Park native found path to teaching
after Wayne State basketball glory

Wayne State University’s all-time single-season scorer, Hall of Fame basketball player Al Ament, has some simple advice for student athletes: Focus on your studies; you will probably never play in the NBA.

In college, Albert Ament, a Grosse Pointe Park native, was the ideal student athlete. He lettered four years on the WSU men’s basketball team as a forward and center from 1985-89. His senior year, he was all-conference, all-academic and runner up for player of the year, leading the team in points with a total of 654, a record that stands today.

“Knock on wood!” Ament, a 1985 South grad said in a phone interview, referring to his standing record. “It felt great, and it was a great way to end my four years of scholarship.”

“I truly miss the hard work, practice and getting ready for the games, and the competition. And being very tired, the good tired, at the end of the day,” he said.

“I balanced all the responsibilities I had, with my team, practice, travel, and all my classes and exams. It was great feeling, a real success.”

Ranked first on Wayne State’s all-time list in field goal percentage with a .563 mark, a school record at the time, Ament finished his senior career with a scoring average of 23.4 points per game and a rebound average of 11.4.

Was Ament good enough to play in the NBA?

“He certainly could have played after college overseas if had he chosen to do so, but I don’t think he would have made it in the NBA,” said former WSU basketball coach Ron Hammye.

“For his position, his chances weren’t going to be good. Al was about 6-foot-7 and he would have been playing against people much larger then he was,” said Hammye.

“But I do believe he could have made a living playing basketball; he was a very gifted athlete,” he said. “He was our go-to guy, when we needed to have a basket we looked to him and teams did a lot to try and stop him,” he said.

After graduating with honors from WSU with a bachelor’s degree in English, Ament decided his chances of making it into the NBA were slim to none.

So his love of traveling led him to enlist in the Peace Corps, where he traveled to Africa to teach English at a small high school in a town in the south of Chad called Kelo.

“It was the exact opposite of my life as a young Grosse Pointer.  But what was interesting, as I look back, is that my four years playing basketball at Wayne was really an intermediate step,” said Ament.

“Most of my teammates were African-Americans from the inner city of Detroit, and I learned a lot from them, watching and interacting with them and they did the same from being my teammates,” he said. 

“Going to a Third World country like Chad was a just another step in learning about people, places, and beliefs different from my own,” he said. 

After earning a master’s in French from Wayne State, Ament completed a second tour in the Peace Corps. In 1993-95, he was an English teacher on the Indian Ocean island country of Madagascar. In 1996-97, he worked for the Catholic Relief Services in Rwanda and for CARE in Zaire. Ament met his wife Godelive in Africa; she was working as a nurse in the Rwandan capital of Kigali.

Today Ament lives in Prince William County, Virginia, with his wife and four boys, and teaches French at South County Secondary School for Fairfax County Public Schools. His parents, Ernest and Beryl, still live in the Park.

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