I played all four years [at St. Mary's College] with - at a certain point, basketball became the thing I was doing most, but it was really in my periphery.

I think how strict my mother's home could be with my mom and my stepfather, there was a fluidity and freedom in my dad's existence that I enjoyed when I was around him, though the responsibility was just different. He expected me to carry myself a certain way without all the rules and confines.

There was things just like not being able to date or - I'm talking like 15, 16 - like just certain things that my friends started to do. Like, they started to get phone calls from girls or like, you know, go and hang out 10, 11 at night, kind of going to the movies. There were just certain things that - it's not that I couldn't do all of those things. It's just that every choice was really deliberate and conscious and thought out and sort of balanced against the religion in a way where I felt - I wasn't necessarily trying to convert at 12 like [my mother] was.

It was really a focus on how to in some ways keep moving in this direction towards something that allowed me to express myself in a way that sports didn't.

I played all four years [at St. Mary's College] with - at a certain point, basketball became the thing I was doing most, but it was really in my periphery.

When you graduate is when you start to find yourself looking at the information in the audition breakdown and it says tall black African - or African-American built such and such. And you start seeing these character descriptions and seeing that, oh, you're only going in for the ones that are described as your look.

Hold tight to the mentality of being a student, meaning hold on to curiosity and approach life as a student.