Faces with tough choices at an early age in his native Colombia, the EuroCup newcomer followed his basketball star.
Hapoel's Angola used basketball to beat the odds
Player Spotlight
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Braian Angola has faced his share of challenges in his first full season in the BKT EuroCup. But they are entirely different to those that the Hapoel Shlomo Tel Aviv forward encountered growing up and using basketball to avoid being recruited into war.
Angola has risen to the challenge of playing with Hapoel as he is the club's fourth-leading scorer and one of the main reasons the Israeli side is a serious contender for the EuroCup title.
"We need to play with each other and for each other. We want to win the championship and be in the EuroLeague next year," said Angola, who is averaging 13.4 points, 4.1 rebounds, 3.6 assists, 1.6 steals and a 17th-ranked 16.7 PIR through eight games.
Not too bad for someone from Colombia who didn't start in basketball until age 12. Just two years later, at age 14, Angola moved about 1,000 kilometers away from his family in Villanueva, a town of 25,000, to Villavicencio, a city with a population of about 500,000. The goal was to learn basketball, but also distance himself from turmoil at home, where political rebels were recruiting local kids his age.
"Back then it was different to how it is now with the rebels," Angola recalled. "A lot of people were getting recruited to fight with the rebels against the government and I didn't want to be in that situation. I talked to my mom to leave and move to a different city and play basketball and take advantage of the talent that I had.
"That was a tough decision to make. I decided to leave to help my family, too. I come from a poor family and not a good situation, but I was able to move and get out of there. It was tough, but when you have motivation, you always have a little extra push."
Angola's parents both played basketball and understood the need for him to get better training, even if that was so far away from home.
Angola improved greatly in Villavicencio, becoming one of the country's top young players. He was Colombia's second leading scorer – and ranked fifth overall – at the FIBA U17 South American Championship 2011, where the team finished third and qualified for the FIBA U18 Americas Championship for the first and only time. At the FIBA U18 Americas tournament, Angola averaged 13.4 points, 6.0 rebounds and 3.4 assists.
Those two performances helped him receive a scholarship to attend high school in the United States at age 18 – even though he couldn't speak the language.
"I didn't speak any English, which was very tough. All my school work was in English, which was tough. But I had the extra motivation of being a kid from Colombia and there were not that many players from Colombia," Angola said, looking back on his move to the outskirts of Las Vegas in 2012. "That made it easier for me to stay motivated and focused on school, and work harder. It was tough for me because I was just in the corner learning English, but I got through it.
"I just had a bigger goal, and that was to play basketball and be able to finish school. I was just using my iPad to try to learn English and was playing basketball. But if I didn't learn English then I couldn't play basketball. So that gave me extra motivation too to try to learn the language and try to be the best student I could be."
Angola turned that motivation into the kind of perseverance that he still models in his game.
"Even if I didn't speak English, I was still the first one in class and the first one in practice," he recalled. "I really didn't have many friends or people around me, even to help me. It took me about eight months to learn the language, but at the end of the day I did it."
And Angola was doing it at one of the best youth basketball programs in the United Stats. Findlay Prep in 2012 was coming off its third U.S. high school national championship when Angola arrived. For his one season, in 2012-13, Angola played with Christian Wood, Nigel Williams-Goss and Allerik Freeman.
"Findlay was the number one team in the country at that time and for me being able to play there – coming from Colombia, where basketball was not the number one sport – was really, really fun for me," he said. "It was a great experience. I was playing with a really good group of guys, unbelievable guys – Nigel, Chris, Allerik. There was a lot a lot of talent in that group and it was amazing to play with that kind of talent and those kinds of people. To this day we still have a good relationship. I was really happy to be able to do that."
Angola ended up graduating from Florida State University in 2018. Going from Belgium to Serbia, Israel, Greece and Turkey and now back to Israel, the Colombian knows that he can get through any challenges hands him. That makes tough challenges of succeeding in the EuroCup that much easier.