Rasheed Wesley Daranijo Sulaimon was born March 9, 1994, in Houston, Texas, the youngest of five children in a family with deep Nigerian roots. His father, Kenny, and his mother, Angela, raised the children with an emphasis on education that was unusually direct: Angela had personally helped put each of Rasheed's four older siblings through college before he ever picked up a basketball seriously. "He needs to take that back," she would say years later, when Coach K told a press conference that going to Duke was "a privilege." "It's a privilege to go to college — period. It was a privilege to have Rasheed." The line was a mother defending her son. It was also, factually, true on its own terms — the Sulaimon household had built itself on the proposition that college was the goal and a basketball scholarship was a tool. The tool was getting Rasheed a great deal of attention.
He attended Strake Jesuit College Prep in Houston, a Jesuit boys' high school with academic standards above its athletic profile, and emerged as one of the most decorated guards in the country. By his senior year he was ranked No. 12 nationally in the class of 2012 — a four-star/five-star prospect carrying offers from North Carolina, Arizona, Baylor, Texas, Texas A&M, and Duke. He was selected as a McDonald's All-American and a Jordan Brand Classic All-American that spring, and he played for the West squad in the McDonald's game. Two summers earlier — in 2010 and 2011 — he had played for USA Basketball at the U18 and U19 levels. In 2012 he won gold at the FIBA Americas U18 Championship. A year later, after his Duke freshman year, he won gold again at the 2013 FIBA U19 World Championship in Prague, on a team that included future NBA players Aaron Gordon, Marcus Smart, Jahlil Okafor, and Justise Winslow.
The Duke decision came earlier than most. Mark Turgeon, then the head coach at Texas A&M, had offered Sulaimon a scholarship when Rasheed was 13 years old, in seventh grade. Sulaimon told his father he wanted to commit on the spot. "He was like, 'No, no, like, you're still young. You have to go through the process,'" Sulaimon recalled in 2025. "And long story short, fast forward, Duke offered me and I was 15, 16 years old. I visited their school, looked at their campus, everything like that." He committed to Duke on February 10, 2011 — three weeks before his 17th birthday — during an unofficial visit. He signed his National Letter of Intent on November 9, 2011, alongside fellow Duke 2012 commits Amile Jefferson, Marshall Plumlee, Tony Parker (who would decommit), and Mason Plumlee's expected backcourt running mate.