For over 30 years, Northampton High School alum Joe Mantegna Jr. has coached a basketball camp with the Northampton Parks and Recreation Department.

This summer will be the first time he won’t be coaching the camp, but he’s got an excuse. He’s at the Paris 2024 Olympics, serving as an assistant coach for the men’s basketball team of South Sudan, the world’s newest country.

It’s South Sudan’s first team to compete at the Olympics, and they are the youngest nation in basketball history to qualify for the Games. Mantegna Jr. is joined on the bench by former NBA players Luol Deng and Royal Ivey, two of his former recruits at Blair Academy, a prep school in New Jersey where he has coached since 1999.

Marial Shayok, another former Blair player, starts at shooting guard for South Sudan and scored a game-high 24 points against Team USA in an exhibition on July 20, when South Sudan nearly pulled off one of the greatest upsets in basketball history. The Bright Stars led Team USA by as much as 14 — and by one with 20 seconds left — before a LeBron James layup gave the Americans a 101-100 win. South Sudan plays Team USA again in Olympic group play on Wednesday at 3 p.m. on USA Network.

For Mantegna Jr., the power of the Olympic experience for South Sudan — which in 2011 declared its independence from Sudan after decades of bloody civil wars that still rage — extends far beyond the court.

“The good that you can do, unifying different tribes, uplifting a country with sport,” Mantegna Jr. said. “You can change the self-concept of people in a country just by having success on the court, on the pitch, or whatever it might be. I knew the power of sports, I’ve been in sports my whole life, but to see what it could do at an international level, to compete at the international level and to uplift a country has been incredible.”

Of South Sudan’s 12 players at the Olympics, six were born in Sudan — before the south seceded — though all six eventually left as refugees to other countries in Africa, the United States and Australia.

Wenyen Gabriel, who played high school basketball at nearby Wilbraham  & Monson Academy, was born in Sudan but left the country as a refugee when he was just 2 weeks old. Two South Sudan players were born in other African countries to Sudanese refugees, one was born in a Kenyan refugee camp, two more were born to Sudanese immigrant families in the U.S., and Shayok was born in Canada, also to Sudanese parents.

“Our country is a new country, only about 13 years old now, and it hasn’t always had the best narrative with a lot of war going on,” Shayok  said. “It’s just great to have something positive, to shed a positive light and bring positivity towards our country that South Sudanese people can be proud of all over the world.”

‘A great way to grow up’

Mantegna Jr.’s basketball journey started as early as he could walk, tagging along to his father’s practices. His father, Joe Mantegna Sr., coached basketball for 28 years and soccer for 22 years at Northampton High School.

Alongside his brother Mark, Mantegna Jr. attended every practice, every pregame speech and every bus ride to every away game.

“It was great,” Mantegna Jr. said. “Great small town, great to be his son. Great to grow up on the buses, and in the locker rooms, and on sidelines of all of his teams when I was a kid. It was a great way to grow up.”

He played for hours with friends and Mark at the neighborhood hoop. When big storms rolled through, they worked together to shovel off the area in front of the basket. Joe Sr. started up the Basketball Athletic Club in Northampton when Mantegna Jr. was in middle school, and his son and his friends barnstormed across western Massachusetts, playing 40 games a season against anyone who would play them.

“They played ball,” Joe Sr. said. “Morning, noon and night. That’s what they enjoyed doing.”

On both the Suburban League team and the Northampton varsity team, Mantegna Jr. was a prodigious passer, Mark and Joe Sr. said. He started at point guard for three years and loved to penetrate into the lane and dish to his teammates. Northampton ran a motion offense and Joe Sr. spent much of his energy perfecting the Devils’ defense.

It was then where Mark and Joe Sr. began to see the start of Mantegna Jr.’s coaching future. Even as early as fifth grade, he took an interest in breaking down games and learning concepts. At the neighborhood hoop, if he needed a dramatic point to win a game against his brother, he often drew up a back screen or an alley-oop. As his family watched the Celtics win three titles in the 1980s, Mark saw how advanced his brother had become.

“He’s 10, 11, 12 years old and the things he would pick out would be something off the ball,” Mark said. “I can remember just watching my father talk with him. It’s not how great Larry Bird was at shooting, it was how great he was at getting open, and how did he get open.”

Whenever he came home from a game, he’d go up in his room and dissect it — how his team won or lost and why. After every Northampton game, he’d sit around the dinner table with Mark and Joe Sr. and analyze the team’s performance. As his father taught Northampton’s defense, Mantegna Jr. looked for ways to break it down.

‘Playing for something much bigger’

After Mantegna Jr. graduated from Northampton, he played basketball for two years at Ithaca College, before a run as a college assistant coach. In 1999, he took the head coaching job at Blair Academy, and Deng and Ivey were his first recruits.

Twenty-one years later, Deng, now the president of the South Sudan Basketball Federation, approached Mantegna Jr. to coach the Bright Stars. He deferred to Ivey, who has been an NBA assistant for the past eight years after a 10-year career playing in the NBA.

Together, Mantegna Jr. and his former recruits worked to bring South Sudan up from the 82nd-ranked team in Africa to No. 1 on the continent. They started on dirt courts — South Sudan is currently building its first indoor court — and brought South Sudanese players together from across the globe.

“We got 50 kids deep, bonding and playing hoops and learning about one another and putting tribal difficulties behind them,” Mantegna Jr. said. “Luol is trying to bring kids from different tribes together so they can have a common understanding of one another through hoops.”

Building a team from scratch was difficult. The Bright Stars had to qualify to get into a qualifying tournament for Afrobasket, the continent’s biggest tournament that offers spots in the FIBA World Cup and the Olympics. Had Cameroon’s team not tested positive for COVID-19, South Sudan would not have qualified for Afrobasket, where they placed third. That got them a spot in the World Cup last summer, where they finished tops among all African nations at the tournament and earned automatic qualification for the 2024 Olympics.

Mantegna Jr. has won five New Jersey prep state championships in his 25 years at Blair and has coached for Team USA’s youth levels, but nothing could have prepared him for the celebrations that followed South Sudan’s early success.

“I didn’t get it, how big it was, until we won our first international game,” Mantegna Jr. said. “What I saw on social media was incredible.”

Thousands of people in Juba, South Sudan’s capital, exited restaurants and bars and danced in the streets. After South Sudan qualified for the Olympics, tens of thousands of fans met the team at the airport.

“It’s an honor, honestly,” Shayok said. “Playing for something much bigger than myself, playing for the people that came before me, ancestors, playing for my family, of course. It means a lot and I take great pride in it. Opposed to playing for my professional team which is more so like a job — although it’s still a joy, playing basketball regardless — it means a lot more.”

Through his connections with Team USA, Mantegna Jr. helped organize the exhibition game between South Sudan and the U.S. on July 20. South Sudan started as a 43-point underdog. But after an early spurt from the Americans, the Bright Stars roared back, led by lights-out 3-point shooting. On the final possession, they nearly won it. A floater clanged off the backboard and two putback attempts at the buzzer were blocked.

After a 90-79 win against Puerto Rico in its Olympic opener on Sunday, South Sudan gets another chance at the Americans on Wednesday. They’ve cemented their place in the South Sudanese history books.

“I’m just taking it all in, it still all feels surreal,” Shayok said. “I think when I look back it’s going to be something I’m super proud of, obviously being an Olympian, but also being the first team to do it for my country. So when you look at that, I’ll essentially be a pioneer, which is crazy.”

Connor Pignatello can be reached at cpignatello@gazettenet.com.