Yacine Diop: Breaking Barriers and Advocating Mental Health Awareness Alongside Her Basketball Career

Yacine Diop: Breaking Barriers and Advocating Mental Health Alongside Her Basketball Career

She has been described by many as a ‘tireless workaholic’ regardless of the team she is playing for and this is a befitting rendition of who Sengal national team superstar Yacine Diop is on and off the court.

The Senegalese international is set to represent her country as her nation's women's national team, affectionately known as the Lionesses, chase a place in this year’s 2024 Paris Olympics. The African silver medalists go up against Olympic champions United States, 2023 FIBA Women's EuroBasket winners Belgium, and nemesis Nigeria, the very same team that denied the Lionesses the 2023 FIBA Women’s AfroBasket title a mere five months ago.

With the 28-year-old Diop named in coach Carlos Alberto Antuna's squad for the upcoming qualifiers, she is expected to guide the side to the Summer Games for what would be the country’s third Olympic appearance and the first since the Rio Games.

AfricaBasket caught up with the 1.78m (5ft 10 in) forward for a chat on her career and life on and off the court, and here is her story. Diop spent her childhood in her native Senegal, where she started playing basketball at the age of 12. Unsurprisingly, she fell in love with the sport at a young age as her grandfather played for the Senegalese national team while her grandmother featured for the Guinea national team; she was not short of inspirational figures to begin her journey.

Diop left the country as a teenager, at 16 in 2011, for a shot at high school basketball in the US. She played here basketball at Oak Hill Academy as a sophomore before joining Seton-LaSalle for her junior and senior years.

She later joined Pittsburgh University, where the 28-year-old played for four years, graduating in May 2018 with a degree in Rhetoric and Communications. She then joined Louisville Cardinals for two years, graduating in 2020.

“I landed my first professional deal the same year I graduated, playing in Russia (for Russian club BC Enisey) for the 2020/21 season before moving to France (for Charnay) and later to Spain,” she narrates.

Her first opportunity to represent the country came in 2013 when she was still in school. She made the team for the FIBA Africa Women’s U18 championship (now the FIBA AfroBasket U18) hosted in Dakar, winning the tournament as Diop was named Most Valuable Player (MVP), a moment to this day she describes as one of her career highlights.

“My debut with the senior team came in 2018 during the FIBA Women’s World Cup, having missed out on the Rio Olympics team despite making the initial call-up. We made history as the first African country to win a match at the World stage, beating Latvia,” Diop offered.

After a stellar show for the Lionesses in Spain during the World Cup, Diop debuted in the Women’s AfroBasket in 2019, with the Lionesses going all the way to the final but being denied a gold medal by arch-rivals Nigeria in the final.

The story would repeat itself in 2021 and 2023, the two nations clashing in the semis in 2021 as Senegal finished fourth. Despite not performing to their expectations, Diop still made the tournament’s converted All-Star Five for what she terms her second career highlight. Late last year, Diop chose to take her talents back to Africa to play for Alexandria Sporting Club (ASC) of Egypt in the inaugural Africa Women’s Basketball League (AWBL) and helped propel the side to the title.

“More than ten years after leaving Senegal, I got to play club basketball, and it was an amazing experience as ASC made me feel at home. The biggest difference between American collegiate or European basketball and playing at home is the level of physicality. However, it was not a big adjustment for me as I am a physical player as well and had experience playing in the AfroBasket, so I knew what to expect,” Diop stated.

Her basketball career has, however, not been as smooth sailing, with the forward admitting to have gone through some rough patches, one just before the 2021 AfroBasket.

“Being named in the team of the tournament then meant the world as I was coming from a very hard period, and such an achievement was a good feeling,” Diop admits.

The following year, Diop took a break from professional and national team basketball.

“I have always purposed to have a life outside basketball, and at that point, I set out to achieve one of my other dreams, which is owning a clothing brand. The break was just perfect timing to get it going. Basketball is not a lifetime career; we have to think and plan ahead as athletes.

Any day, our playing careers could stop for whatever reason, and my mindset has always been to prepare for life after the court, hence the business. Being a sports brand, it gives me the opportunity to stay in the game and in the industry working with different players beyond my playing days,” she explained.

The break and admission of struggle just before the 2021 AfroBasket were, however, just the tip of the iceberg as unbeknownst to many, Diop had battled depression, a somewhat taboo topic in Africa, in 2019.

"One of my lowest moments in life was in 2019 after the AfroBasket. I went back to the US two days after losing the final, and I was going through problems I couldn't explain, and that took a toll on my mental health. I went into a deep depression. It got so bad that I couldn't play for half a season. I couldn't get through a training session without being in tears, and at that point, I contemplated leaving the game completely," she remembers.

Being a subject that is still frowned upon in African culture, primarily due to its complexity and a deep-rooted lack of awareness, Diop counts herself lucky to have gone through that dark spell while with the Louisville Cardinals.

"Thank God I was there, and I was able to get help from the institution's therapists. I was ready to quit, but I also did not want to let this defeat me, so I chose to fight back and get better. That experience was a source of motivation for me to work on myself and come back for the next AfroBasket bigger and better, and that culminated in being named in the All-Star team in 2021," she opened up.

Going through depression as an African female player is not an easy journey, as Diop admits.

"This is not a popular topic in Africa, but more should be done to help such athletes. A lot of times, players are accused of just having an attitude or being sassy, and no attention is paid to them. However, it is time that this becomes a key subject and help those going through that by making them feel comfortable enough to share their struggles and get help," she appealed.

Off the court, Diop has taken the ‘jack of all trades’ tag to a whole new level as, in addition to being a successful business owner, she is a recorded artist. Yes! Don’t believe us? Check out her hit "Go Yaya," where she featured AB Kheucha in the song released in 2020 [Listen Below].

Asked about it, though, Diop calls it harmless fun.

“It is funny for you to ask about my music career because I don’t have one,” Diop says with a hearty laugh. “I just made one song with my friend. It was summer break, and I wanted to do something different. Music and dancing are my passions, and I want to experience new things, and I don’t put any limits on myself.”

Being a player and a music lover, in addition to her active pages with tons of fun videos, especially of Diop dancing or interacting with her teammates, who is one of the most followed basketball players on social media in the continent. With most of her followers coming from outside the sport, Diop says she is leveraging her numbers to grow the sport in the continent by sharing more basketball content and appealing for more of her followers to join the sport.

Diop, hoping to make her Olympics debut in Paris later in the year, had a message for young female athletes looking to make a name for themselves in the sport:

“Follow your passion. Work hard for what you want, as nothing is given. Keep a positive attitude and mindset, and make sure to work on your mental health. It doesn’t matter what you do in this world, criticism will always be there. It’s up to you to know what you want and focus on that,” she concluded.

With playing at the Olympics (currently) being her biggest dream, Diop hopes to play until her ‘body tells her to stop’ while building her business to become Africa’s number one sports brand.

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[Photo Credit: FIBA]