Your Sport: Love of basketball turns into career for Laurinburg’s Gilbert Abraham

Stephen Schramm, Staff writer; Oct 1, 2016

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Gilbert Abraham had worked as an instructor at a handful of Raymond Felton’s camps before he finally got to actually meet the longtime NBA point guard and former North Carolina star.

It was the summer of 2012, in a gym in Myrtle Beach after a tournament Abraham had helped run. Felton introduced himself and said he’d heard the former St. Andrews University player and Laurinburg resident had been working as a private trainer.

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Felton had just finished up a stint with the Portland Trailblazers and said he needed to get some work in. He asked if Abraham could help.

“He said, ‘Let me know what your schedule looks like,’” Abraham said with a laugh. “… I made the time.”

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Abraham, 34, has worked with Felton ever since, even spending a few weeks in the offseason living in Dallas, where Felton experienced a late-career flourish with the Mavericks. He’s also become one of the state’s go-to private basketball teachers, working with high-profile prep prospects and players in elite college programs.

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“He knows how to push buttons and help you grow,” said Abraham pupil and Trinity Christian sophomore Joey Baker, one of the top players in the Class of 2019.

Teaching basketball is life for Abraham, who had stints as a social studies teacher, a newspaper reporter and a college assistant coach. It’s exactly what he loves to do.

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“I get to do basketball for a living,” Abraham said with a smile. “It’s pretty dope.”

The path to basketball began after Abraham, born in Germany and the son of a Nigerian government official, moved to Washington, D.C.’s Maryland suburbs. That’s where he got his first taste of the area’s rich hoops scene, and he was hooked right away.

“When I fell in love with basketball, that was it,” Abraham said.

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Growing up, he’d spend every free moment on a court, playing pick-up games or alone, clashing with imaginary foes. He was a guard for his middle school and high school teams, but he admits that his game wasn’t strong.

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Effort and passion weren’t the problem, and he knew how to be flashy. What was lacking was the basics and a true grasp on what his team needed from him.

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“The thing with me was, I didn’t really learn how to play,” Abraham said. “I could dunk on guys and drive by them and shoot and all that stuff, but I didn’t understand the game. … I was always searching.”

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He was good enough to earn a spot on the team at St. Andrews, where his first two seasons were slowed by both injury — he took a medical redshirt prior to his sophomore year after a torn ACL — and inconsistency.

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But the summer after his redshirt sophomore season, things changed.

He returned to Maryland to work a camp with decorated high school coach Mike Glick. For several days, Abraham played against elite college players. Facing the stiffest competition he’d seen to that point, he began to understand what made those players so good.

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“They didn’t know it, but that’s really when I learned how to play,” Abraham said. “It was awesome.”

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For Abraham, dots were being connected. He was seeing how, without a sturdy foundation of fundamentals and a wider knowledge of how his game fit into what his team was trying to do, he would never improve.

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So he went back to school and got to work. His final two seasons at St. Andrews were better. In fact, they were good enough to lead to offers to play professionally in Qatar and Germany.

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But Abraham decided to stay. He spent a year working as a reporter for the Laurinburg Exchange and later worked as a social studies teacher at Scotland High. Meanwhile, he was in graduate school at UNC Pembroke, where he earned a master’s degree in Public Administration.

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He wasn’t finished with basketball, though. He started an AAU basketball program known as Scotland Warriors Achieving Triumph, or SWAT.

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It was through SWAT that he realized how much he enjoyed teaching the game. He could give his players the kind of sound basketball education he missed out on.

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But the constant fund-raising proved to be a grind, and in 2009, the program disbanded.

By then, other area coaches had noticed his ability to teach the game, and they asked them to work with some of their players. His work with Glenn Patterson, a Red Springs standout who went onto play at Elizabeth City State, got the attention of Eva Patterson-Heath, his aunt. When she became the women’s coach at Fayetteville State, she brought Abraham onto her staff.

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He spent two seasons at FSU, and his early morning workouts attracted players from the men’s and women’s squads.

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But his time in college was short-lived. The arrival of his first child made the travel demands of a college coach unworkable. After parting ways with the Broncos program, he decided he’d go back to teaching and work as a basketball trainer on the side.

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That was around the time he crossed paths with Felton.  Prior to that, he’d worked with good high school and college players, but never with an active NBA player.

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Before his first workout with Felton, he used a coaching video program to dig up clips of all of the former UNC star’s offensive touches for the previous five seasons and devised a workout plan that would sharpen the things he already did well and introduce new wrinkles.

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When he showed up for his first workout session, he presented Felton with a chart detailing the situations he’s usually in when he gets the ball and how he can capitalize on them. Then the pair went through a fast-paced, 500-shot training routine geared toward turning Abraham’s ideas into Felton’s instincts.

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Abraham said that Felton seemed a little surprised at the complexity of Abraham’s workout.

These days, Abraham said moments like that aren’t uncommon.

“I don’t think they expect me to be this thorough,” Abraham said of the players with whom he works.

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With his basketball training company, Akin Athletics, teaching basketball is his full-time job. He has a small-but-growing training roster that includes area prep standouts, college players such as North Carolina’s Justin Jackson and Duke’s Chase Jeter, and NBA players Kendall Marshall and Marvin Williams. He tailors training routines built around their individual games.

He spends the week working with players in Raleigh and Greensboro and occasionally travels around the country to work in instructional camps.

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But he admits that he’s still a student. While he’s viewed as a basketball guru of sorts, he said his curiosity about the game is still as strong as it was when he was a hoops-mad middle schooler or a wide-eyed college player.

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The only difference is that now he gets to do it for a living.

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“It’s a love affair for me at this point,” Abraham said. “The more time you spend with something, the better you get.”

Staff writer Stephen Schramm can be reached at schramms@fayobserver.com or at 486-3536.