This Stanford Freshman Wants His Play to Represent India

“It was just excitement for him to connect with someone he can see is like himself,” Ashok Agarwal, Ryan’s father, said.

Six years later, Ryan Agarwal is much farther from home — 1,700 miles away at Stanford University, where he is a freshman shooting guard trying to bolster the Cardinal’s faltering offense. He’s still chasing Singh, hoping to pick up where Singh left off in representing India in the American basketball landscape while playing the sport in college.

“I just have to keep in mind the fact that I help represent such a big community, and only so little people have the ability to do what I’m trying to do,” Agarwal said recently on the sideline of a Stanford practice.

Agarwal said he didn’t shy away from a certain amount of pressure that comes with people judging an entire culture based on his play. The high school talent evaluator Rivals.com rated him as a four-star recruit, among the best 150 players in his class. When the time came for Agarwal to announce where he would play in college, he chose to share the spotlight not just with the coaches and relatives who helped him get there, but with India. In a video with dramatic music set to a montage of him walking along train tracks, Agarwal voiced his intention “to set an example for a whole heritage and prove that we can do it, too.”

“The commitment video that he did was his thought process, his message that he wanted to say,” his mother, Ranjini Agarwalla, said. “It was not anything that we even talked about. So we were shocked when he brought that up and said, ‘This is what I want to do.’”

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/18/sports/ncaabasketball/stanford-ryan-agarwal.html