“You have guys, they have never seen a play drawn up, they don’t know how to run an assist, they don’t understand the language of basketball,” said Roland Houston, the technical director of the academy. It is run in partnership with the SEED Project, a nonprofit youth empowerment organization founded by Fall. “In a way, that’s good,” Houston said. “They’re not burned out on the game. They’re full of joy.”

Basketball has been played internationally in Africa since the 1960s, under the auspices of the International Basketball Federation, known as FIBA. But in international play, African countries have not cracked the upper echelon: Senegal’s men’s team is 37th out of 165 in the FIBA world rankings. While there have been a handful of basketball players from this part of the continent in the N.B.A., such as Gorgui Dieng of the Minnesota Timberwolves, most of Africa’s stars have been from countries farther east.

“I have asked myself, why wasn’t there a bigger surge of Africans in the N.B.A.?” Houston said of the academy. “But if you don’t see it, you don’t believe it, you don’t know that maybe, ‘I can play in that league.’ And I think that’s been a big gap, the guys just not knowing that, ‘Hey, you can do it too.’”