While Williams-Jeter could have focused on Madol’s parents fleeing a deadly civil war and the myriad other problems that have besieged their native Sudan for decades, she initially did not.
Nor did she elaborate on the 6-foot-3 sophomore playing for Minnesota in the Big Ten last season.
The chapter in the 19-year old’s life that she brought up happened back during the COVID shutdown some 4 ½ years ago when Madol — who grew up playing soccer in Regina, Saskatchewan — found herself drawn to basketball.
“The soccer fields were all closed then, so she took out her laptop and searched out videos of Breanna Stewart and Kevin Durant, two (pro) players who looked like her,” Williams-Jeter said. “She would study their moves and then try to imitate them outside.”
Madol expounded on that story Thursday night after scoring 11 points in the Flyers’ 65-61 come-from-behind victory over Providence at UD Arena:
“I didn’t really have a basketball background before that, so I just searched out Breanna Stewart highlights. I’d watch her do a move and then go out and try it. I kept doing it for days and days until I could perfect it and then move on to the next. It was the same with Kevin Durant.
“I just kept working and working and working until I could do some of those things.”
That work ethic Madol alluded to is not just some gauzy general concept or well-worn descriptor she grabs hold of to tell a story, it’s a fully-ingrained trait that comes from grabbing hold of a cleaning rag, picking up a broom and dustpan and carrying out a trash bag.
Since she was young, Madol — like her other siblings — has helped her mom, Abuk Akuei, with the cleaning business she runs in Regina.
Abuk came to Canada 24 years ago as a Sudanese refugee.
She’d end up having five children, but her husband soon would be out of the picture, meaning she was the sole provider for her family, even though she was in a strange land halfway around the globe from her home, didn’t know the language — she did speak her native Dinka and Arabic — and didn’t know the culture.
Still, there were some things she was sure of.
“I wanted to be independent,” she said by phone during a break between her cleaning jobs a couple of evenings ago.
“When people talked to me about welfare, I said ‘No, I need a job.’”
She found one by accident, she said.
Back when she was a young girl in Africa, her mother died, and she had to help care for her other siblings. That sense of responsibility helped build her foundation for the future.
“I was used to keeping everything organized and cleaned up,” she said. “So when people came by where we lived here (in Regina), they were really shocked. They said, ‘How can it be so organized?’
“Rumors of that spread — one person would tell the next — and I started getting offers to clean other people’s places.”
Her cleaning business developed from that, and she built a list of clients that included residential homes and businesses.
She told me she now cleans a school, a couple of apartment complexes and a bingo hall.
As her kids were growing up, she had them involved in sports and when they weren’t at after-school practices or games, some of them were with her on one of her jobs.
“I’d put some of them in an office where I was cleaning and tell them to do their homework while I worked,” she said. “School came before everything else, including sport.”
Often, she’d have them help her clean.
“I remember in elementary school, after soccer practice, going and helping her,” Madol said. “Fridays were busiest. She’d start at 4 and me and my sister might help her until 11 at night. Then she’d bring us home and go back and finish.
“I picked up those work lessons and now they are my habits. I use them in school and now in basketball. I know if I work, I can excel in what I’m doing.”
That paid off for her in high school and likely would have done the same at Minnesota, except for a coaching change that altered the dynamic and then an injury that sidelined her for much of the Big Ten season last year.
She said she transferred to Dayton for “a fresh start” and as the 4-1 Flyers head to the Music City Classic in Nashville — Monday they play Maryland Eastern Shore and Tuesday, South Dakota — she is getting what she hoped for at UD.
Although she comes off the bench, she leads the team in blocked shots, is second in rebounding (5.2 per game), tied for second in steals and third in scoring (8 points per game).
War at home
As Abuk was talking to me about her daughter’s new start at UD — “She would be sad when I talked to her last year; but she loves it in Dayton” — her attention was divided by the same old story unfolding back home in South Sudan.
“As I’m talking to you now, there’s a fight back in Juba (the capital city) where my family is,” she said. “There’s shooting going on. I tried to call my stepbrother, but his phone isn’t working.
“The fight is between the president and the head of the national security. They say he wanted to do a coup and he’s under house arrest.
“I don’t know what happened today, but there’s lots of shooting.”
According to wire service reports from Juba, heavy gunfire erupted at the home of the country’s former spy chief, Gen. Akol Koor, who has been under house arrest since October when he was fired from the intelligence job he’d held since South Sudan got its independence in 2011.
A landlocked nation in East Africa, Sudan had back-to-back civil wars that began in 1983 and ended in 2005. Six years later South Sudan broke off as an independent nation, but in 2013 it too was engulfed in a civil war that lasted until 2020.
There’s been rampant corruption, human rights abuses and ethnic cleansing. Over 400,000 people were killed, and 4 million people were displaced. Then in 2017 the United Nations declared a famine in the country.
Abuk had fled the nation in the early 1990s and ended up in Egypt for almost 9 years, she said.
“When the war took place we ran,” she said. “I left with my brother. Most people went somewhere else, but we lost a lot of people.”
Eventually, her brother, who’d worked in the government, sought political asylum in England. Abuk’s five sisters ended up in various places in Europe and North America. She married Deng Madol and their first child, Majok, was born in Egypt.
When they finally left Africa, she said they didn’t get to pick their destination. They ended up in Canada and eventually settled in Regina, where there was a small Sudanese community.
Soon raising her children on her own, she said she had one overriding concern:
“I prayed all the time that my kids would do something good.”
Thanks in as big way to sports, they did. She said teachers in school saw her children were athletically gifted and she built on that.
“I thought being involved in sports would keep them out of trouble.”
It also opened doors.
Majok grew to be 6-foot-10 and played basketball, first at South Carolina State and then the University of Regina. Eldest daughter Amou just finished a soccer career at the University of Saskatchewan.
Younger son Akol played soccer at the University of Regina and the youngest boy, Cher, plays basketball.
From soccer to basketball
Abuk said when Ajok was in sixth grade she was approached by people who wanted to take her daughter away from Regina to a soccer school where her skills could be developed.
“I said, ‘No!’” Abuk said.
She felt the family embrace and the lessons learned at home were more important than going off on your own as a child.
Two years later, Ajok switched her focus to basketball and in just a short time began to make a name for herself.
In 2021 she was invited to the Canadian Senior Women’s National Team camp. She was just 16.
Although he didn’t make the team, she said: “It was a good experience to play with WNBA players. They really were welcoming and challenged us to showcase our skills. We’re the next generation and they don’t want us to be afraid when we get in that space.”
She was part of the Under 19 national team squad that won a bronze medal in the FIBA U19 Women’s Basketball World Cup in Spain. As a senior at Archbishop M.C. O’Neill High School in Regina, she was named Saskatchewan’s Player of the Year.
Recruited by several Division I schools, she chose Minnesota because of a special connection to head coach Lindsay Whalen, the former Gophers star and longtime WNBA player.
But before she got to campus, Whalen and her staff were fired after an 11-19 season.
It wasn’t the same bond with the new coaches and then came the broken metatarsal that sidelined her for 14 games. Upon her return, she scored 11 points in just 13 minutes against Michigan in the Big Ten Tournament, but by then her mom said she could tell her daughter was unhappy.
She entered the transfer portal and visited Tulsa before coming to Dayton. Although she was scheduled to go to Colorado next, she said her mind was made up once she came to UD.
It helped that Whalen and Williams-Jeter had been teammates on the Connecticut Suns and are friends. Madol said Whalen thought Williams-Jeter would be just the kind of nurturing coach she now needed.
It also helped that Flyers assistant coach Kalisha Kane is from Canada and played in the Big Ten with Michigan State. And the Flyers would add two more Canadian players in Iowa State transfer Shantavia Dawkins and freshman Olivia Leung.
As Leung put it Thursday night after scoring 13 points — 11 in the final 5:19 — to lift UD victory:
“We all (the Canadians) look out for each other, but at the same time we’ve bought into something bigger than that here.”
After basketball Madol hopes to be part of something much bigger, too:
“When I’m done with school, I want to help people in underserved neighborhoods. I know how it was for my mom, coming from Africa, and being an immigrant. I know how hard that was to adjust to a new lifestyle. I just want to help make other people’s lives better.”
In doing something like that she would be following in the footsteps of two other well known Sudanese basketball players, Luol Deng and Manute Bol.
Both longtime and celebrated NBA players, they dedicated themselves to humanitarian ventures.
Deng — the former Duke star who’s now back coaching children in South Sudan — worked with the World Food Program; the NBA’s Basketball Without Borders initiative; and aided The Lost Boys of Sudan, as the some 20,000 young children uprooted by the second civil war were called.
The 7-foot 7 Bol launched the Ring True Foundation to help raise money for Sudanese refugees worldwide. By the time of his death in 2010, he had given most of his life’s earnings to the cause.
While both are shing examples for Madol to follow, she really needs to look no further than her own family for someone to emulate.
As her mom told the folks who wanted to take her daughter away as a sixth grader.
The best lessons for her in life would come right at home.
About the Author