Yang Dong-geun

Yang Dong-geun (born September 14, 1981) is a retired South Korean basketball player for Ulsan Mobis Phoebus and the Korean national team, where he participated at the 2014 FIBA Basketball World Cup. During his sixteen-year career, he won the KBL Rookie of the Year and was named Most Valuable Player (MVP) in KBL four times. He spent his entire playing career with Ulsan Mobis Phoebus, having been at the forefront of Ulsan's dominance in the league from the early 2000's. Since retiring after the 2019-20 season, he has returned to the team as a coach. Early life Yang enjoyed playing basketball since his elementary school days. As he had been short compared to his peers, he never considered going professional until he had a late growth spurt and started playing college basketball. He attended Yongsan High School, which is known as a high school basketball powerhouse, but was neither a highly-rated prospect or a regular at that time. One of his contemporaries was Lee Jung-suk, who was a year behind him. He overlooked by the "big three" universities in collegiate basketball: Yonsei University, Korea University and Chung-Ang University. Playing career College days Yang was recruited by Hanyang University despite not being a regular in high school. At that time, Hanyang was not a particularly well-known basketball program and was better known for its baseball team. His close friend and future professional rival Cho Sung-min would join him two years later.