Long before Victory Wembanyama was projected to be the top choice in Thursday’s NBA Draft, and nearly a decade before the Frenchman grew to 7-foot-4, the basketball marvel was a 10-year-old who enjoyed soccer, judo, comic books, and any opportunity to make his teammates laugh.

‘Right at the start of my time with him, we went to a tournament in the north of France, he liked to make jokes, he liked to get down on the ground and do the worm and make everyone laugh,’ Frederic Donnadieu, Wembanyama’s first coach in the Nanterre 92 youth program, told DailyMail.com in an exclusive interview.

The anecdote provides insight into the generational skill and his unique potential: While there have been a dozen or so NBA players who are as tall as Wembanyama, few are as comfortable in their gigantic frames as the 19-year-old dancer.

 

‘That showed as well that he was very at ease with his body,’ Donnadieu said of Wembanyama’s dance moves. ‘He never had any problem with his body. It’s more the others who were impressed to see someone as big as that, but for him, that never really bothered him.’

Donnadieu, who was invited by his former protégé to attend Thursday’s draft in Brooklyn, spoke with DailyMail.com about Wembanyama’s path to the NBA, which will culminate when the San Antonio Spurs select him first overall.

Donnadieu was serving as the technical director at Nanterre in the Parisian suburbs in 2014, when a lanky 10-year-old arrived to play for the Under-11s.

‘So my first memory is when I saw him and of course, for a kid of 10-year-old, he was obviously already very tall but what I saw especially was that he had lots of technical ability,’ Donnadieu said.

‘It was exactly what you see today – he was very advanced technically and especially he had a truly incredible technical ability despite his size.

‘In fact, he didn’t play like other big basketball players – who can have difficulties running. Him, not at all. What he enjoyed was to dribble, to shoot. That was what was so surprising.’

Donnadieu’s observations read like a recent scouting report, despite the fact that he made them eight or nine years before Wembanyama became well-known in the NBA. Wembanyama is now renowned for his unique blend of size, athleticism, and skill, all of which Donnadieu saw as a young teenager.

‘From the start we really could see that he was built like a tank,’ Donnadieu said. ‘But for me, I was 100 percent sure [of his potential] when he was 14 and we were champions of France with him – and other players – and he had been very good and very dominant.

‘I said to myself at that point: If he doesn’t go to the NBA, who can?’

The task for Nanterre and Donnadieu was to help Wembanyama enhance his skill set while also preparing his wiry frame to compete against adult men at the professional level.

Admittedly, this was new territory for Nanterre and Donnadieu, who is now club president.

‘The club offered him lots of new things every year – to help him progress more, to give him more to work on,’ Donnadieu said. ‘He started physical training very young with the physical trainers of the professional team. He wasn’t even 14 when he started.

‘Of course, it wasn’t bodybuilding with weights etc. It was isometric work, flexions, really special things.’

Wembanyama was even given a custom bed, measuring over 7-feet in length.

‘He had a special bed at the academy – when he joined, a bed was made to measure so that he could sleep well,’ Donnadieu said. ‘Plenty of little things like that to show him that the club was evolving with him.’