NAMPA, Idaho – Watch Obi Megwa play a basketball game and you'll see the 6-foot point guard slicing and dicing his way to the basket.

He throws himself with abandon toward the rim, no matter how tall the defender is or how often he gets knocked to the floor.

And while it is remarkable to watch, it is even more so when you consider that less than six years ago he laid on a basketball court with his tibia poking sideways pushing his skin out.
The Northwest Nazarene senior went up for a layup at an AAU tournament in the summer of 2013 and when he landed everything went wrong.

"It was just me jumping and landing, which is something I've done all my life," said Megwa, whose Nighthawks face Simon Fraser at 6:30 p.m. MST on Thursday in the first round of the GNAC tournament. "There was a lot of fear just because of the style that I play and not knowing how serious the injury was. It was a freak incident."

As he lay on the floor staring at his leg he was in shock. His father, Sabinus, was in the stands and immediately rushed onto the court. He described it as one of the worst experiences of his life seeing his son broken on the floor.

"The first question out of his mouth was, 'Dad, do you think I can still play?'" Sabinus Megwa said. "He had surgery went to rehab and worked hard every day and he has been playing as good as he was before."

The injury had some lasting mental effects on Megwa, but it also ruined his chances to play Division I ball. Future teammate Adonis Arms said he had heard of him because he was the best guard in Arizona at the time.

"He had a move where he threw it out with one hand and then grabbed it with another," Arms said of the move created by God Shammgod. "The kid should've gone D-I considering his talent level, his IQ level on the court, how fast he is with the ball and the way he cuts through defenses."

Megwa lost most of his junior season and when he first came back he wasn't the same player as the screws in his leg were giving him pain every time he played.

After his junior year, he had another surgery to have the screws taken out and then he went back to work.

Not everything in his rehab was bad, though, as he realized he wasn't strong enough to play the style he wanted to.

"I really started lifting more," he said. "I've gotten stronger since then and it was definitely an eye opener for me."

Megwa went to Mesa Community College out of high school and still dreamed of playing Division I basketball, but the offers never materialized. Some of that was because of his leg injury and some of it was his lack of a consistent jump shot.

He eventually connected with then-NNU head coach Scott Flemming and agreed to come to Nampa.

While it isn't the level he had long dreamed of playing at, he figured it was still a good fit and would give him the chance to play professional basketball after graduating.

Since the moment he took the floor with NNU emblazoned across his chest, he has shown that pro ball is definitely in his future.

As a junior, he was named all-GNAC second team after averaging 17.0 points per game. He turned it up a notch this season, as he is second in the conference in scoring at 19.2 and was named to the all-GNAC first team on Tuesday. He is also just 51 points away from the 1,000-point mark.

The business management major credits a lot of his success at NNU to the work he has done in the summer with his brothers Sabi and Uche.

This last summer they would wake up, go to the gym and lift and do some cardio. In the afternoon, they would practice shooting and his basketball moves at the school gym their mom Luazi Megwa is an assistant principal at. In between, they'd go out onto the track in the 110-degree desert heat and workout.

It's all added up to a dominant senior season that has NNU in the playoffs for the first time since the 2014-15 season and its highest finish in league play since the school went to Division II in 2001.

"It is a testament to how much time he has put in after practices and shootarounds," NNU coach Paul Rush said. "It is amazing the shots he can make around the basket. We joke about how he takes it easy on kids when he does explode and put on the afterburners because he is almost impossible to stay in front of."

A remarkable achievement considering less than six years ago he couldn't walk after a devastating leg injury.