Cover 003 features Vincent Ntunja, who is a 33-year-old Cape Town basketball coach whose fingerprints are on nearly every level of the local game. From grassroots courts in the townships to the NBA Summer League. Coach Vince, as he's widely known, has spent his career turning a sport that once caught him "by default" into a platform for the next generation.
Vincent wasn't supposed to be a basketball man at all. He was meant to be a soccer star. His father, a legend for local club Cape Town Pirates, gave him a childhood spent watching from the sidelines; grown-ups would recognize him, wave him in for free, sit him in a good spot, and keep him fed with peanuts and guava juice. Looking back, he calls it the VIP treatment of his youth, and for a long time, soccer was the only path he saw for himself.
Basketball found him almost by accident. He and his soccer friends used to mock the kids playing this "funny sport" that wasn't familiar in the township, chasing them off just to mess with the ball. Over weeks, the harassment turned into curiosity; one day the other players simply ran off and left the ball behind. Fooling around, not fully understanding what he was doing, Vincent kept putting the ball into the hoop. Something clicked. When he heard about trials at the Gugulethu Sports Complex, he decided to take a chance on the sport he barely understood.
His talent moved fast. Even though he committed to it, going pro wasn't originally his ambition. He was content chasing provincial and national youth honors. It was Merlin Mosoko who pushed him further, physically dragging him to his first training session at a military base in Wynberg under a French coach, after weeks of Vincent brushing him off. That persistence paid off: Vincent became the youngest player to ever feature in the Premier Basketball League, at just 15 years old, an unofficial record, on his own account, that's never been formally documented.
His time in the league was cut short when a rule change barred under-18 players following a tragic incident in a PBL game. Still, the experience left a mark, from the five-star treatment of travel, food, and flights, to buying his first pair of shoes, Fila Jerry Stackhouses, with his first salary. Looking back, he believes South African basketball could have gone much further if the game had been better administered in those years.
Vincent's coaching résumé now reads like a who's-who of professional basketball. Through his work with the Cape Town Tigers in the Basketball Africa League, which he describes as essentially an African wing of the NBA. He's coached players who went on to reach the NBA and other professional leagues abroad, including Josh Hall and Raphael Putney, who played for the San Antonio Spurs. He's also worked alongside a former Los Angeles coach who was part of Phil Jackson's championship staff during the Kobe Bryant era.
That track record opened the door to the NBA Summer League, where Vincent is engaging with the Minnesota Timberwolves' staff. His approach there is unapologetically rooted in where he's from, bringing an African coaching perspective and the spirit of Ubuntu into the room, rather than changing who he is to fit in. Along the way, he's met Michael Jordan, who presented him with an MVP award, sat courtside with Anthony Edwards, and had a basketball court in his home community named in his honor. He's candid about what that kind of exposure can do to a person — the five-star flights and bright lights can just as easily make someone lose themselves if they don't know who they are before they get there.
Rather than keep that experience for himself, Vincent has funneled it back into African Grassroots Hoops, an NGO he runs that brings together kids from Langa, Nyanga, Khayelitsha, and Mitchells Plain, working to pull young people away from gangsterism and toward sport. His influence now stretches beyond Cape Town, connecting with academies and organizers in Botswana, KwaZulu-Natal, and Soweto.
For Vincent, the legacy he's chasing isn't personal glory — it's the court named after him eventually producing more basketball players than he ever coached individually. He wants that model replicated across Delft, Gugulethu, and Nyanga, giving kids access to real facilities instead of the cracked, slippery courts he grew up playing on. He's also quick to point out that basketball's edge over sports like soccer, rugby, and cricket isn't just the game itself — it's the culture around it: the fashion, the lifestyle, the hip-hop influence, the courtside energy. He wants to build a platform where kids who don't make it as players can still find a path as a presenter, an official, an MC, or something else entirely within the same ecosystem.
Central to Vincent's philosophy is a belief in African talent and work ethic — the idea that effort doesn't need to be taught, only given the resources to match it. Through events like the Youth Classic Basketball tournament, he's helping kids record footage of themselves that can be sent directly to universities and scouts in South Africa, Europe, and the United States, opening doors that didn't exist when he was coming up.
When he sees young players representing at BNL level, wearing the badge and carrying real numbers on their backs, he sees the legacy continuing — proof that the platform he's building, one kid and one court at a time, is working exactly as intended.
