When the campers first arrived, they sat within the trees that wrap around the basketball court, waiting for the day to start. 

Kelly Graves, the head coach of the women’s team, walked onto the court with players and staff from both basketball teams to greet the kids. Behind him, players wore different Kobe colorways, a materialistic staple to the programs. 

“We’re grateful to be here with you today and we hope you learn a lot,” Graves said to the 150 kids participating in Oregon’s Mamba and Mambacita camp. “We hope you’re thinking of that great example of Kobe working hard, who he passed on to Gigi.” 

On Oct. 8, Oregon Basketball and the Mamba and Mambacita Sports Foundation, a non-profit founded on the visions of Kobe and Gianna Bryant, hosted a free skills camp with kids from Kidsports and the Hope Project. They spent two hours working on various drills with student-athletes and coaches while highlighting the legacies and impact they had on basketball. 

In early September, Vanessa Bryant, the wife and mother of Kobe and Gigi, announced that Oregon is one of the six colleges that will partner with the Mamba and Mambacita Sports Foundation to further the legacies of the Bryants.

Kobe’s connection to the University of Oregon started with Sabrina Ionescu. He surprised her during her game against USC in Los Angeles, where he watched the game with Gigi.

“They sat courtside, where my jaw sat dropped,” Ionescu told the Los Angeles Times. “They watched the entire game and that was the first time I met Kobe.” 

She started to work out with both Kobe and Gigi in the offseason and that eventually turned into him watching Oregon’s games and keeping in communication with Ionescu. 

“We kept in touch, always texting, calls, game visits. I’d drop a triple-double and have a text from him, ‘another triple-double, I see you’ with a flex emoji,” Ionescu told Los Angeles Times. “Another game, another text. ‘Yo, Beast Mode,’ or ‘Easy money.’”

In Ionescu’s eulogy at Kobe and Gigi’s Celebration of Life, she talked about how Gigi impacted her style of play and vice versa. She talked about Kobe’s mentality towards life and basketball, and how that shaped her experience at Oregon as a female athlete while giving her and her teammates the blueprint to success; the same one he gave to Gigi. 

“If I represented the present of the women’s game, Gigi was the future and Kobe knew it.”

After Ionescu graduated, both of the men’s and women’s programs made sure that their presence was still felt in the locker room. 

“Everyone will say his mindset, his approach and everything in life is built into our locker room,” Kennedi Williams, a senior guard for the women’s team, said. “Upstairs [the concourse], there’s a poster that says ‘You have to work hard in the dark to shine in the light’ and that’s something we carry with us everyday.”

Outside his approach to basketball and life, Kobe was an avid supporter of youth sports. With the creation of Granity Studios, a media company that created fictional sport stories targeted at middle school and young adults, Mamba Sports Academy, a youth training facility, and other various youth sports initiatives that he was either the founder of or an ambassador for, he made sure that kids were always in the conversation when it came to development. 

“The best part was seeing the smiles and all of their faces,” Jadrian ‘Bam’ Tracey, a redshirt junior guard for the men’s team said. “Growing up when I was in their shoes, I looked up to them like they were celebrities and role models so being on the other side of it, face-to-face was inspiring.”

As the campers and the coaches circled huddled around each other at the ‘O’ in the middle of the court with their hands in the middle, they screamed “Mamba.” A full circle moment as the women’s team did a similar thing on the day of his passing with Oregon State ahead of its in-state rivalry game. 

It’s a reminder of the mark that Kobe left on all of us, especially in Eugene. His impact and legacy continues to remain present on Oregon basketball athletes and young players across town, reminding us that basketball is always bigger than a game.