Family ties drive Zawada to succeed
GIRLS BASKETBALL: McMath ‘playmaker’ honing her game thanks in part to hoops-focused sister and dad
Abby Zawada goes left better than some NASCAR drivers.
The McMath Wildcats shooting guard looks so at home coming down the portside flank, ball bounding close to her outside hip, that you could easily wonder if she’s a natural southpaw. She is not.
“It’s something my dad talks about,” said the 5-foot-8 Zawada, an 11th-grader who, we should point out, is equally adept at driving right, too, unlike the aforementioned car racers.
“When we were younger, he talked about how you see people who can only go the one way and left was always more open. We’ve worked on it a lot. We’ve practised it a lot.”
That “we” includes older sister Jessica, a forward who’s in her rookie year with the University of the Fraser Valley Cascades. She was one of the stars of last year’s McMath team that made it to the triple-A girls basketball provincial final, where they lost to the Brookswood Bobcats. A year ago, Zawada was the second or third player coming off the bench most nights for the runners-up from Richmond.
That “we” also includes their father Andrew, who was a key contributor for a 1988 Richmond Colts team that’s still commonly considered one of the best boys teams ever in this province.
He was a big, bruising forward. He was a menace on the boards. Zawada will take the ball to the basket, but she’s also keen on blasting away from three-point range.
She does have that work ethic for the game in common with him. That’s a large reason why she’s taken a step forward this year.
Anne Gillrie-Carre, one of McMath’s coaches, says she’s more than once had an opposing coach point at Zawada and say, “Who is that?” only to have to explain that she’s a returnee from last year.
The 16-year-old played this summer for the VK Basketball club team under longtime Argyle Pipers coach Anthony Beyrouti and he maintains Zawada “saw the (McMath) team success last year and she wanted to be a great player and she put in a lot of time in the off-season.”
“She’s a playmaker now. She’s arguably the best shooter in the province. You can tell that she works on her game every day,” she said.
Zawada admits she feels like she’s working on her leadership with the Wildcats as well. That’s part of taking on a bigger role.
Besides Jessica, the Wildcats lost Jessica Jones (Simon Fraser) and Bobbi Jo Colburn (Calgary) to university and then saw Lyric Custodio transfer to Brookswood. They’re competing, though. The Wildcats were in the triple-A provincial rankings as recently as last week.
“She’s really developing a good sense of who she is, really starting to come out of her shell,” Gillrie-Carre said of Zawada. “She understands the game and can teach it to the kids who don’t get it quite as quickly.”
Zawada added: “Last year was very different, because we had so many seniors.”
As for what comes after her high school career is done, Zawada admits that her sister is already suggesting that she come to UFV.
She will undoubtedly get various offers, but there’s also an obvious massive family connection with basketball.
“I love watching my girls. I get a ton of satisfaction from watching them get better. I missed the Victoria tournament that Abby was in this December and I think they were the first games that I had missed in three years,” Andrew said.