SEAL BEACH, Calif. — During her decade spent as the director of the International Baccalaureate program at Kokomo (Ind.) High School, Heidi Gutwein has grown used to hearing students from foreign lands say they like to play sports. Most of the time, once they get to the States, they realize the competition is much harder than they expected. So when the shy, polite young man from Democratic Republic of the Congo told Gutwein during a Zoom call in the spring of 2021 that he played basketball, she didn’t think much of it. “He told me how tall he was in centimeters, so I had to get on my phone and convert it,” Gutwein says. “I thought, ‘Oh, well, he’s tall. He could probably rebound for us.’”
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John Peckinpaugh was understandably intrigued when the shy, polite young man from Congo alighted in Indiana a few months later. Peckinpaugh, 33, was about to start his first season as Kokomo’s basketball coach. He had heard that the new arrival had not played basketball for very long, but it didn’t take long for Peckinpaugh to realize the student had considerable potential. “You could see the raw, natural ability was there,” Peckinpaugh says. “The way he picked up on things, even with the language barrier, was impressive. After that first workout, I figured he had a good chance to turn into a pretty good player.”
Just 10 months later, this tall young man with the high ceiling has outgrown every expectation and then some. Two months ago, Flory Bidunga’s name did not appear in any of the major national recruiting rankings for the Class of 2024. Even now, he remains unlisted in the 247Sports Composite, which includes the top 86 players in the class. ESPN.com has him at No. 60. No doubt those outlets will make a similar adjustment to the one recently made by Rivals, where Bidunga went from unranked to No. 6. His ascent continued unabated last week at the Adidas 3SSB Open, where Bidunga overpowered the competition and led his Indiana Elite squad to the Under 16 championship. The five-day, five-game stretch confirmed what is rapidly becoming understood in basketball circles: If Bidunga is not the consensus No. 1 prospect in the Class of 2024, he’s awfully close.
“I’ve seen all the top players in that class, and he’s a much better prospect than any of them,” says Frank Burlison, a veteran recruiting scout who watched Bidunga in action last week as well as at the prestigious NBPA Top 100 camp in Orlando last month. “I’m not the lone ranger on that based on the college coaches I’ve spoken to. He’s not as polished as some of the other guys, but he’s got a great body, great hands, great feel for the game, gives great effort. And he’s only going to get bigger and stronger the next few years.”
For a guy who flew under the radar for so long, Bidunga sure is hard to miss. He stands a chiseled 6-foot-9 and 215 pounds, with long arms and unusual bounce for a player his size. He is a prolific dunker who catches post entries in traffic, finishes with both hands (he’s a natural lefty), is a rapid repeat jumper, and routinely beats guards down the floor. He is equally dominant on the defensive end. Moreover, Bidunga plays the game with a high motor and cheerful demeanor, and by all accounts he is extremely coachable. “The scary thing is he’s probably a better kid than he is a basketball player,” Peckinpaugh says. “It’s nice to see someone like him see the hard work pay off.”
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The recent surge is just one more layer of unfamiliarity Bidunga has had to adjust to since coming to the States, but so far he is sounding all the right notes. “Yeah, it does surprise me,” he told The Athletic after Sunday’s championship win over Utah Prospects. “I feel good, but nothing has really changed. I’m the same person I was before. I can’t let all these things get into my head, so I just have to try to focus and do my thing.”
Bidunga’s nifty footwork is another enticing asset, one which he attributes to his years playing soccer while growing up in the DRC capital of Kinshasa. It wasn’t until Flory was 12 years old that a family friend, noting his height, suggested he try basketball. He fared well but didn’t do anything to augur a big-time future. Rather, Bidunga’s decision to finish his high school education in the U.S. was motivated by academics. His father is an engineer and his mother is a successful businesswoman, and both are firm believers in the importance of education and value of travel. A counselor at Bidunga’s high school was familiar with Kokomo’s international program, which currently includes more than 100 students who live in a campus dormitory. Based on the counselor’s recommendation, Flory sent an email to Gutwein early in 2021.
Gutwein is used to getting such correspondence out of the blue. This one came in later than usual, so she had to work quickly to reach out to Bidunga’s school, acquire his transcript (which showed mostly As and Bs) and have him take an English test. Once he cleared those markers, they set up the Zoom call. Bidunga’s English was passable but shaky, so an aunt helped with the translation. “He was so nervous,” Gutwein recalls. “I told him, ‘Flory, you have to talk with me, so take a deep breath. You can do this.’ He smiled and was able to answer my questions.”
Once he started practicing with the Kokomo basketball team, Bidunga showed a remarkable capacity to improve quickly. “It was a little bit hard to communicate with my teammates, because the basketball language is so different,” he says. He averaged 17.5 points, 13.3 rebounds and 5.3 blocks while leading Kokomo to the semifinals of Indiana’s Class 4A tournament. His signature performance came against Richmond High School, a traditional rival and state powerhouse. Bidunga scored 32 points and added 20 rebounds and 11 blocks in a convincing win.
Peckinpaugh connected Bidunga with Indiana Elite, and he started to make his mark on the spring circuit. His real breakthrough came while playing for Kokomo in the Charlie Hughes Classic in June, where Bidunga more than held his own against Xavier Booker, a 6-10 forward at Cathedral High in Indianapolis who is ranked by 247Sports as the No. 4 prospect in the Class of 2023. That earned Bidunga a last-minute invite to the NBPA Top 100 camp, which annually brings together the best players from around the country.
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Burlison is part of the selection committee for that event. He had never heard of Bidunga when his name was floated a few days before the start of camp, but he could see right away that Bidunga was the real thing. “He was playing against some really good players, most of them seniors, and he’s just blocking shots, dunking everything, playing physical, playing real hard,” Burlison says. In Bidunga’s first game, he scored 16 points on 8 of 9 shooting. Over five games, he averaged 10.4 points (on 75.8 percent shooting) to go along with 6.4 rebounds and two blocks, the second-highest average at the camp. He made an equally strong impression during practices and drill sessions, where intensity and effort are most in evidence.
One of the first colleges to recruit Bidunga was Bradley, where Drew Adams, who is the son of Bidunga’s coach with Indiana Elite, is an assistant. The scuttlebutt among college coaches at the Adidas tournament last week held that Bidunga would either end up at Bradley, or that Adams would be hired away by another school and Bidunga would follow him there. Peckinpaugh batted down that notion — “I wouldn’t listen to all the rumors,” he cautions — and added that while Bradley has done a good job recruiting Bidunga so far, Cincinnati, Georgetown, Purdue and Wake Forest were also aggressive out of the gate. Auburn is making up ground fast (Bidunga had a good Zoom call with Bruce Pearl, who was courtside for some of his games last week), and Kentucky has shown interest of late through assistant coach Orlando Antigua. In addition, two coaches from the NBA G League’s Ignite team, Jason Hart and Rod Baker, were at the Adidas 3SSB event last week, and one or both was courtside for many of Bidunga’s games. No doubt many more suitors will follow.
In an effort to maintain order, Peckinpaugh has established a system where coaches can only call Bidunga on Tuesdays and Thursdays “just to keep him sane.” Unlike his domestic counterparts, Bidunga does not have a working familiarity with American college basketball programs, so he is grateful that he is only going into his junior season. “I have a lot of time to think about all of that,” he says. “I try not to put it too much in my mind right now.”
That’s a sensible strategy, but the way things are going, Bidunga is going to have to get up to speed real fast. The shy, polite young man from Congo has grown a lot in a short amount of time, and this basketball tall tale is getting bigger by the day.
(Photo: Michael Hirschuber / Courtesy of Adidas)
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