How former Lobo Tony Snell has found his voice since he and sons were diagnosed with autism

Richard Pitino had been warned.

The fourth-year Lobo basketball coach knew Tony Snell was one of the program greats and a nine-year NBA veteran who helped lead the team to back-to-back NCAA Tournaments in 2012 and 2013 and is universally considered a fan favorite and beloved by his teammates.

What Snell isn’t, Pitino was told time and again, is much of a talker.

So when the 32-year-old Snell was in Albuquerque last month to take part in an alumni all-star game, Pitino offered Snell a friendly introduction and a warm welcome to Lobo practice, but also gave him an assurance.

“I told him he didn’t have to talk or anything like that,” Pitino said. “But he said, ‘No. I’ll say a few words. ... He just talked about how the three years here were three of the best years of his life and he had a great message about winning and winning here.”

Later, Pitino joked that he didn’t know if he was going to have to cut Snell off because the team needed to start its practice.

The fourth-year Lobos coach wasn’t the only one surprised with the newfound chattiness of the 6-foot-6 shooter affectionately known around the Pit in 2013 as the “Silent Assassin.”

Snell admits he has had an awakening, of sorts, over the past year and a half. And he credits the assist to his wife, Ashley, and sons, Karter, 3, and Kenzo, 2, who they are raising in Florida.

The aha moment

“Karter’s already dribbling, shooting hoops,” Ashley Snell said in a recent interview as part of Episode 89 of the Journal’s Talking Grammer podcast.

“Kenzo likes to chase the ball around, but they both spend the majority of their day in our basketball court.”

When Karter was about 18 months old, Ashley noticed he wasn’t hitting expected benchmarks in child development.

“He wasn’t speaking, and then the OCD behavior with organization and stacking toys, and different things like that. Doctors had kept saying the word autism to me,” she said.

The couple began the process of testing their oldest son for autism. Through this, they noticed much of what they were answering about their son applied to Tony.

“I was always independent growing up, always being alone. I just couldn’t connect with people in the personal side of things,” Tony explained to NBC’s Craig Melvin on the Today Show in June 2023 when he announced that as a 31-year-old NBA veteran, husband and father of two young boys, he had been diagnosed with autism.

“And I’m like, you know what? If (Karter) is diagnosed (with autism), then I think I am, too. That gave me the courage to go get checked out,” Tony said.

Father and son were diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder within two weeks of one another. Kenzo has since been diagnosed as well.

The boys are too young to make much of any of it. For Tony, it brought clarity to a life lived feeling different.

And it also led to he and his wife jumping into action.

“I didn’t know autism,” Ashley told the Journal. “The only thing that I heard about autism was negative things. And so I think for us, when we’re faced with this autism diagnosis, that’s when it was like, ‘Hey, well, when we heard (the word), it was negative.’ So, now that we’re learning about it and it’s not negative, we need to tell the world because if people are thinking like us, what kind of world are we paving for our son?”

The couple has launched the Tony Snell Foundation (TonySnellFoundation.org) and has an ambitious five-year plan to open a facility where testing, therapy, classes and other services for children with autism and their families are available.

For now, the foundation has teamed with organizations such as the Special Olympics and with a few NBA teams for special children’s basketball clinics with the hope of doing camps with every team in the league to also offer large-scale education and outreach around autism.

Feeling blessed

Since his diagnosis and appearance on the Today Show in 2023, Tony says he feels blessed. While talking may not be his favorite thing to do, it does come much easier to him as he now has an opportunity to help through a story to share.

Part of that opportunity is to try to help make a world where an autism diagnosis does not define nor limit his sons in any way. He has their backs, he is proud to tell people.

While Tony’s happy to have clarity now, he said he has doubts that he would have been in the NBA had he been diagnosed with autism earlier in his life.

“Probably not, honestly, because there wasn’t much research or that much knowledge of what autism was back in the day,” he said.

Ashley added that “anything viewed as a liability” might have cost Tony a chance to play college or pro basketball.

As the couple moves forward, they also point to a couple of ways autism made life better.

First, Tony spending hours upon hours shooting baskets alone growing up in the Inland Empire area of Southern California may have very well led him to be an NBA-level player.

It also may have helped the couple’s relationship get going.

Ashley says she met her husband at a barbecue hosted by NBA star Jimmy Butler. Tony wasn’t like the other guys.

“At a party, especially like if you’re a professional athlete, usually they behave a certain way,” she said. “Usually, they’re more outgoing with all the girls and talkative and he was very to himself. We had conversations, but his eyes were not wandering. And I was just like, ‘Okay, this is an interesting individual, I want to know more,” she said.

”And when we would hang out alone, we could talk for hours. ... And I’m a big talker. So we’ve been just fine.”

One more season (at least)

As for that NBA career, Tony is still plugging away.

He’s logged nine NBA seasons and spent this past year helping lead the Maine Celtics to the G-League championship.

He’s determined to get that 10th year of NBA service as much to feed his competitive juices as to take care of his family.

The NBA pension kicks in for players after three seasons. Healthcare benefits for a spouse and children kick in once a player gets credit for his 10th season of service.

"I didn't make it this far to make it (just) this far," he said. "I’m really trying to get that 10th year to take care of my family for life."