Former model McPhee now a model shooter
top offensive threat for Stanford, which faces South Carolina at 4:30 p.m. Friday in the Final Four in Dallas. Mighty Connecticut meets Mississippi State in the other semifinal.
McPhee was a three-time state player of the year in Washington, leading Mount Rainier to two state semifinals and one final. In her first varsity game as a freshman, she had 34 points and 19 rebounds. In her last three years of high school, she averaged 22.7, 27.0 and 27.1 points, respectively.
It took her a while, but she seems to be becoming a scoring machine on the college level, too. In four games in the Big Dance, she is averaging a team-high 19 points, raising her season average to 13.4.
That’s more than double her average from last season, when she was mainly a reserve. What changed? “In the fall, quite honestly, we needed Brit out there,” head coach Tara VanDerveer said. “Karlie (Samuelson) got hurt. Brit got a lot of opportunities. I think that’s been the big difference. This team moves the ball. It’s coming to her more.”
When the ball goes to McPhee, she knows what to do with it. More than any other Cardinal player, she looks to score at every opportunity. She knows how to drive through traffic, how to finish, how to use the backboard, how to draw contact, how to convert off-balance shots.
She’s also extremely competitive.
“She has such a gentle demeanor off the court, but she’ll knock your teeth in,” said her former AAU coach, Steve Kleef of the Northwest Blazers Orange.
McPhee and her fraternal twin, Jordan, a junior point guard for Seattle Pacific, and older brother Bryce, who played at Western Washington, were probably born to play hoops. Their mother, Alice, played at Eastern Washington and later in Australia. Their father, Bryce, was a star at Gonzaga, where he teamed with John Stockton. Uncle Jim is Gonzaga’s second all-time leading career scorer.
“The McPhee family is famous up here in Spokane,” Kleef said.
Brittany traveled 275 miles to that city to practice with Kleef ’s team once a week.
“She’s very driven,” he said. “The hardest worker I’ve ever coached. Other kids would go home after practice. She’d shoot for a couple of hours.”
She and Jordan started playing basketball when they were in kindergarten. They were home-schooled by their mother from fourth grade to eighth. They’d often play tennis early in the morning, then do schoolwork till noon. Before returning to their studies, they would do basketball drills at lunchtime in the gym next door to their home in the Seattle suburb of Normandy Park.
The drills were called “100 trips.” Each one would make 100 trips down the court, dribbling right and left. They would make five crossovers to the right, then left, going behind the back, then through the legs. The trips would end with right-handed layups, left-handed layups, reverse layups, pull-ups, any kind of a shot they would do in a game. Then came free throws.
“I probably should have had them shoot more threes,” Alice said, “but I was old school.” She always wanted to keep the drills fun. “My main fear was burnout.”
As she had with her older boys, she sometimes promised any of them $100 if they could make 10 free throws in a row. She gave them only three chances at a time, trying to put as much pressure on them as possible. Only Brittany ever captured the dough.
She says playing against her taller brothers and one-on-one against Jordan was usually a struggle. “She’s amazing at defense, and that helped me,” she said of her sister.
After watching Sue Bird hit off-balance shots for the WNBA Seattle Storm on TV, “I’d go outside and practice crazy layups,” she said.
The home-schooling ended when they started high school. “They’d had enough of me,” Alice said. But the girls would tell her, “They waste a lot of time in high school.”
Brittany doesn’t waste much time at Stanford. “She’s in the gym early and she stays late,” VanDerveer said. “She’s improved her defense and her passing. She’s really improved her basketball IQ. She studies the game.”
That’s not all she studies. According to Stanford, she has the highest G.P.A. of any player in the Final Four.
She’s gone from being a great high school player to now becoming a great college player through her hard work and her coachability,” VanDerveer said.
In the win over top-seeded Notre Dame in the Lexington Regional final, she poured in 27 points. Three-pointers haven’t been her strength this year, but she was 5-for-9 in that game.
“In the tournament, she’s gained a lot of confidence,” VanDerveer said. “She’s playing with supreme confidence right now.”