Adonal is available for interviews and appearances. For booking presentations, media appearances, interviews, and/or book-signings contact svalentine@adonalfoyle.com.
Adonal Foyle is a retired veteran NBA player, who was the eighth overall NBA draft pick in 1997. He played a total of 13 NBA seasons, the first ten with the Golden State Warriors and last three with the Orlando Magic. Upon his retirement from playing professional basketball, Adonal served for 2 NBA seasons with the Orlando Magic as their Director of Player Development. Adonal is also the Founder & President of Kerosene Lamp Foundation and Democracy Matters.
Adonal grew up in the tiny nation of St. Vincent & the Grenadines, where he first picked up a basketball at the age of 15. His quest for a college education which ultimately led him to the USA and into the NBA is an amazing and inspirational story of ambition, hard work and a little bit of luck. Growing up in impoverished circumstances in the Caribbean dramatically influenced Adonal’s worldview, and off the court, he is an activist with a deep commitment to the community, especially young people.
Despite being recruited by all the top basketball colleges, Adonal Foyle made the unorthodox decision to attend Colgate University, a small liberal arts college in upstate New York. A major factor in this decision was his desire to leave college with a strong academic grounding, which he sensed would be harder to accomplish at a school where you were a basketball player first and a student last. At Colgate, he set an NCAA record with 492 career blocks which was only broken in 2002. Although Foyle left Colgate early to join the NBA, he maintained his commitment to education and graduated in 1999, not willing to stop there, he began his Masters degree in Sport Psychology while still playing in the NBA.
Adonal makes numerous community service appearances and founded two non-profit organizations: Democracy Matters, a non-partisan campus-based project working to get big money out of politics and people in; and Kerosene Lamp Foundation which uses basketball to engage and empower at-risk youth to grow into healthy and well-educated leaders in the Caribbean and USA.
Adonal has received many honors, including induction into the World Sports Humanitarian Hall of Fame, and the CoSIDA Academic All-America Hall of Fame, appointment as a Goodwill Ambassador to St. Vincent & the Grenadines, NBA Players Association Community Contribution All-Star Award, Social Change Agent (Greenlining Institute), NBA Community Assist Awards (multiple years) and named Runner Up Central Floridian of the Year by the Orlando Sentinel in 2010. Adonal graduated magna cum laude from Colgate University, and has a Masters in Sports Psychology at John F. Kennedy University.
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