Asmat Kaur
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Career
As in 2020 Jan
Pratyush Raj, January 26, 2020: The Times of India
Asmat Kaur keeps WNBA dream alive
CHANDIGARH: Asmat Kaur is one step closer to making basketball history. The Chandigarh-born hoopster, all of 16, has been training in the US for a shot at becoming the first Indian to play in the Women’s NBA league, which features some of the world’s top stars.
What is amazing is that Asmat picked up a basketball for the first time barely three years ago, when she was 13. Her school friends and teachers had been advising the six-footer to “use her height”, and she found the perfect way.
Talking to TOI from New Jersey, Asmat said, “Friends and teachers used to say, ‘ lambe ho,basketball kyu nahi khelte (you are tall, why don’t you play basketball)?’ It all started casually but now I can’t live without basketball. I am chasing the WNBA dream for sure.” As if living away from home wasn’t challenging enough, Asmat has had to adjust to the aggressive style of the US game. “There’s no time to breathe and no mercy in training,” she said.
The NBA academy organizes development camps for top women prospects from outside the US at the league’s academies. Asmat was among the top five girls selected from the women’s programme in India, completing the camp in May 2018 before a scholarship took her to Lawrenceville School, New Jersey.
In her short time there, Asmat has already got more than a glimpse of the extremely high standards on offer in the WNBA, a professional basketball league of 12 teams started in 1997. “The American infrastructure and facilities are unseen in India. The recovery session after every training period or match is new to me. Coaches make us do squats and pushups the most, because strength training is must for surviving this rough game,” she said, before adding: “In America, you must enter the court with a game plan.”
About her stay in New Jersey so far, she said: “I was nervous initially but it is amazing how quickly my nervousness vanished. Everyone from coaches to players was so welcoming. I never felt I was in another country.”
Apart from Chandigarh, Asmat spent her childhood in Lucknow, Indore, and Mumbai. Her father, Dharamjeet Taunque, is in the telecommunications sector with a transferable job and her mother is a writer. Asked in which city she picked up basketball, Asmat said: “In Indore. I was the tallest girl in the class and, within a year, I was representing Madhya Pradesh in under-14 nationals.”
Shortly after that tournament, she went to the under-19 category and Senior Open Nationals. Within three years, she had played eight national tournaments in different age groups and shot into the limelight with a buzzer-beater shot in the under-16 Fiba Asia Cup 2017 final against Malaysia. India topped the pool.
Asmat is the only child of her parents, so when they came to know of her interest in basketball, they started searching for options on the Internet. They moved from Indore to Mumbai to enable her to target a scholarship. Asmat has an excellent academic record too.
