About a year after he moved from Africa’s Ivory Coast to France as a 10-year-old, Will Yeguete switched from soccer to basketball.
It’s easy to guess why.
Yeguete was tall, athletic, and aggressive, traits that serve him well as a starting forward for Florida, which will visit Arizona on Saturday. He also has a father who played professional basketball in Africa, and who liked the idea of his son following those footsteps.
“I don’t want to say he forced me,” Yeguete said of his dad. “But he wanted me to play basketball more than I wanted to play soccer.”
Except those weren’t really the reasons Yeguete (pronounced ye-GET) switched. It’s simply that Yeguete didn’t enjoy playing outside in France too much.
“I don’t like the cold,” he says. “Soccer was my first love but when I came to France, I didn’t want to play soccer because of the weather.”
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So that was it. From there, Yeguete stayed indoors and played basketball, showing enough promise that he opted to enroll at a U.S. prep school.
Read more about Yeguete, Florida and Arizona in Thursday's Arizona Daily Star.
