“It wasn’t a normal game. They kept stopping every five minutes to say more things about him. It was pretty amazing.”
And so was his dad — Yassin Mousa — who was a national hoops hero in Qatar, the small, oil and natural gas rich Arab nation on a peninsula in the Persian Gulf.
Yassin, who led his club and national teams to over 60 titles, had been the first player from the Arab world ever invited to the Nike Hoop Summit, the prestigious international all-star basketball game held annually in Portland, Oregon.
He was part of Qatar’s 3 x 3 squad the won the 2014 FIBA championship in Moscow and averaged 25 points and 12.4 rebounds a game at the FIBA World Championships in Portugal in 1999.
Hamad said his dad had tryouts with several NBA teams — including Houston, Indiana and Dallas — and was in the NBA G-League.
When he finally retired in 2016, the Qatar Basketball Federation had that sendoff celebration — called the Legend Retirement Game — that packed the 7,700 seat Ali Bin Hamad al-Attiyah Arena in Doha.
A well-known Philippines team was brought in to play an exhibition with Yassin’s longtime team, Al Rayyan.
“About the end of the third quarter they stopped the game, and my dad grabbed a microphone and told the crowd: ‘This is my last game and now I’m going to pass the torch to my son,’” Hamad said.
“I was just 10 and I was sitting behind the bench, and he called me out onto the court. He handed me the basketball and the crowd was cheering his name, and he told me to go make a layup.
“I’d been a soccer player and had just started playing the game. I was scared, but I just took off dribbling down the court.”
As he shared the story the other afternoon in a room above the Dayton Flyers practice gym at the Cronin Center, Hamad — who was wearing a stylish Sp5der T-shirt from the urban streetwear company in Atlanta — pulled out his phone and found a photo of that exact torch-passing moment.
“It’s one of my favorite memories,” he said quietly.
And, yes, he made the layup.
Since then, he’s made a lot of other shots in what’s become quite an amazing, torch-carrying career for someone who’s still just 18, even though he now equals his dad’s 6-foot-8 height.
Tonight, Hamad will take the floor for the Flyers when they open the season against Saint Francis University at UD Arena.
This is the latest stop in what’s become a passport bulging basketball resume for him.
Asked some of the places a bouncing ball has taken him, he rattled off a dozen and a half nations — from Saudi Arabia, Iran and Egypt to France, Spain, Germany, China, Indonesia, and Australia.
He spent nearly three years of high school at the NBA Global Academy in Canberra, Australia, where his hoops education included games around the world and a few trips to the United States to play in Orlando, Atlanta and Boston.
This past February he had one of the standout performances among 40 top young players from around the world who took part in the NBA Basketball Without Borders event during the NBA All Star Game weekend in Indianapolis.
Like his dad 24 years prior, he played in the Nike Hoop Summit and this year he also returned to Qatar to play for the men’s national team in the Asia Cup qualifying games. Although Qatar lost a game in Iran, it beat Kazakhstan in Doha.
In joining the Flyers — where he’ll wear the No. 10 to honor his dad, whose 10 jersey was retired in Qatar — he becomes just the second player in his country’s history to play NCAA Division I basketball. The other player, Abood Abuissa, played just four games over two seasons at Sacred Heart a few years back.
‘Trust’ the process
Hamad has two younger brothers, Abdullah — already a promising basketball talent who just turned 16 — and Ahmed.
He said his mom, Muna, gave him his “patience and smarts,” while his dad, along with the basketball genes, gave him a plan to put those talents to the best use.
He said when his dad was growing up, he didn’t learn English and that made communicating in America — and his NBA bid — more difficult, at first.
Although he grew up speaking Arabic as well, Hamad said his dad made sure he went to an English-speaking school when he was younger:
“He told me one day I’d be playing outside of our country, and I’d need to be able to speak English.”
Another part of Hamad’s development came with the NBA school in Australia.
And he said the venture was unsettling at first.
He relocated during COVID when visas were hard to come by. His dad had planned to travel with him to Australia, but hadn’t yet gotten approval for his passage when Hamad got his student’s visa.
Since school already had started in Canberra, Hamad said the Global Academy officials wanted him to be there and that meant making the long trip alone.
“I was 15, still a kid, and I was homesick at first,” he said.
He soon was part of the Global Academy’s top team and travelled the world.
When he finished there, he said his agent — Bouna Ndiaye, who also represents 7-foot-1 Amaël L’Etang, the Flyers freshman from France, and once represented UD coach Ricardo Greer during his 14-year pro career overseas — asked him what he wanted to do next:
Turn pro or go to college in the United States?
Hamad said his dad had long stressed he wanted his son to go to college and get an education because one day he would need “a Plan B.”
“But the whole thing got really crazy,” Hamad said. “I looked at all my offers and narrowed them down to three: Michigan, Virginia and Arizona State.
“It was two days before I was going to make my choice when my agent called and told me the University of Dayton was interested.
“To be truthful, I had never heard of Dayton and knew nothing about it.
“He asked if I wanted to do a Zoom call with them and all the Dayton coaches got on it and they were friendly and seemed like they wanted me.
“Afterward, my agent told me he thought that would be a good place for me, so I said OK.”
Hamad committed sight unseen — never having visited the campus or UD Arena — and having just found out the school even existed.
“I trust my agency,’ he said. “They’ve been through these things a lot and want the best for me.
“Who you trust and what you trust are the biggest things.
“I trusted them, and now I trust that the University of Dayton will be the best for me.”
Acclimating to college life
Although he is well-travelled internationally, he admits day-to-day living on the UD campus has been a bit of a culture challenge at times.
He said it’s not because he’s a Muslim teen from the Middle East on a Catholic campus in the Midwest, it’s more about a physical sense of place.
He’s from Doha, a city of 1.2 million with gleaming skyscrapers overlooking the Persian Gulf.
“Beyond the city is the desert and there you can see camels and sand dunes,” he said. “And it’s hot.”
The daily temperatures from May though September often top 100 degrees Fahrenheit.
At UD, he — like L’Etang — lives at Marycrest, the dorm for all UD freshmen.
“I see a lot of new people every day, just random people, and I try to trade conversations and find out about them and they’re great,” he said.
“Some of them look at me and Amaël as superstars of the place because we play basketball, but we’re just freshman getting used to college, too.”
Getting used to the food isn’t always as easy.
“I haven’t seen a lot of varieties,” he admitted. “There’s a lot of American food — a lot of hamburgers — but I’ve talked to some of the coaches about helping me find some Arabic food.”
He said he especially misses chicken shawarma.
The place where he feels most comfortable is the basketball court.
Credit: David Jablonski
Credit: David Jablonski
In the Flyers two exhibition games this season, he played just under 15 minutes against Xavier and scored eight points on 3-for-7 shooting while adding three rebounds and a steal against two turnovers.
And in 11 minutes against Ashland, he scored five points with two assists, two rebounds and a steal.
He said he hopes to bring energy and especially play defense when he’s brought into games this season.
Eventually, he said he hopes to get a degree and one day play in the NBA.
He said while his dad was close to getting into the league, he wants to go finish the job.
Like his dad told him in front of everyone.
It’s time for him to carry the torch.
About the Author