Making the right choice, definitely
Well-travelled Maiwan (Junior) Moaku-Matia has found a home at Acadia
Basketball has taken Maiwan (Junior) Moaku-Matia to a lot of destinations over the years, but the 6’6” fifth-year wing player says he has found a home at Acadia.
“I really like it here,” says Moaku-Matia, who arrived at Acadia last fall and first played for the basketball Axemen at the tail end of the 2017-2018 regular season and through the playoffs and the U-Sports Final Eight.
“I like the town, the people, and the fans are really engaged and supportive.”
Born in Montreal, Moaku-Matia is a true ‘Junior’, and is best known by that nickname. He lived in Montreal until he was seven when his family moved to Hamilton, Ont.
He attended Academie Catholique Mere- Teresa, a French Roman Catholic high school in Hamilton. He is bilingual (French and English), and at first, “spoke English with a Quebec accent.”
“I grew up playing baseball in Montreal with my brother. I tried volleyball and soccer, and skateboarded until my feet got too big for the board.” He started playing basketball “in a house league when I was in Grade 5. I’m 23 now, so I’ve been playing for 12 years.”
Moaku-Matia was recruited to Hope Academy, a prep school in Chicago, for his final year of high school. From there, he was recruited to Iowa Central Community College where he spent two years and earned an account- ing diploma.
While he liked it at Iowa Central, he found that in basketball terms, “it wasn’t for me.” He decided to “come home to Canada looking to turn a new page.”
He spent the 2016-2017 season at Cape Breton, but again, “it didn’t really work out” for him. “I still have a lot of respect for CBU. It’s a good school, with a good fan base.” On the court, though, the Capers went winless in their 20 regular season games.
The summer he left Iowa, he met Luc Stevenson at a basketball camp. The two stayed in contact, and when Moaku-Matia came to Wolfville with CBU, he found Stevenson was an Axemen assistant coach.
Acadia was already on MoakuMatia’s radar.
“The first time I played here (with the Capers), it was my first time visiting Wolfville. There was a big crowd, and they had a ceremony recognizing AfricanCanadian student-athletes. I was impressed by that. I thought I’d like playing here, and attending a school with fans who were engaged and had respect for their past African-Canadian athletes.”
Moaku-Matia transferred to Acadia knowing he would have to sit out until he was eligible to play. Rather than miss the entire 2017-2018 season, he made the decision to play as soon as he was eligible.
“I decided to play at the end of last year,” he says, even though it would mean using up a year of eligibility. “I felt we had a good shot at contending (in the conference), and we knew we were hosting nationals. I decided to do it rather than spend the rest of my life wondering ‘ what if?’”
In his five games, Moaku-Matia had 46 points and 29 rebounds. Acadia won three of the five to finish fourth in the regular season with a 15-5 record.
This season, Moaku- Matia has been in the starting lineup for all but one of Acadia’s first seven games, scoring 108 points and grabbing 45 rebounds. He has been among the more effective Axemen, averaging just over 14 points and six rebounds per game.
Moaku-Matia is studying business at Acadia.
He hopes to graduate in the spring of 2019, and would like to try his hand at maybe playing basketball professionally.
As well, as an extracurricular sideline, he has started a small company whose aim is to create greater awareness of mental health issues. Calling his enterprise ‘Save Me, Save We’, he has T-shirts for sale, with “part of the profits being donated to a mental health clinic.”
He points out, “one in five people will suffer from mental health issues – possibly some of my teammates, maybe even me. Every day, I encounter people who are experiencing problems, and aren’t prepared to talk about it. We shouldn’t be afraid to talk about problems we’re having.
“Once the threshold of your mental health is affected,” he says, “it’s like a physical injury. It takes time to heal, and the more you prolong it, the longer it takes.”
There is, he says, “a lot of stress to being a student-athlete.” At one point during his time at Iowa Central, “I was taking eight courses. I was overwhelmed by my workload, and it was starting to affect my performance,” both on the court and in the classroom.
Moaku-Matia has no regrets over about choice to come to Acadia, just as he has no regrets to use up a year of eligibility by choosing to play down the stretch and in the playoffs last season.