Dominique, La Magnifique: How A French Teen May Be The Next International WNBA Superstar
For years, Dominique Malonga has been a rising star spoken of in European and true basketball circles. Now, on WNBA Draft day, she takes a step towards international WNBA superstardom.
Dominique Malonga walked into a gym on the Rue Du Vercors in Lyon, France. It was just another workout on a Thursday in October of 2022. She ran to the top of the key, simulated a pick and roll and caught the ball just above the free throw line. With a confident fluidity, Dominique then put the ball on the floor, spun to her right. In two steps, she effortlessly left her feet and ascended towards the hoop, flushing the ball home with her right hand.
It may not have seemed a surprise to the group of preteen boys watching from the corner of the gym but soon, it would surprise the women’s basketball world. Malonga didn’t know it at the time but the dunk was being recorded and was posted to social media by a sports management firm called Comsport. The video of a 16 year old French girl dunking spoke for itself so the caption was succinct.
“Dominique Malonga.
Remember the name.”
A Gym in Yaounde
Long before the viral fame and international attention, the Malonga family lived in the Cameroonian capital city of Yaounde. Dominique’s father, Thalance, is a French-Congolese Doctor and diplomatic envoy to President Denis Sassou Nguesso of the Republic of the Congo. Her mother, Agathe N’Nindjem-Yolemp is a former professional basketball star who spent time in the French league and represented Cameroon internationally.
Even if she didn’t love it initially, a young Dominique was raised with a ball in her hand.
“I was really doing it because my parents wanted me to do it and then later I really fell in love with the sport,” she says. “I was starting to be in competitions under 15 [years old] in tournaments, against other teams and friends and I really started to play for real.”
While women’s basketball in the United States is starting to grow into a more professionalized operation at the youth level, Dominique’s early days were more reminiscent of the backstories told by America’s original Title IX pioneers.
“I didn’t really have access to an inside court so all the practice was outside first,” she remembers. “We have some [gyms] in Cameroon but it’s not just open for everybody.”
But she had some help from her mother, who ran an academy for girls basketball players in Yaounde. That connection, literally and figuratively, opened the doors to the biggest gym in Cameroon’s capital, the Palais des Sports. Built in 2009, the arena was a joint project between the Cameroonian and Chinese governments. For over a century, the West African nation has been under many spheres of influence, from German to French and now (from an economic standpoint) China.
To learn the background of the country is to understand Dominique and how she managed to end up in France in the first place.
The Portuguese first arrived on their shores in 1472 and dubbed the Wouri River ‘Rio dos Camaroes’ for the abundance of ghost shrimp that inhabited the waters. Eventually, that name became Cameroon when translated to English. By the 1860’s the Germans’ had established a foothold in the region as imperialist European powers began to descend on Africa and take anything not nailed down. Much like King Leopold’s treatment of native Congolese in Belgian occupied territories, the Germans were using forced labor for nearly every plantation and project in Cameroon.
After World War I, France entered the picture, receiving tranches of land after Germany forfeited all their colonial holdings as part of the armistice. The nation came under the influence of what is now known as the ‘Francophone’, or French colonized areas that adopted the language as either their administrative or major secondary tongue. Other nations in Africa under the sphere include the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Algeria, Morocco, Senegal and Mali, to name a few.
While the French only held colonial control of the area for 44 years, a somewhat smaller time frame than other occupied territories worldwide, the influence of the country is still deeply felt in Cameroon today. English and French are the two official languages in a country that is over two-thirds Christian.
“I always felt I’m [also] French,” Dominique explains, “Because when I was born, my Dad had a French passport.”
Cameroonian law states that if your father has a passport and citizenship in France, that can pass along to children as well.
“So I was born with French papers,” she adds. “And then my mom, she was still playing [professional basketball] when I was born and she played a lot in France. So I lived a couple years there when I was young before going back to Cameroon and stayed there for my first ten years.”
It’s a constant question of identity and belonging, especially in formerly colonized nations in Africa. Are you French or are you Cameroonian? Are you able to play for one at the international level without spurning the other? In short, who do you belong to? Who are your people?
Dominique wrestled with those questions throughout her childhood but eventually found a way to balance them both. But the answer wouldn’t become apparent until years later, after she had moved from Yaounde to France and started on a journey to achieving her new dream: becoming a professional basketball player like her mother.
French Phenomenon
When she was about 11 years old, the Malonga’s decided to move to France to get Dominique involved in a more robust basketball training infrastructure. Soon, the outdoor practices and loose environment of competition became much more regimented and intense. She joined a prestigious French boarding school and national training center called INSEP, which trains athletes in 26 different sports. Some of the country’s best basketball players, from 2016 WNBA champion Sandrine Gruda, to NBA stars Tony Parker, Clint Capela and Boris Diaw are alumni of the institute.
Soon, she’d be turning heads because what those at INSEP didn’t know was that 14 year old Dominique could already dunk.
“I was in my hometown, Nanterre, and it was just after practice,” she recalls. “And just after practice I was playing around with some friends and I was like ‘okay, let’s try.’ And then I just put the ball through the ring with the last nail. But for me that was it.”
That confidence to live above the rim grew into her teenage years until a picture day at INSEP when everyone began to take notice.
“You have the guys, they’re playing around too, making some videos,” adds Dominique, “And I was like ‘okay, I can do it too. So let’s just have a women’s video too.’”
She flushed the dunk home and, for the first time ever, Dominique Malonga had her first dunk on video. One of the earliest people to take notice was a former INSEP alum, Tony Parker, who made a bold proclamation: Dominique was the female Victor Wembenyama.
At this point in time, ‘Wemby’ was already something of an international phenomenon. He had been playing professionally since the age of 15, sporting an almost superhuman combination of length, height, speed and fluidity. He could score at all three levels and was a next level defender as just a teenager. Coincidentally, Wembanyama and Malonga spent their formative years in the same town, Nanterre, and both developed through their hometown French club.
As Victor’s star ascended and he began to build hype as one of the best NBA prospects since Lebron James, Dominique was growing into her own as well. Much like Wembanyama, she was a unique breed. A ‘unicorn’, as they say in basketball. She had already grown to over 6’5, could run the floor, score at will, defend with professional level players and, perhaps most importantly, she could dunk.
While there are plenty of women that have dunked in the sport, there aren’t many who displayed the type of athleticism and ease that Dominique did as just a teenager. That caught Parker’s eye enough to offer her a chance to play for ASVEL Lyon, where he was the club President and where Victor won a French Pro A title in 2022-2023. So in 2021, Dominique Malonga became a professional basketball player.
“My whole first year was really a welcome to the world,” she says. “I didn’t play a lot. I played, maybe eight games in total.”
But those in Lyon knew what they had. Former Chicago Sky video coordinator Yoann Cabioc’h joined ASVEL Féminin in 2022 after winning a WNBA championship the prior fall. When he laid eyes on Dominique, it was pretty clear what the ceiling for a player like her would be.
“You could see the potential, of course, that she had,” he says. “She was already able to knock down threes, to run the floor, to dunk and very smart, on and off the court.”
While it would take her a year or two to really come into her own, the high level of competition proved to be essential to Dominique’s development. Some American college coaches came calling but she was entirely interested. She was already playing professionally and saw the value in trying to compete against athletes that were, in some cases, ten or more years older than she was.
“The players are already 25, 27,” Dominique explains. “You play against players that have played several EuroBaskets, every World Cup, sometimes several Olympics. So they really experience the game. And when you arrive as a young player and you have to play around players like that, it’s so worth it to just improve your game and improve fast.”
She worked tirelessly with Caboic’h and the rest of the staff, doing individual workouts after practices and trying to improve quickly as ASVEL worked to cement themselves as a European competition contender. Which is how she ended up in a gym on the Rue Du Vercors, dunking off a spin move while an onlooker posted a video to Twitter.
Olympique Dominique
Yoann was the coach Dominique was working out with that October morning. It wasn’t a particularly special day and he didn’t realize that anyone was recording them either.
“It went around the world,” he says.
By the time she stepped off the court and checked her phone, Dominique’s follower count went from a little over 1,000 on Instagram to nearly 10,000. American media outlets picked up the Comsport video while those in the women’s basketball community widened their eyes. It looked like the future.
“Hours later, I saw the video on ESPN Sportscenter,” she remembers.
The French national team took immediate interest and she made her international debut for Les Bleues at the 2021 FIBA U16 Women’s European Challengers event. She averaged nearly 20 points and 10 rebounds a game and led France to qualifying for the 2022 FIBA U17 World Cup.
She’d go on to win bronze, scoring 28 points and grabbing 17 rebounds in the third place medal game against Canada. It was a clear announcement to the world that she was going to be a force to be reckoned with and a contender for senior team selection on a French team that was regularly improving every year.
But at the club level, Malonga wasn’t an immediate splash the way the way she and others thought it might be. ASVEL Lyon won the EuroCup Women (the second highest European competition) in 2023 and won their domestic league, the LFB, the same year. Dominique was out for six weeks that year due to an injury and averaged 6.4 points and 3.3 rebounds in seven games. A season later, she was loaned to another club in the LFB, Tarbes G.B. and she began to come into her own. She averaged 11.9 points, 8.9 rebounds and 1.4 blocks in 25 games.
The improvement was obvious, especially to Cabioc’h who had now become the head coach of ASVEL.
“She’s very coachable, she’s very humble, she’s a hard worker, she’s extremely smart,” he says. “She’s somebody that’s listening, that wants to learn from the older generations, wants to learn from the coaches, respects everybody in the gym from the janitor to the coach.”
Maybe it was that locker room presence, beyond the clear talent potential, that convinced French officials to select Dominique for the senior team ahead of the 2024 Olympics in Paris. She impressed in the Qualifying Tournament in Xi’an, China, establishing herself as an elite defensive presence as WNBA veterans Marine Johannes and Gabby Williams led the scoring efforts.
While some athletes that are a part of the French sphere of influence may have a feeling of complexity around the idea of representing a colonizer country on the international stage, Malonga takes a bit more of a nuanced approach.
“I was kind of related to France and I went to a French school in my young days,” she explains. “So that wasn’t hard for me to just go to France and fit into the environment. I just love to show that identity is not about one or two, it’s just about how you feel and where or what do you belong to, and what you want to represent.”
That steadfast confidence in herself and her identity allowed her to fully enjoy the process of Olympic qualifying and made everything sweeter when the French federation announced that the 18 year old Malonga would be a part of the official roster for the Paris games in 2024. She would be the youngest member on the team.
“I was so happy to be there because I was lucky,” Dominique explains. “I worked for that but not everybody can say I made it to the Olympics. Not everybody can say I made it to the Olympics at 18.”
That first night, at the Stade Pierre-Mauroy in Lille, roughly two and a half hours north of Paris, the arena was packed. The French national team walked onto the floor to take on Canada in front of over 20,000 fans. And Dominique took it all in.
“I will never forget the feeling,” she says. “This arena, full house, it was a lot of French fans, they’re just cheering at us, just waiting for us to show the world that [the level] of French basketball is so high today and I felt embraced by this feeling of joy. And I’m proud.”
Les Bleues advanced to the gold medal game against the United States. And while Dominique was used mostly in a rotational role for the duration of the tournament, she took away several experiences and a now cemented belief that women’s basketball in France had arrived.
“I never heard a gym that loud,” remembers Dominique. “I’m really into social media and I saw a lot of edits about our game and our players. Like, people were knowing us. And it’s so weird because I never heard about women’s basketball in France and now it was like — just [seeing people] talking about [it] — that was crazy. And I was like ‘okay, we’re growing.’”
While the French team didn’t defeat the United States, the effort had a ripple effect through the global women’s basketball world. The game was an indicator that the rest of the world was starting to invest in the sport with a goal of catching the Americans but also that the French, in particular, were becoming a European epicenter for some of the best players in the world. And, at the center, was a 19 year old that might become the greatest of them all.
Global Reach
After the Olympics, American outlets started to take a deeper interest in Dominique Malonga as a WNBA prospect. While Paige Bueckers, the 2025 NCAA champion guard at UConn, was viewed throughout the year as the prohibitive number one pick of the draft, certain draft scouts and reporters started to put Dominique into the lottery range.
Cabioc’h couldn’t believe it.
“I don’t understand why she’s fifth or seventh in mock drafts,” he says, referencing winter mocks that had her towards the end of the lottery. “She should be first by far, even with Paige Bueckers.”
A bold claim but one that certain WNBA GM’s and scouts agree with. While Bueckers is a superstar in the making, a guard that can facilitate and score in an era when guards are leading the way in the league, Malonga represents a future player archetype even if she may just end up being one-of-one.
The Victor Wembanyama comparisons have pushed her name into the American sports lexicon in recent weeks since the NCAA Tournament ended but Yoann sees it a different way.
“I think Victor is the male Dominique,” he quips.
As the WNBA enters an era where there are multiple faces of the league, from Caitlin Clark to Angel Reese, A’ja Wilson to Sabrina Ionescu and beyond, Dominique Malonga is something totally different. There have been international stars in the WNBA before, from Lauren Jackson to Emma Meeseman, but no one that has made such waves in this era of media attention.
For her part, Dominique sees herself as a global ambassador of the game and her belief system around identity and culture lends itself to someone that can manage to be a star many can rally around.
“I know that I’m both Cameroonian and French and even if I just have the French passport, it’s not about paper,” she says. “It’s about where do you belong? My dad is actually Congolese, so I also represent Congo in what I do. And I really want to highlight that I’m from those three countries and I’m so proud of it. And I don’t need to choose.”
“Even if I play for the French national team at the end of the day, I have Cameroon and Congo in my DNA and every time I step on the court and in whatever I do, it will always be those three origins that are gonna show and I gotta be proud of it and just show it to the world.”
There is something admirable in her choices, of bridging a long history rife with complex and unsavory history, subjugation and imperialism to turn it into something that can be a source of global connection. As she prepares to come to the United States, Dominique Malonga adds another pin on a world map of her travels, getting the opportunity to become an international superstar the likes of which the WNBA hasn’t seen before.
Cabioc’h sees this as an opportunity to grow the game abroad and to use Dominique, and the other international stars before her, as an example that women’s basketball is something to be prized everywhere, not just within the United States.
“I think she can change the game,” he says. “Because we keep seeing a lot of positional fives in the WNBA that are playing close to the rim. But I think Dominique Malonga will add the running ability. Like a rim runner, the ability to switch, the ability to drive that maybe [someone like] Jonquel Jones doesn’t have. Dominique can do all of this, plus run and drive. And I think that will change the game.”
“If Dominique [ends up] performing over there,” he adds, “Which I think would be the case, then I think the WNBA can get even bigger in France. And I think it can help develop some links between French basketball in the WNBA. And why not, at some point, having a WNBA game in Paris?”
Living up to Yoann’s description of her, Dominique deflects the question about whether or not she can be a singular change agent for French basketball abroad. Instead, looping in her international teammates, a potential ‘golden generation’ as she calls it, and saying that the movement will happen as a collective.
“I am really proud of this group of players that are going to change the face of French and European basketball,” she concludes. “We said that French basketball has reached a really high level as shown in the last Olympics and I’m sure what’s coming is much bigger.”
As she prepares to walk the stage to be selected in the 2025 WNBA Draft on Monday night, Comsports’ tweet from 2021 looks almost prophetic in hindsight. Because by now you have remembered, and are likely to continue to remember, the name Dominique Malonga.
Any chance Dallas takes Malonga at 1?