Ndongo followed a long, often bumpy road from Cameroon to VMI

Unlike many cadets, Christelle Ndongo won't be entering into the biggest challenge of her life when she enrolls at VMI this fall. The Rat Line, the uniforms and the discipline don't intimidate her.

"Emotionally, it won't be hard for me to go to VMI because I've gone through things much harder than that," she said.

Three years ago, Ndongo (pronounced DON-go) left her family in Cameroon to live in Florida and play basketball. Suffering from homesickness, she then followed her brother Franck, a VCU basketball player at the time and her only family member in the United States, to Richmond.

When she arrived here on a one-way plane ticket and enrolled as a senior at St. Catherine's, she had one goal - to get a college scholarship. It was the only way she could continue her education. A three-sport competitor in volleyball, basketball and soccer, she had the skill and focus required of a collegiate athlete, but only had one year to prove it to college coaches.

She quickly became a standout on the St. Catherine's basketball team.

Division II schools in North Carolina, Tennessee, Chicago and Minneapolis started to court her, but things just didn't feel right.

"Timing in life is everything," St. Catherine's Athletic Director Julie Dayton said. "The timing was just late. Some of these coaches started to offer money but we didn't have an invite, and she hadn't visited the campuses, and it just felt very vague. So we were concerned about her putting her eggs in those baskets."

Having dealt with homesickness before, Ndongo decided that leaving the family she had made in Virginia would be torture. She didn't want to be alone again. So she kept her focus on Virginia colleges.

She applied to Longwood and VCU, but by the time their coaches learned about her, they were nearly out of scholarships. And they had very specific interests for their final spots.

Still hoping to get more exposure on the court, Ndongo signed up to play in basketball showcase events. To help pass the time and stay in shape, she joined St. Catherine's soccer team. It was a sport she had played all her life, but one with which she had lost touch since coming to the United States.

Meanwhile, VMI soccer coach Bryan Williams, a former St. Catherine's coach, was looking to fill a few spots in his recruiting class. He heard about Ndongo's soccer skills and decided to go take a look.

Like basketball, most Division I soccer programs wrap up their recruiting in the fall. But since Williams looks for a cadet, a student and an athlete all in one, it often takes him longer to fill his roster. Williams attended St. Catherine's game against Trinity in the LIS tournament. It took him only one look to recognize what he had found.

"She's definitely a presence when you see her on the field," he said. "I was very impressed with her eloquence and the way she carries herself. . . . Had she been playing soccer for all three years, she might have been snatched up long before now."

Ndongo visited VMI and Williams gave her a sense of what it would be like to be a cadet. Two of her siblings went to military school in Cameroon, so she wasn't turned off by the idea.

"He told me how people live in the dorms, how hard it is to be at VMI, how restricted we are about freedom and all the rules we have to follow," Ndongo said.

"After the visit, I was like 'This is the right place for me. This is where I want to go. And if they give me a chance, I'll just take it. And I'll do everything I can so they don't think they made a mistake about giving me that chance.'"

Williams gave her that chance, and Ndongo canceled her basketball showcases and signed her official letter of intent. Had she not gotten the scholarship, she would've considered going to community college or doing another year of high school. There's a chance she would have had to go back to Cameroon.

Ndongo has been told that she has chosen a school where no one is an outsider.

"If you make it [through the Rat Line], you're home free," said Betty Baugh Harrison, Ndongo's legal guardian who signed the letter with her. "But still, everybody is in it together to help you succeed. Everybody is the same. It doesn't matter what you have, what you don't have, what your background is. Everybody is the same."

After VMI, Ndongo says she's considering becoming a diplomat. She hopes she can get a green card and work here for a few years before returning home.

On her visit, she heard a statistic that in the Rat Line, after the first week, 100 people quit.

A cadet asked her, "Are you going to be part of those hundred?"

She responded, "Never, ever. Don't even think about it."

Ndongo, only the second St. Catherine's alumna to enter VMI since the school opened its doors to women in 1997, elaborated.

When other Keydets quit, she said, "they can go home and find another school. If I quit, I'd have to go home. And I don't want to go home without a degree. So I'll just go through it. I know it'll be tough, but I have a good reason to go through it."

Contact Eric Kolenich at (804)649-6109 or ekolenich@timesdispatch.com