Ryan Agarwal wants his play to represent India: NYT

Texas born son of immigrant parents from India wants to “prove that we can do it, too”

Ryan Agarwal, Dallas, Texas born son of immigrant parents from India, who is a Cardinal shooting guard, is hoping to increase Indian representation in the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) and beyond, according to the New York Times.

Now a Stanford freshman, Agarwal was a sixth grader obsessed with basketball in 2015. So that year, when the Dallas Mavericks made the 7-foot-2 Satnam Singh the first Indian-born player selected in an NBA draft, Agarwal knew he had to go see him compete.

READ: Stanford-bound Indian American basketball phenom Ryan Agarwal is a star in the making (March 21, 2021)

On a trip two years later with his cousin and father to watch Singh in an NBA G League game, Ryan Agarwal realized he wanted to play like Singh himself, the newspaper said.

Agarwal’s parents had emigrated from India, and he was born in a Dallas suburb. He told the Times he had never seen someone who looked like him playing basketball and had therefore never considered taking the game seriously. It was watching Singh, he said, that made him believe he could play at a high level.

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

Six years later, Ryan Agarwal as a Stanford University freshman is 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.

READ: Indian American high school phenom commits to Stanford (March 16, 2021)

“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 told the Times recently on the sideline of a Stanford practice.

Agarwal told the newspaper 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, according to the Times

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, was quoted as saying. “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.’”

READ: Indian American high school prospect Ryan Agarwal gets offers from Harvard, Stanford (October 26, 2020)

That Agarwal was even recruited out of high school was notable, the Times said noting only 2 percent of Division I student-athletes identified as Asian in the 2021-22 school year, according to NCAA statistics.

“I’m blessed with the parents I have, because they put me in every sport possible to just try to see what I love, which honestly, not a lot of Indian parents do,” Ryan Agarwal said. “I think that’s the biggest thing for me. If it wasn’t for the support from my parents, who knows where I would be.”

So far this season, Agarwal has come off the bench for Stanford in nearly two-thirds of its games, averaging roughly 8 minutes when he plays.

Rivals.com once ranked Agarwal as a top-20 shooting guard, but Stanford Coach Jerod Haase told the Times he considered Agarwal a more complete player because of his size at 6-foot-6 and his passing ability.

The only player of Indian descent to have logged NBA minutes is the Canadian-born Sim Bhullar, who wasn’t drafted but played in three games for the Sacramento Kings during the 2014-15 season. Bhullar now plays in Taiwan.

READ: This Stanford Freshman Wants His Play to Represent India (February 19, 2023)

Since the NBA opened an academy in India in 2017, 20 graduates have earned scholarships to Division I programs, prep schools and junior colleges in the United States, or signed professional contracts, according to a spokesman for the league.

Zach Reynolds, a spokesman for Stanford, told the Times that when he was trying to figure out how many players of Indian descent played Division I men’s basketball, he and other sports information directors around the country were able to come up with three: Agarwal, center Amaan Sandhu of Monmouth and the Penn State walk-on player Ishaan Jagiasi.

READ: Suyash Mehta becomes NBA’s first Indian American referee (December 24, 2020)

READ: Memphis Grizzlies hire Indian American Sonia Raman as assistant coach (September 24, 2020)

READ: Indian American hooper Shayna Mehta lighting Ivy League circuit on fire (March 5, 2019)

READ: Indian basketball player Satnam Singh to play in Las Vegas Summer League (July 7, 2017)

READ: Indian Basketball player Amjyot Singh enters 2017 NBA G League Draft (October 23, 2017)

READ: Indian basketball player Satnam Singh to play in Las Vegas Summer League (July 7, 2017)

READ: Indian American James Blackmon Jr. confirms his NBA draft intention (May 9, 2017)