Kennedy Leonard – the Scotland 3×3 star raised in Michal Jordan-mad Chicago

Kennedy Leonard honed her basketball skills in the gym where superstar Michael Jordan trained but is revelling in the chance to make her Dundee-born mum proud at the Commonwealth Games.

Leonard, 25, is part of the Scotland women’s 3×3 basketball team in Birmingham, but her entire childhood was spent on the other side of the Atlantic.

She was born in New Jersey in September 1996 and her family moved to Chicago nine months later, just before Jordan embarked on his ‘Last Dance’ season with the Chicago Bulls which ended with a sixth NBA title.

“When you grow up in Chicago, or spend time any time in Chicago, you’re automatically tuned into the Bulls and Michael Jordan in that era,” Leonard told the PA news agency.

“So it was cool to grow up and be surrounded by that and to be that close to something so iconic.”

Leonard would play and watch the sport all the time with her basketball-crazy dad and attended Bulls summer camps, where she had the opportunity to play in the same halls where Jordan and his team-mates would have practised.

The Bulls magic clearly rubbed off on her as she was offered college scholarships to play the sport, and joined the University of Colorado programme in Boulder.

On her Twitter page she talks about how people told her she was “not good enough, too small and too slow” but has emphatically proved them wrong.

Her success continued at Colorado, as she smashed the university’s all-time assists record. An injury at the wrong time ruled her out of the WNBA draft and she moved to Europe, first to Germany before joining the London Lions.

She was part of a Lions women’s team that won four titles last season and won each of the 24 WBBL games they played last season.

Playing in the Commonwealth Games for