Montour’s Ama Sow might be the most exciting high school basketball player to watch in all of Western Pennsylvania.
He might be the very best, too.
Standing 6 feet 10, Sow, a senior, has used his skills, athleticism and drive to become a double-double machine. He throws down big dunks regularly, swats away shots with ease, has a low post game that continues to blossom, shoots 82% from the free-throw line, and has even knocked down nine 3-pointers.
“He’s amazing,” senior teammate Colton Straight said. “I was expecting a lot from him, but he has exceeded my expectations. He’s been great.”
Sow (rhymes with sew) is the marquee player for a Montour squad considered one of the best Class 5A teams in the state, but life hasn’t always been golden for this tall teen who hopes to lead his team to some gold medals and trophies in the next two months.
This is a kid who just over three years ago left his family in Senegal to come to the United States. He was then a 6-foot-6, 160-pound 15-year-old who came to this country all by himself and without knowing a lick of English.
As if Sow didn’t face a huge challenge already, the basketball program he traveled more than 4,000 miles away to play for folded just a few months after he arrived, and he and some of his teammates were booted from the house they were living in.
“He was homeless,” said Dave McComb, a Kennedy resident, who, along with his wife, Nicole, took in Sow and have since become his legal guardians.
At one time, Sow didn’t have much. But he has always had dreams, among them learning a new language, fitting in as a student in the United States, and making the NBA. He’s still working on that third goal, but he’s getting better by the day. And with the help of the McComb family and the Montour community overall, Sow, despite standing out due to his height, has blended in beautifully.
“He was in the homecoming court, if that’s of any indication,” Montour coach Bill Minear said of Sow, who was actually picked to be “prince” during homecoming ceremonies.
Added Sow, “Since I’ve been here, I feel like I’m a whole different person. I’ve changed a lot. As a person and as a basketball player, too. I’ve learned a lot since I got here. I get a lot from playing here at Montour. A lot of people said, ‘You’ve got to go to prep school. You’ve got to go to prep school.’ But the things I’ve learned here, I didn’t learn playing prep.”
Todd Price has been principal at Montour High School for 18 years. Price has interacted with thousands of students over the years but said that none of the others have been quite like Ama, whom Price said “ended up at Montour for a reason.”
“Ama’s story is a very unique one,” Price said. “I think it’s one that potentially could have not had a quote-unquote happy ending, but I think this is one of those stories that ends really well for him.”
The early days
Sow grew up in Dakar, Senegal’s capital, which has a population of just over 1.2 million. Sow comes from a big family and said he had a happy childhood. He said he lived with his grandmother for a while before moving into another house that also included his parents and two siblings.
Selle Hann has known Sow since the latter was a child. Hann, now an assistant coach at the University of Tennessee at Martin, at one time lived in the same neighborhood as Sow, just a few minutes away. Hann, who said Sow has a wonderful family, remembers when Sow was so small that he was not a center or even a forward, but rather a point guard.
“Ama grew late,” Hann explained. “I remember this one camp, he was wearing a Kobe No. 8 jersey. The jersey was so big on him. And at the time, I had some basketball shoes that I was giving out to kids in our neighborhood. Ama was so small and he had these shoes that were so big on him. But he loved them so much. He wanted to wear those shoes, so he did.”
Sow was part of a basketball academy in Senegal. The focus of the academy, Sow said, was mainly on fundamentals such as dribbling and shooting, skills that he also refined by watching videos on YouTube.
But there was a critical part of basketball that Sow did not learn back home.
“I didn’t play any 5-on-5,” he said. “So when I came here, I didn’t understand the game. When I would get into a game, I knew how to shoot and how to dribble, of course. I could do a lot of stuff. But I never played 5-on-5 before. I didn’t have any experience.”
As a young teen in Dakar, Sow would record videos of himself working out, shooting and dribbling, and then post them on Instagram, tagging coaches in the United States on the posts. Sow said that got the attention of prep schools from around the country. One of those schools was First Love Christian, located in Washington, Pa. The school had a strong prep program that would regularly send players onto Division I colleges.
Jeremy Grubbs was an assistant coach at First Love at the time. Grubbs is a Pine-Richland graduate who is now an assistant at Pepperdine.
“Ama messaged me on Instagram and started sending me his [videos],” Grubbs recalled. “I obviously looked at them and said, ‘This kid is pretty good.’”
Sow and Grubbs formed a relationship, and Sow eventually decided to leave home to come to the United States and attend First Love. It was a process, Grubbs said, especially with Sow not knowing any English. Grubbs, though, played a large part in making it work, paving the way for Sow to come to the United States in December 2021.
Coming to America
Sow, only 15 at the time and knowing no English, needed to fly to New York City and then to Pittsburgh, and then find his way to a home he would be living at in Trafford. To say that was a challenge would be an understatement.
“He made it from New York to Pittsburgh and the home that he was staying at by himself with no cellphone,” Nicole McComb explained. “I can’t tell you that my other 18-year-old could do that. I don’t think a normal kid would have been able to do that. I mean, I get lost in the mall. I can only imagine.”
Sow said he took online classes at First Love in addition to learning how to play basketball. Remember, he had never even played 5-on-5 prior to coming to the country. Sow, along with six teammates, lived in a house that was actually a converted funeral home.
“There were seven guys in three bedrooms,” Grubbs recalled. “A 7-2 kid, Ama, a 6-8 kid, maybe a 6-6 kid. It was ridiculous. They were stacked like sardines.”
Sow played in just a few games at First Love that season, which turned out to be the final one for First Love. The basketball program folded following the season and merged with a prep program in Scotland, Pa., located near Chambersburg.
It was just before that program folded when Jake DiMichele was first introduced to Sow. DiMichele was a star player at Our Lady of the Sacred Heart High School and is the third-leading scorer in WPIAL history. DiMichele now plays at Duquesne, but prior to that played at First Love Scotland Campus.
“After my senior season ended at OLSH, I kind of knew I was going to First Love, so I started working out with their guys,” DiMichele said. “Ama was there, and the coach said, ‘He’s a freshman. He just got here.’ His English was bad. He was so raw as a player. And then First Love moved to Scotland Campus where I went, and Ama wasn’t going to come.”
When the program went under, Sow, along with his housemates, were told they needed to leave their home.
“He had nowhere to go,” Grubbs said. “I was scrambling trying to help this kid out, trying to figure out where he could go at least for the summer. I called Dave [McComb] because he’s a guy I’ve known. I said, ‘This kid needs somewhere to live.’”
McComb vividly remembers that phone call he received from Grubbs in May 2022. McComb said it was on a Thursday morning and he was on the golf course ready to tee off on the first hole.
“He explained the story,” McComb remembered. “He said he was going on vacation and said, ‘Hey, do you want to take this kid?’ I thought for like two weeks when he was on vacation. And then he said, ‘No, the place is closing. I can’t take him. All of the kids that were there were gone but Ama. He really can’t go back to his home country.’
“So I said, ‘Let me call my wife,’” McComb continued. “I played hole No. 1 and didn’t even call my wife. I called Grubbs back and said, ‘Yeah, we’ll take him.’ And then I told her like three days later.”
A new beginning
Dave McComb owns and operates Cafe Gianna, a small diner in Coraopolis named after his daughter. He and his wife had three kids of their own when Ama joined them — Brandon Bieranowski is now 18, Aiden Bieranowski 15, and Gianna McComb 7. Brandon played basketball at Montour before graduating last year, while Aiden is a 5-9 sophomore guard on this year’s team.
Over the past 2½ years, Ama has become a member of the family … literally. In fact, the McCombs became Sow’s legal guardians after just two months of him living with them.
“Everybody kind of voted,” Nicole McComb said. “It was all of us in or all of us out, and as a family we just enjoyed having him around.”
Sow and the McComb siblings have become tight. That’s especially true when it comes to his relationship with Gianna, who seemed to always be flashing a big smile while interacting with Sow following a practice late last month. When a reporter asked the family to make their way onto the court for a photo, Sow, unsure if he was supposed to be a part of it, initially didn’t join them. Gianna then looked at Sow and adorably said, “It’s not a family without you Ama.”
“I feel like they are my brothers and I see them as my brothers,” Ama said of Brandon and Aiden. “We don’t have the same parents, but I feel like we do.”
Don’t get it wrong, this whole saga of Sow becoming comfortable living in this country has come with quite a few obstacles, some of which the McCombs spoke about.
“He had to learn the American way of doing things, and that was very complicated for him for a while,” Nicole said. “What he had learned and what he believes is his culture is not how we do things all the time. Like his dad can have multiple wives. You can’t do that here.”
Figuring out what to feed Sow was a challenge, too. Sow is Muslim and does not eat pork. And due to the language barrier early on, it was difficult for the McCombs to figure out what they should and should not be feeding Sow. And then there was the topic of what to do during Ramadan, the monthlong period in which Muslims don’t consume any food or drink during daylight hours.
“Ramadan was crazy for us the first time because he can’t eat during the day. So is it disrespectful to eat in front of him?” Dave McComb questioned.
His wife added, “You’re cooking in the kitchen, and it’s lingering up into his room, and then you’re trying to force feed him as soon as the sun goes down.”
Speaking of eating, Sow even has a chore to do at home, that being loading and unloading the dishwasher.
Sow has made friends with members of the local Senegalese community, which Nicole McComb said has been a great resource for him, especially during times when he’s gotten homesick and during the holidays. That community includes Pitt basketball players Papa Kante and Amdy Ndiaye, both of whom also hail from Dakar.
Montour life
Sow began taking classes at Montour High School at the start of the 2022-23 academic year. And, on that first day of school, there might not have been any student in the entire district more excited to get started.
“When I came here, I was really excited,” Sow said. “It was a lot different than First Love. I didn’t get a chance to go to school there. So when I came here, I was really excited to go to school and meet new people.”
“Yeah, that lasted for about six months,” Dave McComb said, laughing.
Chimed in Nicole, “He’s like, ‘What do you mean we have to go every day? And why do we have to wake up so early?’”
By all accounts, Sow has come a long way these past few years, one of the biggest improvements being his English.
“When he first got there, he knew so little English that he was watching American television shows with the captions on so he could learn [the language],” said Grubbs, who has maintained a relationship with Sow. “He’s done a great job of advancing his English, and that’s because he put a lot of work into it.”
Sow said that watching TV is one of his favorite hobbies outside of basketball. He lists “Prison Break” and “Money Heist” as being his favorite shows.
As for some of his other hobbies?
“Sometimes I go to the mall, and I like to hang out with the shorties. You feel me?” Sow said, laughing.
The McCombs said that some work needed to be done to figure out where Sow was academically, considering nearly all of his previous school work took place in Senegal. But Nicole said that Montour did an excellent job in helping Sow land in the spot where he needed to be. Sow had to double up on some classes his first year (sophomore), but has not had to take any summer courses. He’s a strong student and is on track to graduate in the spring.
“He sits in the first row of every class he’s in. He’s so engaged as a student,” Price said. “He’s tried so hard to assimilate himself and learn the language. I give him credit for dealing with the circumstances. He’s just such an impressive young man. Whatever Ama decides to do in his life’s work, he’ll be successful.”
Shining on the court
It’s almost hard to believe that Sow has been playing actual basketball games for only a handful of years. Just as he has made huge strides learning a new way of life, he has taken similar giant steps on the court.
“I’m proud of the fact of how willing he is to learn. Dave McComb has been a big help in that, too. They watch tape at home. It’s his willingness to learn. He has a way to go, but he’s a hard worker,” Minear said of Sow, the tallest player Minear has coached in his several decades of coaching.
Sow’s numbers on the court have improved each season. Scoring-wise, he averaged 13.1 points a game as a sophomore, 17.1 as a junior and now 21.6 his senior season. In addition, Sow, who a few weeks ago scored his 1,000th career point, is averaging 17.4 rebounds and 3.7 blocked shots per game. He has produced a double-double in every game and collected his first triple-double when he finished with 33 points, 18 rebounds and 10 assists in a win against West Allegheny last month. He’s shooting 48% from the field and 82% from the line.
With numbers like that, it’s easy to see why some believe he is the WPIAL’s best player.
“He’s up there with the best. He should be No. 1, honestly,” Straight said.
DiMichele has kept tabs on Sow these past few years, saying, “The improvement that that kid has made over three years, not just in basketball, but in life, speaking English, becoming more adept to the American culture, is truly a sight to behold. But his game speaks for itself. He’s putting up crazy stat numbers.”
Sow is a major reason Montour is 18-1 and has WPIAL and PIAA championship aspirations. The Spartans (11-0 in section play) have wrapped up the Class 5A Section 3 title and have a strong shot of earning the No. 1 seed in the WPIAL playoffs when the brackets are announced next week. The Spartans own strong wins against the likes of Upper St. Clair, Chartiers Valley and Moon, and their only loss was to a team from Florida.
Ask Sow about playing high school basketball in Western Pennsylvania, and he’ll flash that big smile of his.
“I love playing here,” said Sow, who wears a size 14 shoe. “The student sections. The fans. Everything. It’s just really cool for me.”
Another thing that is pretty cool is that Ama’s family back in Senegal watches many of his games via internet streams. Ama said he is in contact with them nearly every day, and Dave McComb said that hope is for Sow to return to Senegal to visit them for a few weeks following graduation.
Sow is a big attraction when he’s playing, but he’s also pretty popular following games, as well.
“You’ll see kids in the youth program come up to him,” said Price. “They’ll ask him for his autograph and shake his hand. A lot of kids today get caught up with themselves, but he’ll go out of his way to interact with people.”
Only up from here
In just a few months, Ama will be off to college. It will be his latest challenge, but having Sow leave the area will be a transition for the McComb family, as well.
“My daughter Gianna, it’s going to be like a lost organ for her,” Nicole said. “And I’m going to need to find someone else to pick on.”
When it came to picking a college, Sow had his share of suitors. Duquesne offered in the fall of Sow’s junior season, so picking the Dukes and staying local was on the table. Another intriguing option was to go to Pepperdine to be reunited with Grubbs. A Big Ten school was in the mix, too, as Washington offered Sow last March.
However, of the many coaches recruiting Sow, none of them went as far back with the big fella as Hann, who is in his first season at UT Martin, located in Martin, Tenn. The Skyhawks are a Division I team that competes in the Ohio Valley Conference.
In November, Sow became the first recruit to sign with first-year UT Martin coach Jeremy Shulman, and Hann called Sow a “big time” recruit for the program.
“He’ll fit into our system well,” Hann said. “He can handle the ball, he can shoot, he can pass, he can switch 1 through 5. He’s a big-time fit with the basketball part of it, but it’s not just that. It’s all about family, and we want to bring in young men that are really great kids, and Ama is a big-time great kid.”
You can bet that many in the Montour community will be following Sow closely as he moves onto college and, who knows, maybe even into the professional ranks one day.
“We’re just hoping he makes it to the NBA and remembers to get us peanut heaven tickets,” Nicole said.
As for the NBA, that’s the dream for Sow, who calls Anthony Edwards his current favorite player and Michael Jordan his all-time favorite.
“Since I was a kid, when people have asked me, ‘What do you want to do when you grow up?’ I’ve said that I want to play in the NBA,” Sow said.
Sow has a steep hill to climb to achieve that specific dream of his, but it’s probably not wise to bet against him considering what he has been through, overcome and accomplished these past few years.
“That’s a big-time story that needs to be heard,” Hann said. “I’m really proud of him because it’s not easy. I’ve done it myself, but not how young Ama was. To move to a new country, the way he’s done it, it’s a big-time story and I’m super proud of him.”
Brad is a sports writer at the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, but he's currently on strike. Email him at beverett@unionprogress.com.