Jama Mahlalela, a BHK ‘04 alumnus of the UBC School of Kinesiology, was a Varsity basketball star, a community leader, and is now the head coach of the Raptors 905 G League in the NBA. He was a key contributor in the Raptor’s 2019 win against the Golden State Warriors making the Raptors the first team outside of the US to win the NBA Championship.
As a student at UBC, Mahlalela was recruited to the Thunderbirds varsity basketball and served as co-captain in 2003 and helped bring his team the Canada West title that year. During his fourth year, Jama was elected as president of the Athletic Council (where he served as the representative council for all varsity teams), and upon graduation, he received the Jama Mahlalela Award, created in his honour. The award recognizes excellence in the areas of selfless dedication, leadership, and spirit and has only been awarded twice in the past decade.
Jama recently sat down with us and reminisced about his days as a student in KIN and the lessons that learned that he has carried with him ever since. Reflecting on his student experience, Jama believes that he learned the most about being a coach as a result of his KIN sport and coaching classes. “Though I was a basketball player, many sports didn’t come easy to me. In class when we did sports such as swimming, the sense of being a natural athlete just didn’t take me through. It was my KIN classes that taught me how to be an educator and a teacher and where I learned about coaching. Because my body had no clue how to perform the sport as the motions were not natural to me, I had to learn to break down each movement. It’s an artform and a skill to be able to teach someone else how to perform an exercise,” says Jama. The person who guided and helped Jama most through his years at UBC was professor emeritus, Gail Wilson. She is the one who “taught me how to think about sport and how it connects to society. This is what helped carry me forward to my career right now.”
On his first day of checking into residence Jama met his roommates, who would form his core group of friends throughout university and with whom he has stayed close ever since. “My residence experience was really valuable as it created a community and a network of people that have stay connected to me throughout my life.” Jama recalls that one of the highlights of his time on campus was participating in the annual Storm the Wall event, which seemed to bring the whole campus together. Our team was always quite competitive, and one year we even won!”
When asked what his advice for students and alumni is, Jama responded, “relate to people. People come first. The way you treat people and engage with them is really important. For those who are finishing university and moving on to the next phases of your life, that choice you make around the relationships you have is crucial and forms the basis of who you are.” The secret for Jama is to do everything with a positive attitude. “We can choose to be positive. A lot of negative things happen in our world, but we can still choose to find a positive approach to those things and find a way to combat them, deal with them and process them. I preach to my players every day to have a ‘sunny-day mentality’. Each of us can carry a sunny-day mentality that will loop back and give you the energy to combat all challenges even when it is stormy.”
