Sammy was determined to living his dream of being a NBA basketball player. Over the span of his 10 year professional career he held his own against players that would go on to play for championship caliber teams such as LA Lakers and San Antonio Spurs.
However, summer of 2008 things would dramatically change. “When I got injured, I didn’t know exactly what happened to me because I didn’t get hurt on a play. I woke up one morning and felt a throbbing pain in my knee. I thought it was just from the rigors of all the practice and games during a long season. The pain would never leave and I played through season with the pain. I got an MRI and found out that I would need micro fracture surgery.”
If you would have asked Sammy's freshman basketball coach if he could envision him playing professional basketball one day that coach would have told you, “not a chance.”
Matter fact, when Sammy was a freshman that same coach cut him from the team leaving Sammy angered and confused. “When I got cut from the high school basketball team it was a shock to my system, because I came from a feeder system of CYO basketball where I was one of the leading scorers in the league averaging 30 points per game.
At 15 years old Sammy would have an epiphany that he would either allow this situation to make him bitter or make him better, and from that moment on his 10,000 hours of training began. Contrary to the traditional path of playing high school basketball and getting recruited at D-1 schools, Sammy carved out a lane that was driven by hard work and unparalleled determination.
