lauren yearwood
basketball
school:
Oak Bay (Victoria)
freshman’s future: Oregon
Watch Lauren Yearwood on the basketball court, and it doesn’t take very long before you start to notice the nuances, those rewarding little moments where decisions are made that speak to a larger language of understanding.
The sport’s own alphabet soup can take you through the gamut from cuts and seals to fakes and flares, but when the final translation is complete, the best thing you can say about the senior forward with Victoria’s Oak Bay Breakers is that her intangibles have always out-measured her sheer physical gifts.
That alone is saying a lot, especially when you’re talking about a 6-foot-3 forward who played in five straight provincial championships through her high school career, has already represented Canada at championships around the globe, and who in the fall begins her collegiate experience down south in the Pac 12 Conference with the University of Oregon Ducks.
That resumé alone confirms the obvious, that Yearwood’s game is filled with superlatives, from the European-flavoured multi-skills she brings as a big forward, to her old-school abilities in the paint as a post-up scorer and shot blocker.
But it’s the nuances within those areas that paint the clearest, widest scope of her persona: a team-first mentality and an innate understanding of the game and her place within it.
“She is a gifted teammate,” says Rob Kinnear, her head coach at Oak Bay, offering the most succinct description possible of his star player.
“It’s a big cliché, but she is oncein-a-lifetime. If I coach until I am an old man, I don’t think I will get a total package like she is. She is gifted in the classroom and gifted on the court.”
Adds Kelly Graves, her head coach-to-be at Oregon: “She is going to be a rock in our lockerroom.”
A pretty unbreakable one, at that.
A broken ankle suffered at provincials during her Grade 9 year, a concussion suffered last summer on the eve of making the Canadian team bound for the FIBA Americas tournament. Rough patches on Yearwood’s road, to be sure, but her resiliency has her right back on track as she competes for a spot on the Canadian team which will competeattheWorldJuniorChampionships later this summer in Russia.
“When I went to Oregon on a 48-hour visit, halfway through my first day everything just felt completely natural,” Yearwood says of choosing the Ducks.
“Such a big part of it was how I fit in with the team and the girls I would be around, because they become your family.”
Her new family of Ducks quite quickly noticed the nuances, all the ways in which their new Canadian teammate will play the game for the betterment of the flock. And at the end of the day, they too will define Lauren Yearwood as their gifted teammate.