As members of the SMU men's basketball team workout and prepare for the upcoming season, they do so with a new perspective on three teammates and their team as a whole.

"I think now they really know like where we came from," said senior center Bamba Fall.

"It was very eye-opening," says sophomore guard Mike Walker. "You get to know the guys on the team and everything, but to be able to see where they come from and why they act the way they act… is very enlightening."

The team returned last month after a 12-day trip across Africa to play and teach basketball and to learn about teammates like Fall, Papa Dia and Mouhammad Faye, all from Senegal.

"What they have to go through just to play the game on an everyday basis just makes you think twice and appreciate what you have a lot more, a lot more," says Walker, who grew up Iowa City, Iowa.

The trip marked the first time Fall's parents met his teammates and coaches.

"My mom," Fall says, "definitely felt relief."

SMU

"Bamba looks exactly like his mom," says sophomore swingman Alex Malone. "I was like yeah that's Bam's mom right there."

They got see the sights, like Nelson Mandela's hometown, play the national teams from Senegal and South Africa and learn about themselves as a team.

"Just fighting back as a team brought us together a lot more," Malone says of their games against the older players on the national teams.

"We all know each other real well," Fall says. "I think it will really help."

And both before the trip and during they took an anthropology class, Peoples of Africa, with a professor along for the journey. They had daily class meetings and kept journals about their experiences on the trip.

"I found out I didn't know everything about Africa," Fall says. "I definitely learned something too."

But what's most important to Fall are the young players from his homeland he hopes to inspire.

"Now they know that without school you can't play basketball," he says, "so I think basketball will help them stay in school."