He talks of his childhood, his early days playing the game. Sojourner was born in New Orleans, but his family moved to Portsmouth, NH, when he was about 2 years old. Around that time Sojourner’s father, Isaac Sr, himself a talented ballplayer, placed a basketball in his son’s tiny hands.
By age 5, Sojourner was playing organized hoops, developing his all-court skills as his body grew larger, faster and stronger. Offensively he was not prodigiously talented; his jump shot and footwork would improve with age. But on the defensive side of the ball, the long-armed Sojourner was a shot-blocking specialist, very good at timing an opponent’s release, jumping high into the air and swiping the ball away. “Defensively, you can’t really take that away,” he says. “Nobody taught me how to block shots. That’s something I liked, and enjoyed.”
Sojourner played AAU ball for the Seacoast Storm, a squad coached by his father. Isaac Sr emphasized hard work and steady improvement. He scheduled the toughest competition he could find, some of the best youth teams in all of New England. Age difference mattered little—older boys, Isaac Sr reasoned, were a better test for his young team. Consequently, in Sojourner’s early seasons, the Storm was often outmatched.
“So you play high school seniors, juniors as a 14-year-old,” he says. “We’d get our butts handed to us every once in a while. For me, it was the way you get better. My dad always believed in, you play the best, you become the best.”
Sojourner remembers long nights against the Boston Amateur Basketball Club, a top caliber AAU program. “That’s how my dad would measure us,” he says. “We would play them, and get beat by 50. We never made excuses. We had to raise our level.”
The Seacoast boys grew up, and they got better. During Sojourner’s senior AAU season, the Storm again played BABC—those same Boston kids who used to beat the hell out of them—and lost by a mere two points. Isaac Sr’s master plan was working; the Storm had risen to the challenge.
Sojourner and many of his Seacoast teammates attended Portsmouth High School. Together they led the Clippers to a 21-0 season in ‘93-94 and won the New Hampshire State Championship. Sojourner, the team’s senior star, was named the New Hampshire State Player of the Year and received All-American honors. He received some interest from Division I programs, particularly Weber State in Utah, but his grades weren’t stellar. The JuCo route was another option, so he settled on Jacksonville Junior College in Texas, which at the time played in the top ranked junior college conference in the country. “At that high level,” Sojourner says, “they’re all DI prospects.”
Playing small and power forward, he had a solid freshman campaign and averaged 11 ppg. He was a bit undersized (about 210 pounds “soaking wet,” he says with a chuckle), matched up against guys like San Jacinto’s “Dink” Peters, who at 6-9, 400 pounds was anything but dinky. Still, Sojourner more than held his own at Jacksonville.
Per NCAA regulations, his plan was to sit out a year, then suit up for Weber State for three full seasons of DI eligibility. But again it was academics that held him back. “I was playing too much basketball, and not going to class,” Sojourner admits. After a brief and unhappy stint at Weber, he signed on with Salt Lake Community College, another strong JuCo program.
From a basketball perspective, the Utah years were among the best of his life. His game rose to new levels. Averaging 16 points per, Sojourner made the Top 50 Returning Sophomores list in 1997 (a prestigious honor in the JuCo world), and also played some intense pickup ball with a few University of Utah Utes—most notably Keith Van Horn, future New Jersey Nets sniper, and the 6-11 Michael Doleac. Against the best competition he could find—his father’s maxim still holding true—Sojourner polished his growing repertoire of skills. “All that stuff helps,” he says of those pickup games. “They’re just big dudes.”
If you Google the name “Isaac Sojourner,” a handful of YouTube clips will pop up. The videos are grainy and low-quality, characteristic of televised Japanese basketball, but together they reveal an entire Basketball Japan League game, complete with scattered crowd noise and thumping loudspeaker music. Sojourner is easy to spot: He’s the tall black dude on the Takamatsu Five Arrows, white jersey No. 25, snagging rebounds and hitting jumpers. This particular game took place in Ryukyu, Okinawa Prefecture, home of the Golden Kings, sometime during the ‘08-09 season (the YouTube details are vague, and the exact date is unspecified). Whenever it was, Sojourner is clearly the Five Arrows’ best player.
