The semifinals of the Chicagoland Collegiate Athletic Conference (CCAC) tournament. Roosevelt University in Chicago, a city that many call the heart of basketball. One of the biggest games of Cole Micek’s career. The star Filipino American shooting guard for St Francis, who at the time was one of the top Asian American players in all of college basketball.

Unfortunately, though, this is a reality that Asian Americans basketball players around the country are faced with. Not only do these types of instances occur often and repeatedly, they are rarely met with opposition or punishment.

The normalization of anti-Asian sentiment has been a topic that has been brought to society’s attention recently in light of the thousands of reported anti-Asian hate crimes since the start of the pandemic. AAPI celebrities and academics have attempted to educate the public on the fact that these issues have been deeply embedded into our society.

“Racism against Asians has been so normalized in society for decades, to the point that even Asians themselves sometimes don’t realize it is racism,” Sonia Sudjana, a student at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, articulated.

And in many senses, those same issues have been rooted within the basketball arena.

Only two out of the 529 players currently in the NBA are Asian American, Jordan Clarkson and Ryan Anderson.

Over the past few decades, basketball has become a global game. A large factor of this is because, like soccer, it is one of the most accessible sports there is. A ball and a basket is all you need. And that’s what allows the sport to serve as a ‘universal language’, as LA Clippers assistant coach and Japanese American Natalie Nakase referred to it as.

But just because it is played all around the world and across every region of America, that doesn’t mean that the opportunities for success are equal to everyone. The NBA, the world’s highest ranked basketball league, currently has just two Asian American players: Jordan Clarkson, who is 1/4 Filipino and Ryan Anderson, who is 1/8 Chinese. This is despite the Asian American population the fastest growing ethnic demographic in the country. That’s two out of the 529 players in the league.

In the light of the recent events, a handful of Asian American athletes have come forward to share their experiences facing race-related riscirimination on the court. Most notably, Jeremy Lin revealed that he had been called coronavirus on the court during a G League game this year and opened up about his experiences facing constant racism while playing in the Ivy League.

Athletes have expressed how normalized this behavior has become to the point where it is oftentimes not only accepted, but even encouraged.

And with the lack of representation, there is a constant perpetuation of the public’s belief of what being Asian American means. Very rarely is basketball associated with that to an extent greater than being just a fan, Cal State Fullerton sociology Professor Christina Chin said.

The often hostile and unjust ways in which Asian Americans are treated by teammates, opponents and spectators play a role in detracting them from pursuing the sport at higher levels, she said. For the few of those who do make it to the higher levels of the sport, they more often than not are the ones who were able to pair their talents with heightened self-confidence and determination to overcome these obstacles.

At the same time though, sometimes crossing that barrier isn’t enough. Because at the end of the day, the ball doesn’t always lie in their hands.

Sai Tummala, an Indian American former Division I player, stated that because of the lack of public understanding of Asian American culture, there are assumptions made by coaches regarding academic prowess and athletic inadequacy. His biggest challenge was being able to prove he was more than a smart Indian American kid who happened to play basketball, but someone who had immense passion and physical capability for the sport.

During Stanley Thangaraj’s research of South Asian American basketball for his book Desi Hoop Dreams, he noticed this same sort of approach by recruiters to the top South Asian players in Chicago.

Both Kiran Shastri and Derek King, two Asian American overseas professional players, have attempted to go inside of the recruiters' minds and break down their understanding based on what they have experienced and seen. Neither attribute malicious intent for their decisions of not selecting qualified Asian American talent, but instead say it is more of a subconscious bias that is a result of societal-based assumptions and the search for players that “fit the mold.”

They picture it like this: Being a college coach is a high stakes job and they want to do everything in their ability to make sure they select the player that will be the greatest asset to their team. Why would they take a risk on an Asian American player, when there have been very limited success stories from that community, when instead they could handpick an African American or Caucasian player with a presumed higher likelihood of succeeding. In addition, if an Asian American player ended up turning into a bust, they would likely receive much greater negative backlash than if a more stereotypical-looking basketball player would fail to pan out.

“You kind of feel isolated,” Shastri said regarding the inequalities in recruiting. “You're not sure who do you turn to for help in that situation. But sometimes you need one person to take a chance on you.”

King bluntly stated that if he had the same build, same skill, same name, but was African American, his whole recruiting process would have been different. He is not alone in making this claim, however. Jeremy Lin, himself, is famously accredited for saying that he would have received a DI scholarship had he been black.

Lin’s story may be one of the most publicly accepted cases of racial injustice in college recruiting in recent decades. A high school athlete with among the most accolades of anyone to have played in the Bay Area. A 17 year-old who single handedly willed his team to a state champion. The Northern California Player of the Year and a first team all-state selection. Yet, zero Division I scholarships.

Both Lin and his high school head coach Pete Diepenbrock did not originally consider the possibility that race was a factor. But looking back on it, they believe without a reasonable doubt that it actually was the case.

“Having to send in his own tapes, it's virtually unheard of if you're the [NorCal] player of the year, you're all this, all that,” Linsanity producer Brian Yang said. “And I always feel like the evaluators are not inherently racist. But when it comes to race, and especially when it comes to the Asian American voice, because there's so seldomly any representation of us, you just don't see it in the public eye.”

With the recruiting biases that many of these athletes have experienced, Mike Mon has tried to circumvent that. He is the founder of the Asian Basketball Champions of North America, a yearly tournament created to congregate Asian Americans hoopers of all types from around the country to come to one central spot and compete. As part of the event, he has also created a combine-type event where he invites professional scouts. Mon said that dozens of players who have participated in the combine have gone to play overseas and that credibility attracts scouts to seek out talent that often gets passed on.

But only so much progress can be made by going around the system, Mon acknowledges. Representation on a national stage in itself can do the trick, Chin believes. But she says that it can’t be anomaly cases like Lin. It has to be a legitimate trend for long term progress to occur.

And we may be starting to see it finally. There may be up to three Filipinos in the 2021 NBA draft class. No Asian American college player has been in the national spotlight like Vietnamese American Johnny Juzang was in his historic March Madness run this year. A South Asian had the highest rebounds per game this season by any player in the past 40 years of D1 hoops. There are signs of progress. But only time will tell if the trend will last.

“There's kids who are starting to play and we're starting to hear their names,” Shaun Jayachandran, founder of Crossover Basketball and Asian American basketball enthusiast, said with optimism. “And it's exciting that I'm not going to know everybody. I get really geeked out that I can't keep track because that's what you want. You want it to become much more normalized so that in another ten years, it's just normal representation and nobody's questioning it.”