Reath trying to complete winding journey from Kenyan refugee camp to NBA
Duop Reath doesn’t recall all that much of the Second Sudanese Civil War. But he remembers enough.
He recalls being one of the millions displaced and living literally nowhere, in a Kenyan refugee camp with his family. And the sacrifices his parents made to get him to the Las Vegas Summer League with the Nets, and on the cusp of the NBA.
It’s been a long, twisting trek for Reath, from South Sudan to Kenya, with stops in Australia and Texas, Louisiana and Serbia. And he’s hoping to make Brooklyn the next stop, after playing in two of the Nets’ six games on their way to last Sunday’s summer league semifinals.
“I just try and play my role,” Reath said. “Just trying to be the best role player I can be, rolling to the basket hard, pop when I’m open, and playing the best defense that I could, just trying to be a rim-protector.”
Basically all the things the 6-foot-11 Reath did in two seasons at LSU. Those things didn’t get him selected in the 2018 draft, but did land him a three-year contract with Serbian team FMP. It’s another stop in a journey that’s been winding, and at times dangerous.
Reath was born into one of the longest civil wars on record, with 4 million displaced and 2 million killed. From slavery to mass killings, the war claimed more civilian lives than any since World War II.
The eldest of seven siblings, Reath lost a host of family members while his father, Thomas Duop Reath, tried to spread peace through the church.
“It was dangerous. The war, the fighting, wasn’t that far. I lost a lot of my uncles to the war. Dad and mom’s brothers — mostly my mom’s brothers,” Reath once told TigerRag, an LSU sports website. “It makes you grow a little bit quicker. It makes you more mature. You don’t really have a childhood like that. You have to take care of everybody else at a very young age.”
Reath’s family moved to stay clear of the war zones. That is, until he was 9, when his father and mother (Nyanen Juch) moved to the Kakuma refugee camp, in a remote Kenyan town by the same name, a word Swahili word that means “nowhere.”
“I remember it. We got displaced, moved to a refugee camp, Kakuma refugee camp. It was a pretty big camp,” Reath told The Post. “They left all their family behind: Their mothers, parents, brothers and sister. They left all those people behind just for us, so we could have a better opportunity.”
There are over 150,000 refuges crammed in the camp, suffering through conditions that include dust storms, poisonous spiders, snakes and scorpions, not to mention outbreaks of malaria and cholera.
Reath’s was among those families. That is until his father’s cousin, who had escaped and settled in Australia, sponsored them as refugees.
“They did everything for us, for the kids,” Reath’s younger brother, Sebit, told The Post by phone. “They wanted us to
have a better opportunity, get an education.
“That’s the most important thing they wanted for us, a better opportunity they never had because [in South Sudan] there’s not really much opportunities you can get. They wanted to give us a new start.”
That new start came Down Under. Reath, who’d grown up in a hut with no bed, and had no shoes or formal schooling, got all three. And an introduction to the sport that would change his life.
After spending his first few years in Perth playing soccer and Australian rules football, a growth spurt saw him sprout to 6-6 by the age of 14 and convinced him to try basketball.
“At first when I started, I didn’t think it would do so much for me,” Reath said. “But once I got into it more and started seeing what it did for other people, I just used that as motivation. If they can do it, I’m positive I have a chance to do it, too.”
What Reath did was earn a chance to come to America, get a free education and have a shot at a pro career. Playing in a summer Australian league at 17, he caught the eye of Lee College assistant Marcus King. That got him a ticket to Baytown, Texas and a foot in the NCAA basketball door.
Now after a two-year JUCO stint and a solid SEC career at LSU, Reath has seen Sebit follow in his footsteps at Lee while he himself suited up for Brooklyn in summer league. Getting a camp invite and a shot to stick with the GLeague Long Island Nets won’t be easy, but Reath has already come a lot further than he ever could’ve dreamt.
“We didn’t [expect this]. At the time, it was just something we did as kids, something we fell in love with,” Sebit said. “We just developed. … We started to see this could really take us around the world.”