SHIPROCK – Whether playing under the brightest lights in one of America’s largest cities or in the smallest gymnasiums in rural communities, basketball has left an enormous mark on Analyss Benally and Andre Ingram.
The duo led a skills camp for local youth this week inside the Chieftain Pit at Shiprock High School.
Benally, a standout high school player who became a Division I sharpshooter at San Jose State University, has hosted skills camps across the Navajo Nation to share her story with Indigenous kids of all ages.
“Basketball is everything to me,” Benally said between drills at the camp. “It taught me how to speak to people, it taught me how to be in rooms that I was uncomfortable with, it taught me how to work with people that I had no idea who they were sometimes, and then it builds friendships and bonds, it builds community as well outside of your family.”
Benally is one of only a few Native American women to play professional basketball overseas, with a career that has taken her to European leagues in Romania, Albania, Kosovo and Croatia. She also made her acting debut in the 2024 Netflix sports drama “Rez Ball” and was inducted into the North American Indigenous Athletics Hall of Fame.
She was joined on the court by her father, Brian Benally, an assistant girls basketball coach at Bloomfield High School, and former Los Angeles Lakers guard Andre Ingram. Alongside local coaches Brian Mosley and Robert McCaskill, the staff guided more than 100 area kids through shooting drills, defensive skills and fundamentals.
Prior to her professional career, Benally attended Wichita Heights High School in Kansas, where she was a four-year varsity player and scored more than 1,000 points. She was a three-time Wichita Eagle All-City League selection, a three-time Wichita Eagle All-Class 5A pick, a Sports in Kansas Class 5A Honoree and a 2016 Navajo Times All-Star.
By the end of her collegiate career at San Jose State in 2021, Benally was one of the top 3-point shooters in the Mountain West Conference. She set a school record as a sophomore for 3-pointers made in a single season and finished in the top 10 in school history for 3-point scoring and attempts.
Benally hopes the camps, which have traveled this year to locations ranging from Montezuma Creek, Utah, to Dulce, give youth the chance to experience the thrill of the game.
“The key for me is getting them to hoop,” Benally said. “Getting them out of their comfort zone and seeing them get a little bit more confidence with themselves, with how their body moves, with how they know that they can do things maybe they didn’t think that they could do in the beginning.”
Ingram, 40, signed with the Lakers in 2018 and scored 19 points in his NBA debut against the Houston Rockets. His point total that night was the most by a Laker in a career debut since Nick Van Exel scored 23 points in 1993.
Before his professional stint, Ingram played college basketball for American University, finishing his four-year career as the school’s fifth all-time leading scorer with 1,655 points.
“I try to tell the kids today that the players today are very skilled, but you see the highlight part, you don’t see that they have to learn before they can do that type of stuff,” Ingram said. “I tell them you can do the stuff on TV if you learn the fundamentals first. If you try to emulate what you see on TV first, you’ll never do it right because it starts with the fundamentals.”
With his wife and family hailing from Kayenta, Arizona, Ingram is familiar with the challenges regional youth face when trying to attract interest from college scouts and coaches.
“I grew up in a small town, so anytime I can do something like this and bring it here, I would absolutely love to because these kids don’t have as much access,” Ingram said. “They don’t see that many success stories from where they’re from, so they don’t think they can do anything. I didn’t always have this, and when you see somebody else do it, it makes you think you can do it too.”
ABFive will hold its next basketball camp in Phoenix starting July 17. More information is available at abfivebasketball.com.