Louise Forsyth
SCHOOL: Brookswood (Langley) FRESHMAN’S FUTURE: Gonzaga
On the day Louise Forsyth first set foot in the gym at Brookswood Secondary, you could say she was too young and lacking the credentials needed to run with a high school basketball program on the verge of becoming a provincial dynasty.
Just an eighth-grader. Willowy in stature. Was she really ready to run with this pack of Bobcats?
“She could have played on her Grade 8 team and set the world on fire,” says her coach, Neil Brown. “But that would have been like kindergarten for her. Instead of that, it was more she went straight to Grade 3 because her goal was to win senior (varsity) championships and become the player she has become today.” And what a player that is. Through her five straight senior varsity campaigns have come five straight B.C. Triple-A Final Fours, four final appearances and three provincial titles.
And this past season, one in which her team was unable to reach the final for the first time in her high school career, came selection as The Province’s B.C. high school Player of the Year, and a No. 13 ranking among guards for the entire 201617 collegiate freshman class by none other than ESPN.
And next season, with a 3.8 gradepoint average, she heads to Spokane and an NCAA Division 1 basketball career at Gonzaga, the same school attended by previous Head of the Class hoop honourees Robert Sacré, Kelly Olynyk and Emma Wolfram, the latter her teammate-to-be.
“Right now, it’s pure excitement,” says Forsyth, whose parents both played basketball at UBC, and who leaves for Toronto at the start of July to try to make the Canadian junior national team headed to Italy for the Under-19 World Championships.
This fall, when she’s not practising or playing for the Zags, you might find Forsyth — an accomplished harrier — going for a tempo run around the campus to burn off some stress.
And in the classroom, she is headed down the path of health sciences and pre-med, with a dash of environmental studies thrown in as well.
It’s the world she’s wanted from the moment she realized, as an eighth-grader in that Brookswood gym, that no shortcuts could ever be taken.
“The hardest thing I’ve had to overcome is my shyness,” she explains. “I am not, by nature, an outgoing person. But I overcame it. I found my confidence because of my work ethic.”