'Feels like home': USF basketball hopes pair blaze trail from Asia to The City

“I think here, it’s better than China!” he told The Examiner with a big laugh shortly after a practice inside War Memorial Gym, the Dons’ basketball arena for the last 70 years.

Wang and his teammate, Mongolia native Mike Sharavjamts, are two of the only Asian teammates in NCAA Division I basketball.

As USF, The City’s premier college basketball team, enters the final two weeks of the regular season with one of the best records of any West Coast school (21-6 overall, 10-2 in West Coast Conference play), it fittingly does so with two players of Asian descent on the same roster. It might not be exactly representative of The City’s Asian community, which is 37% of the total population, but it’s far larger than most college basketball teams in the nation.

Chris Gerlufsen, USF’s second-year head coach, said he hopes Sharavjamts (pronounced SHAR-uv-jomts) and Wang help USF become a destination for players from a continent that’s rich in basketball talent.

“San Francisco is arguably the best city in the country for players that come from backgrounds like Mike and Barry,” Gerlufsen said. “We have a natural built-in home field for those guys, outside of our basketball family, to have unbelievable both Mongolian and Chinese populations here in The City to make them feel at home. When you have that built in, we’d be stupid to not try and take advantage.”

“I think these guys are a great salesman for how comfortable they feel here in The City and what it’s done for them,” he said.

Sharavjamts and Wang are at significantly different points in their careers.

Sharavjamts, a 6-foot-8-inch swingman in his first season on the Hilltop, is one of just three Dons to start every game this season. After spending his freshman year at the University of Dayton, he entered last summer’s NBA draft. He eventually decided to pull his name out to improve his stock — he was projected to be a late second-round pick — and transferred to USF.

Wang, meanwhile, is a bulky, 6-foot-9-inch big man who attended high school in Australia at the NBA’s Global Academy in Canberra and is just trying to crack the Dons’ rotation. He has played in about half of USF’s games, averaging a little more than 7 minutes per night.

Sharavjamts has been in the U.S. longer, too, and is no stranger to the Bay Area. He played high-school basketball at the prestigious Prolific Prep in Napa, which has become known for churning out top players such as Gary Trent Jr. of the Toronto Raptors and Jalen Green of the Houston Rockets.

Wang, on the other hand, is living in the U.S. for the first time.

Both players said finding a community in San Francisco has been easy, in no small part due to its Chinese and Mongolian populations, each among the biggest of any metropolitan area in the country.

“San Francisco is huge!” Wang said. “Everywhere I look, there are Asian people. Our team has a lot of Asian guys too.”

He said the presence of Asians on the staff is part of the reason he chose to play in San Francisco. “I was comfortable right away,” he said.

Sharavjamts, already a celebrity back home in Mongolia, has become a sensation on USF’s campus. He can barely walk anywhere on campus without being stopped by students and fans wanting a selfie. Sporting the nickname “Mongolian Mike,” he has an entire rooting section full of Mongolian fans at every Dons home game, and it’s become commonplace for Mongolians to congregate at USF’s road games, too.

Dayton helped foster a community around Sharavjamts, which included the entire city honoring him with a Mongolian Day. But he said San Francisco is an entirely different experience.

“It’s more like Mongolia,” he said. “It feels like home.”

Sharavjamts’ brother, mother and father — the latter a basketball legend in Mongolia nicknamed the “Mongolian Shark” who became the first Asian Harlem Globetrotter — moved with Sharavjamts to The City, roughly 6,000 miles away from their hometown of Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia.

They, along with his girlfriend — a Mongolian student at Academy of Art University — live with him in an apartment a five-minute drive from the school.

“Her food is really good,” he said of his mother. “I don’t eat a lot of American food. My mom cooks for me all the time. It’s been great.”

Wang said that he didn’t need to look far to find a community in The City — the community found him.

“They will come here to watch the game, they will talk to you,” he said. “You have a lot of fans who just talk to us.”

It’s helped that his good friend Simon Guo, with whom he played in Beijing, is a team manager for the Dons.

Gerlufsen said the team actively tries to nurture a welcoming environment for international players such as Sharavjamts and Wang, connecting them with locals who share their cultural heritage.

He joked that when he was recruiting Sharavjamts and Wang, he spent more time speaking about The City’s Asian community than he did pushing anything about basketball.

“I made sure that they understood that when basketball wasn’t going on, and they had some downtime, that they were going to be able to take advantage of all the great things that the city and the Mongolian and the Chinese population have to offer here,” Gerlufsen said. “When you have that, it has a way of making a young person feel at home.”

Sharavjamts said those efforts have paid off.

“Our coaching staff, they want us to be ourselves,” he said. “Since day one, it’s felt like home.”