Kynan Zeke, 18, is a professional basketball player for the Paya Lebar Basketball Team (PLBT). He has represented Singapore in competitions for the Under-21s worldwide.

 

You may think that he’s just like any other athlete, but Kynan is a living proof that even late bloomers stand a chance against their peers who started early. 

 

“It has been an exciting journey. I have learnt so much and I was even surprised myself when I knew that I was in the starting team in PLBT,” Kynan says.

 

Kynan started playing basketball competitively at 16, which is a very late age for any professional athlete. However, that did not stop him from achieving his goal of playing the sport at a professional level.

 

“It really wasn’t easy when you start out ‘older’, when everybody else started at 7 or 8,” Kynan says. “The learning curve that hit me was so steep, it really tested my determination.”

 

Kynan began playing basketball at the age of 14, where his love for the sport grew during recess and after school. Unlike many other professional athletes, Kynan was not groomed from a young age.

 

“It started out just as a social activity with friends, because everyone played the sport at the time,” he says.

 

As a competitive soul, Kynan has always enjoyed sports even before he started playing basketball. Kynan was a former player of the table tennis team in his secondary school, which fostered his competitive spirit and love for sports. 

 

“Kynan has always been in the field of sports and has excelled in it way above anything else,” says Mr Porter Bassi, Kynan’s father who is a physical education teacher as well.
 

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Being active and proficient in various sports helped Kynan to quickly learn the ropes of new sports in a short span of time. However, for what he made up for in skill, he had lacked in size. 

 

Standing tall at 1.8m when he was 15 years old, Kynan only weighed around 63kg which affected the position he could play. When he played as the centre for the team, his stature put him at a disadvantage when playing against other professional basketball players, who weighed around 75kg and above.

 

“It was so difficult going into competitive basketball because everybody was tall and also stronger than me, so improving myself took months of training,” Kynan adds.

 

Kynan had to go through many hours of strength training before going for trials for the Under-21s team and this was on top of the usual basketball training sessions at his club and school.

 

“You could see that he was always rushing from place to place just to be able to manage school and basketball,” says Lionel Neo, 18, a close friend and former teammate of Kynan. 

 

There was a point in time when Kynan’s family members, peers and teachers told him to quit basketball and focus on his studies, but he continued striving to achieve his goal of wanting to participate in basketball competitions.

 

As someone who has participated in competitive basketball, Lionel adds: “His progress was honestly impressive. Coming from someone who started off at a young age, him improving to the point where he is better than me was impressive.”

 

However, gruelling amounts of competitions and strenuous training sessions inflicted injuries onto Kynan’s growth.

 

“Two years back I had an arm fracture which causes issues for me till this day,” Kynan says. “I had to change the way I shoot the ball. This sudden change really affected the amount of playtime I had and was even afraid of losing my spot in the team.”

 

This setback worried Kynan’s parents, as they were concerned with how he would have been affected in school and as a sportsman. However, this did not stop him as he went through dieting and strength training to get back to his original form within a month.

 

Kynan says: “I think the hardest part of this was not just that I had to work twice as hard, but I also had to give my parents the assurance that my studies will still be stable even with all these things happening during my O-level year.”

 

Apart from basketball, Kynan is currently studying design at Temasek Polytechnic (TP). He is in TP’s basketball team and represents his school for competitions. 

 

He has dreams of playing basketball internationally as a professional athlete but also wants to be a product designer in the future.