Their brother, Prince, a cornerback for the Giants, sent his well wishes in a text message.
“All of them got scholarships to university,” said Christy Amukamara, the family matriarch. She smiled. “That was a great relief for us.”
Technically, Passionate, a high school senior, had yet to sign a scholarship offer as her team played for an Arizona prep basketball championship. Still, the Amukamaras are at the forefront of a growing number of Nigerian-American athletes, born in the United States, who are excelling at the top levels of high school, college and professional sports.
Andre Iguodala and Victor Oladipo play in the N.B.A., and Ime Udoka is an assistant coach for the San Antonio Spurs. The brothers Samuel and Emmanuel Acho are in the N.F.L. The sisters Nneka and Chiney Ogwumike of the W.N.B.A. were the only siblings both drafted No. 1 over all in a professional sport besides Peyton and Eli Manning. Jahlil Okafor of Duke is predicted by many to be the first pick in the coming N.B.A. draft. And the sprinter Courtney Okolo of the University of Texas set a women’s N.C.A.A. record of 50.03 seconds at 400 meters last spring.
Peace Amukamara
Typically, these athletes have parents or grandparents who came to the United States to study or to escape the 1980s-era military regime in Nigeria, Africa’s most populous nation, with about 175 million people living in an area twice the size of California.
About 380,000 Nigerian immigrants and their children live in the United States, up from 25,000 in 1980. They have settled in metropolitan areas like New York, Houston and Washington, and as a group, they are far more likely than the overall American population to receive undergraduate and advanced degrees, according to a 2014 analysis done for the Rockefeller Foundation and the Aspen Institute.
Many in the Nigerian diaspora view sports as a kind of student-athlete ideal with its discipline, work ethic and opportunities to gain access to higher education and professional careers, the athletes, their parents and sports officials said.
“The educational piece is the cross-nexus; they’re not just doing this for sport,” said Chris Plonsky, the athletic director for women’s sports at Texas, where a number of Nigerian-American and Nigerian immigrant athletes have played.
While at Nebraska, Prince Amukamara said, he planned to attend law school until he heard the ESPN draft analyst Mel Kiper Jr. project him as a first-round pick in the 2011 N.F.L. draft.
“My Dad said, ‘O.K., you can pursue sports,’ ” Amukamara, 25, said, adding, “Sports has always been secondary.”
Athletes born in Nigeria have also continued to rise to prominence in North America in the decades after Christian Okoye ’s grinding success as a running back with the Kansas City Chiefs and Hakeem Olajuwon’s Hall of Fame basketball career with the University of Houston and the Houston Rockets.
Masai Ujiri is the general manager of the Toronto Raptors. Obafemi Martins, a forward for the Seattle Sounders, finished second last season in the voting for most valuable player in M.L.S. The country’s top-ranked girls high school basketball team, SS. John Neumann and Maria Goretti Catholic High School, in Philadelphia, has two players from Nigeria: Christina Aborowa, a 6-foot-4 senior forward headed to Texas, and Felicia Aiyeotan, a 6-9 junior center.
Ujiri estimates that his foundation, Giants of Africa, has brought 75 to 100 male athletes to the United States from Nigeria over the past dozen years to play college basketball.
Promise Amukamara with fans after the Colorado game. Credit Jarod Opperman for The New York Times
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