Wale Emmanuel has come a long way. The founder of the Chicago Basketball Academy was born in the city he helps to improve, but grew up bouncing back and forth between Chicago and Nigeria. Emmanuel spent much of his youth raised under foster care or in boarding schools, having been born to a single mother too poor to care for him.

He worked with delayed speech and visual disorders through adolescence, without the money to get help, and struggled to make friends and assimilate as he was unable to play sports or comfortably talk to his classmates.

The social power of sports has, nevertheless, always helped to define Emmanuel path, and it was at 11 that he started getting into trouble because he emulated and hung out with kids he met at basketball games, leading him to juvenile crime and arrests.

A family friend noticed his struggles and sponsored his transfer from a Catholic school in Uptown to a boarding school in Nigeria, where he studied alongside both the super-rich and the very poor until he returned to Chicago at the age of 15.

When he came back to the Midwest to complete his high school education, Emmanuel supported himself with retail jobs, and eventually moved onto a business focus at DePaul, but not before dabbling in Classical Latin, Education, Philosophy, Humanities, and Language Arts at Harold Washington College and The Feltre School.

Emmanuel finally decided to study accounting after he looked into becoming a dentist for a time. He found himself taking on an entrepreneurial spirit as he looked deep into the hiring patterns of dentistry, compiling macro-level information about the competitive nature of the industry, and ultimately feeling a little guilty about how many students who paid into dentistry education wouldn’t be able to find work in the field.

Eventually, he landed on the dream of becoming a sports dentist for professional athletes, and imagined meeting superstars by taking them in as patients. He imagined the same dream for other at risk youth. But Emmanuel ultimately left dentistry because he was surrounded by others who wanted to practice in the field for healthcare, not entrepreneurship, and he didn’t want to take their seat at the table.

Emmanuel did end up working with powerful people and celebrities, but it was after he became a strong businessman at DePaul. He worked as an accountant at Ernst & Young, and then as a senior consultant at AON Infrastructure Solutions. Emmanuel made a name for himself by helping government, developers, and community owners manage proposals and risk solutions in public-private partnership transactions and social infrastructure projects.

With his resourceful economic mind, he next ventured out to found the Chicago Basketball Academy alongside former Chicago Bulls star Bill Cartwright. Cartwright is just one of the big names Emmanuel has had the honor of working with, with NBA All-Star Shawn Marion, Kanye West collaborator Malik Yusef, DePaul President Father Dennis H. Holtsneider, and former U.S Deputy Secretary of Education Dr. Michael Bakalis among his collaborators. With its focus on a complete, advanced education based on an immersive study of sports, the Chicago Basketball Academy acted as a blueprint for Emmanuel’s latest project: The Sports Economy School.

Emmanuel’s research for the SES has been exhaustive. His methods have been out of the box at times, as he’s informally visited college campuses throughout the city for years, collecting information first-hand from students, to find out what they are and aren’t learning, and how.

What follows is a plan for a comprehensive and elite college education that immerses its students in the exciting world of sports. This is an institution for anyone who wants to learn; not just athletes. SES will be equipped to work with students with special needs, including those with Asperger’s and Autism.

The key to SES lies in taking the seemingly endless enthusiasm that young students have for sports, and converting this energy into the curious, intellectual passion needed to learn everything else about the world—and Emmanuel knows how to do just that