Athena Thompson has already experienced her fair share of international basketball. The 16-year-old guard is among Great Britain's most outstanding young talents, having led her U-16 national team to its second-ever Division A promotion following this summer's FIBA EuroBasket tournament in Turkey. Thompson competed with players from across the United Kingdom and against teams from around Europe.
But her current day-to-day life has even more diverse international flavor. Thompson is now in the United States for her first year at Putnam Science Academy. She's one of a whopping 10 players from outside the United States, representing seven different countries, on Putnam Science's 12-player top prep roster.
In total, 19 of the Mustangs' 22 players in the program come from 12 different nations: England, Turkey, Russia, Ireland, Montenegro, Senegal, Serbia, South Africa, Colombia, Chile, Spain and France.
"It kind of feels like I don't have to travel the world because it's already with me," Thompson said.
It's not uncommon for prep schools today to recruit a handful of international players to their programs. But Putnam Science, which is not a fully-fledged NEPSAC school, is by far the most extreme example. The Mustangs represent a new challenge for second-year coach Greg Canzater, a Boston native who is suddenly consuming more FIBA film than he ever could have predicted.
"Never in a million years did I think that I'd be sitting here, watching the likes of an Athena Thompson and a Rachel Lynch play in the FIBAs or the Fours (Four Nations tournament), as they say in their region," Canzater said.
Canzater is well-known in Boston basketball circles; he started the popular SISRun summer pickup league during the pandemic and has coached at Brighton High and Bunker Hill Community College. When he took the Putnam Science job, Canzater knew he'd be in the international space since more than 50 percent of Putnam's student population is from outside the United States. But he only knew a bit of Spanish and very little about the global basketball scene.
To get started, Canzater leaned on the Putnam men's coaches, led by Tom Espinosa, who has a wealth of connections to national team coaches and development programs. He said he's lost sleep combing FIBA tape on YouTube and talking to parents in different time zones. Watching games of one young player, like Russian center Kate Lipatova, would often lead him down rabbit holes and tournaments where he'd find other stars like Thompson. Because these top talents are competing in global sanctioned competitions, it's actually easier to find multiple games' worth of film than it can be locally.
"I get to watch mistakes, I get to watch habits, and then I think once I found that, the rocket ship took off," Canzater said.
Selling Putnam, and the U.S. in general, is fairly straightforward: most of these stars want to play in college or professionally, and those coaches are here.
Thompson dreams of the WNBA and knows that no English player has ever reached that level while solely developing in England. She's wanted to get to the U.S., and last fall, she connected with former Putnam player and current Baylor freshman Ines Goryanova. Thompson watched some Putnam games, developed a connection with Canzater over video calls and made the move to Connecticut this summer, three days after wrapping up her national team play.
"Me and my mum kind of felt I'd sort of outgrown basketball in England, because I needed more exposure and just that next level of basketball, and being around talented players and being able to get exposed to college coaches," she said.
Tacko Sy, a 2026 center from Senegal's capital of Dakar, sought similar exposure. She had been playing in Spain but returned to Senegal in 2022 to join the SEED Academy, and her head coach in Senegal referred Putnam Science to her. Sy wants to play Division 1 basketball — her favorite players are Luka Doncic, Dennis Rodman, Chloe Kitts and Candace Parker — but she's also focused on turning a college education into a stable career. She's already thinking about studying communications.
"I want to study first, so hard," Sy said. "If I go for the unofficial visit, in my head, I see if I'm really ready for playing college basketball, because now it's so hard."
Though Sy can speak French, Spanish and Catalan, she's still learning English like many others on the Mustangs. For Canzater to get his team in sync on the court, he first has to get them communicating together. He tries to have the players speaking English when they're together, and sometimes common basketball words transcend languages — but not always.
An example: If a defender is calling for where to help, we would say "help, two away." In Spanish, it's "line" or "dos line." Canzater makes sure his team knows when a Spanish-speaking player says the phrase and what it means.
"I learned very quickly that just as much as me doing my research on players, I need to do research on the styles and even terminology in other countries," he said.
On the court, the Mustangs went 15-15 last season (they also played three JUCO teams) and have started this year 2-0 with victories over Wilbraham & Monson, and Darrow, both NEPSAC Class AA schools. They also won the championship in the Quincy, Mass., Beantown Slam tournament, competing against MIAA fall teams. Putnam Science is not part of a NEPSAC class but can chase a national prep school title. As the only girls program at the school, the Mustangs are motivated to prove themselves and step out from underneath the shadow of the boys side, which boasts four prep circuit championships.
"We want to win," Sy said. "The boys have four wins, and the girls: zero. So we want to play together for this."
Several players on the team have already landed Division 1 offers. Lipatova committed to Penn over the summer and Rachel Lynch, from Ireland, committed to Le Moyne this week. Sy has picked up offers from CSU Bakersfield, Duquesne, Fordham and Siena. Duquesne even traveled to Senegal to meet Sy's family. Thompson's first offer came from Fordham (she has a second from Siena), and was floored when the Rams offered her during a phone call at the end of September.
"I was really shocked. I was so happy, and my mum was on the call as well," she said. "So after I ended that call, I rang her back straight away. Because it was my first offer, I was quite emotional. I didn't really know how to react."
Basketball is only part of the major cultural adjustment. Thompson's initial impressions of the United States: It's loud and full of people, but the fast food is much better than in England. She's also taking a U.S. history class — "the British are always fighting," she notes. Sy says eating so much pizza, chicken and burgers is a new experience for her, but she also loves the music, which helps ease her anxiety.
"My earphones are my life," she said.
Canzater has the Mustangs eat dinner at the same table every night. They've bonded by sharing music from their home countries and watching scary movies as a team. But it's not easy for teenagers from around the world to suddenly live together.
"Getting used to having to share bathrooms and things like that, I think has been a bit challenging at times, especially at the start, because we'd only just met each other," Thompson said. "Living with each other, we kind of just had to pick up and gauge off one another how we could work together and have our own private spaces, then also at times be able to bond with each other."
Each player also grapples with homesickness. Sy misses her six siblings and her parents, whom she texts frequently. Thompson has found it hard being away from her mom, Kim. The two have a special relationship built around basketball, and Kim has been on the sidelines as a parent or coach throughout Thompson's basketball career.
"I've had to really become mentally stronger," Thompson said. "I ring her about 3-4 times a day, so I still talk with her a lot. But it's quite hard because I can look back on the bench and my mom's not there, whereas in a game in England, if I look back, I know she's there."
But Thompson, like each of the Mustangs, feel pride in their personal journeys and the countries they represent. Thompson in particular wants to reach the highest levels of basketball and show her home country of Great Britain, an unheralded basketball nation, what's possible.
"I've had quite a few people from England — younger girls maybe, 13, 14 (years old) —message me and been like, 'How have you got here?' and things like that," she said. "So for me, I'm quite happy about that, because I want to inspire younger girls to follow journeys like this, and do the sport you love and do it because you love it."
