Following ‘leap of faith’ out of rugby league, Luca Ace-Nasteski is chasing his basketball dreams at Harvard

"What do you care about the most?"

Credit: Harvard Athletics

For the first 16 years of Luca Ace-Nasteski’s life, basketball was little more than an afterthought.

Instead, the Manly native grew up obsessed with rugby league, dreaming of playing under the bright lights of the NRL. By his mid-teens, he was on the fast track to making those dreams come true. A highly-regarded prospect, Ace-Nasteski earned a two-year entry-level contract in 2021 with the South Sydney Rabbitohs worth around AU$120,000.

Fast forward four years.

After a remarkable U-turn, rugby league is squarely in Ace-Nasteski’s rearview mirror. He declined the Rabbitohs’ contract to pursue basketball, which has led him across the world to Harvard, where he is a freshman and the first Australian to ever suit up for the program. 

“I took a leap of faith,” Ace-Nasteski told The Pick and Roll. “I just thought, the hardest thing is to let go and try something new.” 

Ace-Nasteski’s mindset shifted from rugby league to basketball around the time he suffered a stress fracture in 2020, which coincided with a four-inch growth spurt. At the same time, Luca became enamored with watching Zion Williamson’s viral high school and collegiate highlight reels, which were full of thunderous dunks.

 “I watched him watch [Williamson’s] progression,” said his older brother, Marcus. “I remember once he was like, ‘Man, I want to be like that.’”

But with the Rabbitohs’ contract sitting on the table, Luca needed to make a decision between rugby league and basketball. He asked his family for advice, and came away with a mixed bag of answers. 

His father, Steve, is a former rugby league player, a prominent sponsor of the Rabbitohs and a high-profile figure in NRL circles. At first, he struggled to see how a transition to basketball could make sense.

“I told him to follow his dream, but in my mind I thought, ‘What are you doing? You’ve got a professional career in sport in front of you, which is what you always wanted,’” Steve Nasteski told The Pick and Roll. “I thought he was making a mistake.”

But Marcus and Luca’s mother, Alexandra Ace, encouraged him to look past the Rabbitohs’ contract and do what made him happy.

“The question doesn’t come down to which answer is better or worse,” Marcus told him. “It’s just like, what do you care about the most?”

The answer was basketball. 

Much of the reasoning had to do with Marcus. Luca had played some competitive basketball — for one season when he was 12, and for a few more years in high school — but most of his time on the court came from shooting around and training with his brother.

It started when Marcus received a backyard basketball hoop for Christmas, when he was eight and Luca was five. The brothers would set the hoop’s height to the lowest setting, reveling in their temporary ability to dunk. 

Even when rugby-mad Luca would ask to toss the footy ball around, Marcus — who went on to play basketball for the University of Sydney — would leverage it into more basketball time. 

“Just because I was older, I’d make some terrible deal with him. I’d be like, ‘Alright, we’ll shoot 20 shots and then do two passes,’” he said with a laugh. “It was that or nothing, so he was gonna pick that.” 

So, even though Luca’s upbringing revolved around rugby league, that foundation of hooping with Marcus played a key role in his choice to swap sports later on.

Once Luca settled on his decision, he sat down with Marcus and drafted an email informing his high school rugby league coach at the Scots College in Sydney that he would pursue basketball from then on. He still remembers the moment he pressed send, just before he left for a 5 a.m. rugby training session in Palm Beach, a few kilometers north of Manly.

“I was like, ‘holy sh*t,’ I can’t believe I’ve just emailed this guy. Everything I’ve done up until now and now I’m going to tell him I’m never going to play,” Luca said. 

He grinded through the fitness session, sprinting up sand dunes on the beach for two hours. Neither Luca or his coach acknowledged the email until the end of practice, when Luca confirmed that he was done playing rugby. He called it “the point of no return.”

“I was nervous to leave behind everything that I had worked for my whole life, like I was just giving up all these countless hours,” he said. “It’s pretty scary.”

Once he settled on his decision, things moved quickly. Focused on securing a chance to play college basketball, Luca began to train with Manly-based coach Tim Hill. The workouts would start at 5 a.m. and include one conditioning session and one basketball session. For Luca, it was a crash course in high-level basketball.

The conditioning consisted of cardio workouts on the sand dunes, or running sprints with an elastic band strapped to a partner. The basketball training featured reactive ball-handling drills, a focus on lateral mobility (a skill rarely used in rugby league), and a host of other drills. Working with his high school coach at The Scots College, Tedi Yaghoubian, he also revamped his shooting form. 

Most players in college basketball were practically born with a basketball in hand, playing on AAU teams before turning 10 years old. Luca, by contrast, is about 50,000 hours of practice behind the average Division 1 basketball player.

“[Hill] always said, ‘We’re not going to have enough time to start from the beginning, because you’ve got to learn such a wide variety of things to be prepared for college,’” Luca said. “He had to speed up the things I did. I might not execute and make every move perfect at this time, but you’ve just got to learn on the fly really quickly. 

Game reps eased the process. Luca first earned them in 2021 with the NBL1 East’s Inner West Bulls, testing his game against competition that included former NBL players and NBL hopefuls. He didn’t have the skillset of his teammates and opponents, but his athleticism helped him hold his own, averaging just under eight rebounds in 18 minutes per game. He also spent time with another NBL1 East team, the Manly-Warringah Sea Eagles, gaining confidence by the day.

Harvard got involved soon after, once Ace-Nasteski sent email blasts of his tape and statistics to college programs. A few other Division 1 teams followed suit, and he traveled to the U.S. to play his final year of high school basketball at IMG Academy in Florida. 

Ace-Nasteski ultimately pulled in a few Power 5 offers — from Boston College and Oregon State — but he stuck with Harvard, the first program that had recruited him. It was the only school he had visited, and his familiarity with the program played a key role. 

Harvard, of course, is one of the world’s most prestigious universities. And for many, an opportunity to play basketball for the Crimson is — above all else — a chance to secure a valuable Harvard degree for a career away from the court after school. 

Luca doesn’t see it that way. He came to Harvard to play basketball and pursue a pro career, so that’s what he’s focusing on. “Sure, the academics are hard here and I’m still doing well in them, but I’m leveraging basketball, because that’s what I want to do,” Luca said. 

Credit: Harvard Athletics

His father holds a similar mentality. 

 “I never saw it as education,” he said. “I saw it as, ‘This is your chance to crack the NBA.’”

Luca believes in his dream of cracking the pros, but he also understands how improbable it would be. Harvard has produced one NBA player — Jeremy Lin — in the last 70 years. Ace-Nasteski has played a relatively small role in the team’s rotation this season, averaging 11.9 minutes, 2.3 points and 3.1 rebounds across 23 games. 

But his unique career path creates a potential that few others in Division 1 basketball can match. As a player, he is remarkably raw. Being 50,000 hours behind your peers doesn’t bode well for Luca’s present outlook, but it presents the potential for significant improvement. 

“I have this space in college, where it’s like a four-year journey. I have four years to truly do what I can and make the most out of it,” Luca said. “I’m not gonna be a lottery pick after a one-and-done year. That’s not what I’m thinking about.”

He pointed to the emergence of Xavier Cooks and Duop Reath, two Aussies who burst into the NBA after circuitous post-college journeys. 

Cooks spent four years at Winthrop, another mid-major that isn’t known for producing NBA talent. But, gradually, he worked his way into the league. He spent two summers in the NBA Summer League (with the Golden State Warriors in 2018 and the Phoenix Suns in 2019), and  played a season in Germany’s Basketball Bundesliga in 2018-19. From there, he spent four years with the Sydney Kings and another with the NZNBL’s Wellington Saints before earning a contract with the Washington Wizards. 

Reath has come out of the woodwork to be a productive player for the Portland Trail Blazers. He spent four years in college: two at a junior college in Texas, and another two at LSU. Like Cooks, he bounced around after going undrafted. He developed under the mentorship of legendary Australian national team coach Brian Goorjian, playing for the bronze-winning Boomers at the 2020 Olympics and with Goorjian’s Illawarra Hawks in 2021-22. He also spent stints in China and Lebanon and returned to the Boomers for the 2023 FIBA World Cup before cracking into the association with Portland on a two-way contract this season. Most recently, he inked a three-year contract with the Blazers on Feb. 16.

Luca knows that his potential path to the NBA would look similar. 

“I’m going to have to find a harder way, or a grittier way to make the NBA,” Luca said. “Whether that’s playing in the NBL or Europe first, I know my journey’s going to be different.” 

In the back of his mind, he also understands that a career in rugby league would still be on the table if basketball does not work out. 

“He could go back tomorrow,” Hill said. “I don’t have a doubt.”

But for now, a return to rugby league is the last thing on Luca’s mind. 

“It’s all basketball right now,” he said. “Basketball, basketball, basketball.”

On the court, he has plenty of upside. He profiles as a versatile forward who can play on the wing and in the post. And though he hasn’t had many opportunities to show it at Harvard, he’s a capable shooter from beyond the arc, too.

But Harvard head coach Tommy Amaker has been most intrigued by Luca’s speed and agility, given his 208 cm frame.

“How he runs for a guy his size, he’s like a gazelle,” Amaker told the Pick and Roll. “He’s one of the fastest guys we have on our team, and he’s one of our biggest guys.” 

At Harvard, Luca’s role has centered around defense and rebounding — two skills that also defined his success in the NBL1 East. Those assets, in particular, came along naturally in the transition from rugby league to basketball.

“The movements from rugby league have really helped,” Luca said. “Trying to get an offensive rebound, getting around someone, or just like the touch with my hands. Even shooting, I just felt like it came natural, in a way.” 

Still, the adjustment to college basketball has forced Luca to spend extra time honing his craft in the gym, chipping away at those 50,000 hours. His teammates have noticed.

Xavier Nesbitt, a freshman guard at Harvard, was taken aback by Luca’s work ethic during the school’s orientation week in late August.

After a full day of meetings ended at 11 p.m., Nesbitt and the rest of the team were ready to sleep. Then a text from Luca came through on the team’s freshman group chat: “Anybody want to come to the courts?”

“We were all like, ‘Uhhhh, you see what time it is?!,’” Nesbitt said. “But I think that just speaks to his work ethic, and his will to get better.” 

For now, that’s all Luca is trying to accomplish: get better every day. 

“The hardest thing is knowing I’m behind,” he said. “I’m accepting that I’m going to make mistakes because I’m new, but I’ve just got to keep doing it and keep doing it, and not get bogged down by it.” 

Still, he can’t help but pinch himself when he thinks back to the journey that got him to this point.

“If you had told me about all this when I was 15, I would have said, ‘What the f***?’ What do you mean?’” he said, standing outside the locker room at Harvard’s Lavietes Pavilion, more than 10,000 miles from home. “I just can’t believe it.”