good facilitator and get my teammates involved.”
Foster said the staff is coaching the Hawks harder this year, not only because of the move to the CAA but because the team is especially young. There’s no secret that Rice likes to schedule hard, too, and the Hawks will begin this season with three straight road games against Power Six opponents – Seton Hall, Virginia and Illinois. Rice will look to Jarvis Vaughan, the roster’s only senior, for leadership. “He’s seeing things so clearly right now,” Rice told me. “He hasn’t really been in to play, but he’s seeing it and he’s understanding where we’re coming from as coaches. So now it’s almost like he’s on our side with us helping the younger guys now, because he’s been through it so many times.”
Monmouth was picked 10th in the CAA preseason poll, second out of the league’s four new teams – Stony Brook was ninth, NC A&T 11th and Hampton 13th. The Hawks begin the year No. 250 in the country in KenPom.com’s rankings and way down at 336 on Barttorvik.com. The Lindy’s preseason magazine had them slightly higher at eighth of 13.
The lower expectations are understandable when you consider not only the bump up in competition, but the loss of the last year’s entire starting five to graduation or transfer. Expect Myles Ruth to be the primary ball-handler after starting 14 games two years ago as a freshman. Foster will be important. Klemen Vuga, Tadhg Crowley and Sandhu all could see time at center.