Graham Hunter, 33

When I was 16 I got the chance to go to America to play basketball. My daily routine at Ukiah High School in Oregon involved getting up at 5am, training for two hours, going to school, then playing in the evenings. I lived with the assistant coach and his family, and he had the keys to the gym, so it was easy to slip in during the early hours to practise.

It was a culture shock. My idea of America was a bright, glamorous world, like you saw in the movies, with shiny malls, beautiful people and big houses. I was in a small place in Oregon, population 250, and the next big town was 50 miles away.

But being at school there was fun – everyone sitting eating in the classrooms, listening to their Walkmans. It was great.

I found myself fitting in quite well but I think that had a lot to do with the sport. Other exchange students who were there at the time walked the hallways without getting the same attention. If it hadn’t been for the basketball, I might have had a very different experience.

I had been made captain of the school team, the Ukiah Cougars, and crowned Most Valuable Player for my first season.

It was a dream come true – until my first game. I was about 5ft 10in, the tallest on the team, and suddenly we were confronted with two seven-footers on the other side. We lost, badly, and it was a very sobering experience.

But it made me work even harder and I was selected to represent the state of Oregon in the USA Junior Nationals – an amazing experience.

I came back to Blantyre to finish high school and at the age of 17 joined the Troon Tornadoes. We won the Scottish cup and the national league and I was picked to play for the Scottish under-18s.

After two years at the National Basketball Academy in Durham I won an athletic scholarship to the University of Maine. I was studying business admin and had to get the grades to stay in the basketball team so I took my education more seriously than I ever had done. I wasn’t there to be an athlete, the teachers told me – I was there to be a student athlete and there was a big difference.

I went to America a wee, negative boy from Blantyre and was suddenly confronted with this mass of positive-thinking, cheerful people. They believed in themselves – they were going to be the best, the champions, the next president. It was an incredible world to be part of and it completely changed my attitude to life.

Every time I came home, I’d meet the friends I grew up with and see them heading further in the wrong direction. I became aware of how little there was for them in my community and it made me think I might be able to bring something positive to them, through basketball.

I set up Reach for the Sky six years ago. The idea was to give kids a long-term programme they could invest in, rather than having a coach come in to the schools for six weeks then, just as they were starting to have a positive influence on hard-to-reach young people, disappearing again.

It’s grown from a one-man operation – me lugging bags of basketballs around on the bus from school to school – to 10 basketball development academies around South Lanarkshire, holiday camps, a streetball initiative, work in schools and a volunteer project building confidence in young people and increasing their employability.

Reach for the Sky isn’t just about basketball. It’s about giving young people the opportunity to shine. The best stories I hear are about the kids who had no confidence when they came here, who are now full of self-belief, and the teenagers who had no motivation, who felt they were going nowhere, who are now coaches and heading for university.

They inspire me – their passion, their determination to succeed, are what makes it all worthwhile.

Visit reachfortheskybasketball.com

Ann Fotheringham