ELIAS OBENYAH’S basketball journey started as a child in Ukiah and has led him to become one of the top high school players in the state for his senior year at a school in the Bay Area. Now his journey has a new destination: Stanford University, which recently announced Obenyah will play there starting next year.
Obenyah still comes back on the weekends to Ukiah where his family lives, but he spends his weekdays attending Salesian College Preparatory in Richmond and lives with a host family there, said his mother Christina Obenyah, who was born and raised in Ukiah and still lives there with the rest of their family.
Salesian’s boys’ basketball team made it to the state quarterfinals last season and started this one ranked No. 25 in the nation by the high school sports website MaxPreps.com, thanks in large part to the 6-foot-5-inch Elias, who is part of a highly touted Stanford freshman men’s basketball class announced last month.
Among Obenyah’s fellow freshman Cardinal teammates will be Aziz Olajuwon, son of one of the all-time basketball greats, Hakeem Olajuwon.
Growing up in Ukiah, Obenyah “wouldn’t put the ball down since he was 5,” his mother said, and he played briefly in the city-run recreational league before moving onto AAU competitive basketball in San Francisco by the time he was 9.
Christina said her husband Aaron, who is from Ghana, did not grow up playing basketball, and neither did she, but Aaron “learned as much as he could and would work with [Elias] day and night.”
She mentioned Miles Hayes and Kevin Bonner among Elias’ coaches locally in the Ukiah area who were also influential in his development as a player.
“These guys were selfless, they could see the drive,” she said. “They would open gyms for him and let him do extra training.”
She also mentioned Mendocino College head coach Billy Offill, who let Elias work out with players on the college’s team.
To get more visibility as a recruit for colleges, Elias made the decision to move to the Bay Area to attend the basketball powerhouse Salesian and live with a host family that includes Deon Otis, who coached Elias on the AAU team when he was 9, his mother said.
Getting a scholarship to a school like Stanford “was totally one of his goals,” Christina Obenyah said of Elias, who fielded 21 offers from major college basketball programs.
Salesian head coach Bill Mellis said in a statement, “There’s been no better example of a ‘student-athlete’ than Elias in my 25+ years at Salesian,” while Stanford head coach Kyle Smith called him “one of the top prospects in the 2026 class in the state.”
Wherever Obenyah’s journey takes him, whether it’s in Richmond or soon in Palo Alto, he has a cheering section in Ukiah that is rooting him on.
“The support from all the people, friends, family, it’s unbelievable,” Christina Obenyah said. “The love and support of our community fueled him to keep going.”
This story originally appeared in The Mendocino College.