Sean Obi was born on January 16, 1995, in Kaduna, a city of about 1.5 million in northern Nigeria. He was the youngest of six children — three boys and three girls — in a middle-class Christian family. His parents worked selling Land Rover parts. Everyone in the neighborhood played soccer, not basketball. Sean played soccer too. He was a normal kid in a city that was anything but normal.
In 2000, when Sean was five or six years old, religious riots swept through Kaduna. The violence — rooted in disputes between Christian farmers and Muslim herders over water rights and land access, though often described in starker terms — reached the Obi family's home. Their house was burned to the ground. 'We lost everything,' Obi said years later, sitting on a couch in Connecticut, understating the catastrophe in a way that would become characteristic.
The family survived and rebuilt, but Sean's path out of Kaduna began with basketball. A coach named Sani Turi — a Muslim, it's worth noting, in a city riven by religious violence — spotted the tall kid playing in his village and invited him to join a basketball academy in Kaduna. Sean had never played organized basketball. He was lured as much by the chance for a better education as by the sport itself. He lived with his coach's family for two years.
In 2010, when Sean was fifteen, a basketball contact in Kaduna named Ahmad Ahmad called Steve Eggers, a Greenwich, Connecticut, oil trader who frequently did business in Africa and played basketball in his downtime. Ahmad's pitch was simple: he had a talented, smart kid who wouldn't get the education he needed in Nigeria. Steve's son Hunter, already the first freshman to play varsity basketball at Green Farms Academy in fourteen years, watched a video of Sean's game and suggested the family take him in.
The Eggers family became Sean's guardians. He enrolled at Green Farms Academy in Westport, Connecticut — a world away from Kaduna in every conceivable dimension. The adjustment was enormous. In his Nigerian school, there had been over a hundred students per class, no technology, no communication between teacher and student. At Green Farms, he was expected to sit around a table, engage in discussion, and read complete literary works. His sophomore English teacher, Virginia Balser, recalled: 'It must have been incredibly difficult. He'd never been sitting around a table in class, expected to be alert and responsive and speaking up every day.'
Sean adapted. At Green Farms, he became a force — averaging 18.2 points and an astonishing 20.0 rebounds per game as a junior, recording a double-double in all 23 games. As a senior, he averaged 17.0 points, 12.0 rebounds, 3.1 assists, and 2.7 blocks, leading the team to the NEPSAC Class C Tournament championship. He accumulated 1,299 points, 1,090 rebounds, and 56 double-doubles in under three full seasons. He played AAU basketball with the Connecticut Basketball Club alongside Andre Drummond, the future NBA All-Star. He also volunteered with the Midnight Run organization, feeding homeless families in New York City.
He was ranked the No. 2 player in his Connecticut class by ESPN. He committed to Rice University in Houston — a school that valued academics as much as athletics, a place where a kid from Kaduna who wanted to be educated could also play basketball.