New Northwestern center commit Symon Ghai is living his dream
It is some 7,500 miles from South Sudan to Chicago if you’re traveling in a straight line. But that doesn’t begin to tell the story of how far new Northwestern basketball commit Symon Ghai has come to get to where he is now.
Ghai is from Tiam, a tiny village of about 1,000 in central South Sudan that might as well be on a different planet than Evanston, Ill. Most of the people are members of his extended family.
This is a young man who lost his father before he was born. Who started learning how to hunt deer to support his family at age 5. Who had never picked up a basketball until 2021, when a scout running a camp in a neighboring town saw him playing soccer and got him to attend the camp with the promise of a free meal.
So forgive Ghai if he feels his life doesn’t seem real at times.
“It was always my dream to come to America,” said Ghai, who committed to the Wildcats on Oct. 24, less than a week after taking an official visit. “Now it’s real. Sometimes I feel like I’m in a movie.”
‘Northwestern has everything’
The basketball part of Ghai’s story is the easiest one to tell, so we’ll begin there. After all, he is 7-foot-3 and athletic, a natural rim protector and shot blocker who picked up the game quickly. Rivals rates him as a four-star prospect and the No. 110 prospect in the 2026 class.
It wasn’t difficult for that scout running the camp to notice Ghai playing soccer on that field in Bor, South Sudan, back in May of 2021. He was already 7-feet tall at age 15.
Despite playing organized basketball just three years, Ghai managed to earn offers from several Power Five programs with his skill set. He chose Northwestern over a final four of Oklahoma State, Xavier and Florida A&M. He also held an offer from Ole Miss. He took unofficial visits to Ole Miss and UCF, which is right up the road from Kissimmee, and an official visit to Xavier.
Ghai says he decided to become a Wildcat because Northwestern offered him everything he is looking for, both on and off the court. Naturally bright and articulate, Ghai carries a 3.6 GPA. He is seemingly wise beyond his years. He speaks slowly and confidently, in almost flawless English, one of the nine languages he knows (Arabic and seven other tribal languages from back home are the others).
“Northwestern has everything I actually want,” said Ghai. “I am trying to be somebody in my life. Northwestern is really good academically, and really good at basketball. It has everything I wanted.”
He also enjoyed his official visit to Northwestern on Oct. 17-19. If you were at the Purdue football game on Aug. 18 at Martin Stadium, you probably saw Ghai standing on the sideline. He was hard to miss, standing head and shoulders above everyone around him.
“The team, every person I met on campus was really nice,” he said. “They all made me feel like I had met them before.”
He also liked what he saw of Northwestern’s game day environment at Welsh-Ryan Arena from watching videos online. He looks forward to playing in front of that fan base starting next season.
“I’ll watch games and see when everyone…goes crazy,” he said. “That passion and energy really energizes the players.”
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The deer hunter
Ghai owes a lot to deer. Hunting them has been a central part of his life for just about as long as he can remember. He was selling his deer in Bor, a bustling city of some 315,000, when Wilson “discovered” him. Ghai even mentioned deer in his X post announcing his commitment to Northwestern.
“From a village boy living on deer and milk to pounding the rock with the Northwestern Wildcats — all by God’s grace. Thank you to my family, Marcus Wilson, and everyone who believed and prayed for me. God bless you all,” he wrote.
Ghai’s uncle started bringing a 5-year-old Ghai along with him to hunt deer in the forest. By 10, Ghai says, he was a good hunter. By the time he was 13, he says he was one of the best hunters in his village.
“I was raised in a village where hunting is a way of survival,” he said. “We have no money. A man’s purpose is to contribute to the family by hunting or farming.”
And his family is a large one. He has six siblings. His grandfather had eight wives and fathered 32 boys to carry on the family name. (Ghai isn’t sure how many girls were in his grandfather’s family, as girls become part of her husband’s family when they marry.)
To give you an idea of how different the culture is in South Sudan, consider Ghai’s younger sister, Nyeruon Dhak. She is 17 years old and extremely tall, like the rest of his family. He estimates she stands “6-7 or 6-8,” the same height as his mother.
You should bring her to the United States to play basketball, I said. That wouldn’t be possible, he explained. She was married at 13 and now has two children.
When the basketball scout approached Ghai about coming to his camp in Bor, Ghai assumed it was a soccer camp. He had never touched a basketball before, let alone knew any of the game’s rules. He had only kicked a ball, so dribbling and shooting were completely foreign concepts.
Ghai was at first skeptical, but the scout promised him a free meal. That got him to go the next day.
“He kept his word. They fed me really good,” he said.
The camp coach sold Ghai on the idea that basketball can change his life, providing “free school” in the United States. He showed Ghai videos of South Sudanese stars who played in the NBA, like Luol Deng and Manute Bol.
“He told me, ‘If you come here every day, this ball can change your future,’” recalls Ghai.
A pleasant surprise
Luol Deng looms large in South Sudan. The former NBA star is the country’s ambassador of basketball, a man who has devoted a lot of money and time to promote the game in the East-Central African country. The camp Ghai attended in Bor had an outdoor court and coaches that were paid for by Deng’s organization.
Northwestern head coach Chris Collins has a connection with Deng. He recruited the former NBA lottery pick and coached him as an assistant during Deng’s one season at Duke in 2003-04.
So when Ghai was on campus at Northwestern last month for his official visit, Collins leveraged his relationship with the 15-year NBA veteran to help him in the recruiting process. He surprised his big man target by telling him he had someone for him to talk to on the phone. It was, of course, Deng.
Ghai said that it wasn’t a major factor in why he decided to become a Wildcat, but it certainly didn’t hurt. Deng is clearly a man that Ghai holds in high regard.
“Coach Collins really surprised me with that,” said Ghai. “He recruited Luol Deng. Luol is a great guy to us, a great example for kids in South Sudan, not only for basketball, but for his intelligence, and how he gets everyone together back home…
“I hope that I could maybe be someone who can share my story one day like Luol.”
A steep learning curve
After the camp in Bor back in 2021, Ghai went back home. It’s not like camp coaches could just call him; he didn’t have a phone. He could only communicate on Facebook, and he had to go to a nearby town outside of Tiam for a Wi-Fi connection.
It wasn’t until January of 2022 that Ghai finally communicated with them again. Then he had to convince his family to let him go to the camp and pursue basketball. His sisters didn’t want him to leave. He had family obligations, and they didn’t trust what could only have sounded like a pipe dream at that point.
But eventually, Ghai convinced his uncle to let him try. He went to the camp every day – it was a two-hour walk or, more often, a one-hour run to get there. The same deal applied: the camp would provide meals and Ghai would play basketball.
In May, he went to Kenya to play his first game, as well as apply for his visa to go to the United States. The results weren’t great on the court. What do you expect from a guy who still didn’t know how to dribble or shoot?
“I just dunked the ball,” he said with an almost audible smile.
Opponents caught on to Ghai’s limitations fast. Knowing he couldn’t shoot, they just started fouling him to send him to the free-throw line. He laughs when telling the story of his first free throw in a game.
“I missed the entire backboard,” he said between chuckles. He adds that his former teammates on that team still send him video of it as a way to razz him.
Reaching the promised land
On Aug. 12, 2022, Ghai finally arrived in the United States, fulfilling a dream that was planted in his head the year before. He met Marcus Wilson, the American who ran the camp in South Sudan, for the first time. Wilson is now not only Ghai’s coach at the Academy of Central Florida in Kissimmee, Fla., but also his legal guardian.
Ghai lived in the St. Louis area with a host family and went to St. John Vianney High School in suburban Kirkwood. Still a raw development project, Vianney head coach Kevin Walsh and his staff focused on small steps to get him ready for the season.
“They taught me three things: how to time the ball for blocking shots, how to rebound, and how to stay in the paint and not let anyone score,” he said.
Ghai proved to be a fast learner. By the end of his second season, in March of 2024, he showed just how far he had come as a player. He put up 22 points, 14 rebounds and five blocks to lead the Golden Griffins to a 76-57 win over Winnetonka in the Missouri Class 5 third-place game of the 2024 Show-Me Showdown at Mizzou Arena.
For this season, Ghai transferred to The Academy of Central Florida, a boarding school where Wilson is the head coach this year. He left a good situation in St. Louis for a chance to improve his game even further.
“I saw an opportunity to compete nationally and challenge myself to get better,” he said. “I loved my old school, but competition was not at a national level.”
The Golden Bulls play a national schedule and, he believes, better prepare him for Northwestern and playing in the Big Ten.
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A fitting name
Like in most African cultures, Ghai’s name has meaning in his Nuer tribe. His full name is Symon Ghai Dhak Puk, but he goes by just the first two names now, like most Americans do.
Why? “You can’t fit it on the [visa] paper,” he said matter-of-factly.
Ghai, in Nuer, means “surprise and wonder,” he explains. He was named that because when Ghai’s father passed away, his mother, Nyethak Tung Maloa, was three months pregnant with Ghai. She was understandably shocked.
“She was left in wonder,” he said. “Now she had to survive on her own.”
Instead of a sad story, Ghai uses the meaning of his name as motivation. To him, it means God listened to his mother and helped her take care of the family.
It also may mean something more now. Ghai is in America, halfway around the world, playing basketball, a sport he knew nothing about while he was hunting deer back in Tiam. His life is like a dream, and he is like a star in one of the movies he watched as a kid.
Surprise and wonder is an apt description.
