Houston, we have a star
Houston (B.C.) liftoff propels ‘hungry and humble’ Ruth Hamblin to college’s Final Four
In 2012, Ruth Hamblin was one of 10 kids to graduate from high school in tiny Houston, B.C. Today, she’s finished her aerospace engineering degree and has propelled Oregon State to the NCAA women’s basketball Final Four.
Ruth Hamblin is the small-town girl who never dreamed that her story would, in a manner of speaking, become larger than life.
Yet as the biggest event in the entire canon of women’s collegiate sports tips off Sunday in Indianapolis, no one will have taken a more unlikely journey to the epicentre of her sport than the farmer’s daughter from the tiny northern town of Houston, B.C.
Standing 6-foot-6 and aptly nicknamed The Canadian Hammer for her shot-blocking prowess, Hamblin has helped lead the Oregon State Beavers (32-4) on a magical run to the school’s firstever NCAA women’s basketball Final Four.
Their first-round opponents — the dynastic, three-time defending national champion Connecticut Huskies (36-0) — are overwhelming favourites.
Yet if this is indeed a David vs. Goliath matchup, even Hamblin’s height can’t overshadow the odds she has beaten to arrive as the truest of statistical outliers.
HUMBLE BEGINNINGS
There are so many ways to quantify why Hamblin shouldn’t be playing in the Final Four that it’s tough to know where to begin.
Growing up, geography and weather meant isolation. And not picking up a basketball in any kind of serious fashion until the ninth grade placed Hamblin at the very bottom of the elite developmental curve.
But perhaps most of all, consider the fact that at the Houston Christian Secondary graduation ceremony in 2012, Hamblin donned cap and gown as one of only 10 seniors. That’s girls and boys combined.
Perspective to her dizzying climb?
How about an ESPN feature written about her earlier this season, which began with the headline: “How Ruth Hamblin became perhaps the best pure centre in college basketball.”
As the catalyst for Oregon State’s dynamic offence and its prolific scoring guard Jamie Weisner, Hamblin made her name, first and foremost, as a stopper at the other end of the court.
She will leave the school as the PAC 12 Conference’s two-time reigning defensive player of the year as well as its all-time leading shot-blocker. And come April 14, don’t be surprised to see her picked in the first round of the WNBA draft.
Yet despite the accolades and the headlines, Hamblin hasn’t rested on any of the praise.
“Seeing stuff like that just motivates me even more,” Hamblin said last week as her team returned to its Corvallis, Ore., campus, fresh off an upset win over the Baylor Bears in a regional final. “It has been cool to see from where I have come. But I just stay humble and hungry. By senior year, you realize that all of that is for the fans. I have just stayed focused on the journey.” What a journey it has been. Growing up in B.C.’s Bulkley Valley region — where moose-crossing signs are commonplace and where mining and forestry are staples of the local economy — Hamblin would rise at dawn to tend to her chores on the family cattle ranch. In her spare time, she would both ride and show her horses.
But once she got bit by the basketball bug, she dove in headfirst with a quenchability factor that was off the charts.
Encouraged to try out for Basketball B.C.’s provincial teams by current University of Northern B.C. athletic director Loralyn Murdoch, Hamblin made both the Under-16 and -17 teams while leading Houston Christian to back-to-back B.C. Single A titles.
Former Canadian women’s national team head coach Allison McNeill remembers meeting Hamblin for the first time as a 10th-grader when she gave three separate camp clinics over a full day in Smithers, a town just north of Houston. The first was for children, the second for coaches and the third for high school players.
“And Ruth came to all three,” laughs McNeill. “I saw her size and her athletic ability. But what I remember most about her that day was that she had work ethic and size. She had the desire to be good and you can’t measure that. It’s why I thought she had a chance because those are the ones that succeed.”
OLYMPIAN IDEALS
Canadian women’s basketball has entered a new golden age.
Reaching the quarter-finals under McNeill at the 2012 London Games, current head coach Lisa Thomaidis has guided the team back to the Olympics and a spot in Rio de Janeiro this August.
Just where does Hamblin fit in Canada Basketball’s plans?
“She is right in there, part of the mix in terms of our top 15 or 16 that we’re considering for Rio,” says Thomaidis. “It is likely she will be a part of our next quad (Tokyo 2020), but that’s not to say that she doesn’t have a shot at Rio. Her time is coming. She is going to get drafted by the WNBA. And she is going to have a future with us. It’s just a matter of when.”
Thomaidis remembers the first time she saw Hamblin in person, in a national team age-group camp setting, and what struck her most was the way the young prospect carried herself.
“You didn’t look at her and just say, ‘Whoa, that’s a big kid,’ because she was so efficient in her movement and she was proportioned so well,” Thomaidis says. “Then you see her IQ and her ability to take feedback. She had a thirst for knowledge and when you gave it to her, she put it into play.”
Hamblin took that thirst, and a natural strength honed from years of work on the ranch, and put them to immediate use with the Beavers.
“Coming in straight from Houston Christian was overwhelming enough,” she said. “But I had strength in the centre position and I was able to hold my own. It helped me realize that, ‘OK, I do belong.’ And defence, for me, was the easiest and most natural instinct I had to foster.”
Yet as her collegiate career is set to end, it’s the offensive side of her game which is just now starting to percolate.
In Oregon State’s win over UCLA in the PAC 12 title game, she scored 23 points and grabbed a career-high 20 rebounds. In the team’s routine first-round NCAA tournament win over Troy, she had 18 points, 18 rebounds and five blocks in just 21 minutes of court time.
“It’s unreal how much better she could still get offensively,” says McNeill. “If you think about it, she is really still so young to the game. And she plays with a joy and enthusiasm that I think she will keep forever.”
HOUSTON, WE HAVE NO PROBLEMS
Ask Hamblin about what her life as a student-athlete has meant to her, and she will speak every bit as passionately about the academic side of her time at Oregon State, including her life as a budding rocket scientist.
“I am in mechanical engineering but my specialty is aerospace engineering,” said Hamblin, an academic All-American with a 3.85 GPA, who wrote her final exam the day before the NCAA tournament began. “My brother (Gavin) is a power engineer at Rogers Arena. He had a love of science, and he introduced me to it.”
Part of a team that has already successfully launched a rocket 20,000 feet skyward, Hamblin knows that the prospects of a professional basketball career, another representing Canada’s national team, and yet another in rocket science will provide some very creative challenges in the very near future.
But really, is all of this any more challenging than jumping in the car with dad Lance and doing 13-hour drives from Houston to Vancouver to take part in provincial development camps, like she did when she first got hooked on the game?
“It’s crazy when I think about the journey,” said Hamblin, who made the weekly trips so many times that she memorized the names of every tunnel from Boston Bar to Yale and even wrote a song about them. “My parents have been so supportive from day one. I wouldn’t be here without all of the things they did.”
And with that, Hamblin gets set to play in the biggest basketball game of her life, one you could be excused for not having seen coming, but one which gives hope to so many who might live a long way off the beaten path.
“She has come from a limited basketball background and made herself into a tremendous player over a period of time by all standards we would consider so short,” said Thomaidis. “It speaks to her intelligence, her ethic, and in coming from a small town, knowing what hard work is all about.”