A different path
Lee didn’t want to play basketball. Now she has Mount St. Mary’s in its first tourney since 1995.
Rebecca Lee’s roots in basketball were less destiny and more serendipity.
A broken ankle suffered while roller skating for the first time at the age of 12 derailed a potential soccer career for Lee, who had played the sport since she was 4 years old. But parents Kyle and Victoria Lee refused to allow their daughter to sit around.
So one day, Rebecca Lee and her father left the family’s home in Severn, and Kyle Lee dropped off his daughter at an area gym where the Maryland Youth Basketball Association was running practices.
“I was kind of irritated because they really didn’t tell me anything, and I was around all of these girls who had been playing for a while, and I had no coordination,”
Rebecca Lee recalled. “I was like, ‘This is not going to work out.’ But to [my parents], you had to play a sport. You couldn’t do nothing. So I was like, ‘I better get used to it.’ ”
That concession proved fateful for Lee, who starred at Old Mill and is doing the same at Mount St. Mary’s. The 6-foot-2 senior center was named the Northeast Conference tournament’s Most Valuable Player after amassing 37 points and 24 rebounds, including 17 on the offensive glass, in two games to power the Mountaineers to their first tournament championship since 1995.
Awarded the No. 15 seed in the NCAA tournament, Mount St. Mary’s (17-6) will clash with No. 2 seed Maryland (24-2), which swept the Big Ten regular-season and tournament crowns, in a firstround game Monday at 4 p.m. at the Alamodome in San Antonio. Coach Maria Marchesano has not been shy about stating her belief that the team would not have captured its first conference regular-season title since 2001 or gotten an opportunity for its first NCAA tournament win if not for Lee.
“We would not have clinched for sure without her,” Marchesano said. “She carried us in a couple of those games, and we probably wouldn’t have won the championship. We just would have been a very different team. Without her in there, we would have had to do a lot of different things, and it’s hard to imagine designing a scheme for those teams we played without her presence.”
Lee’s development might never have been if not for her parents’ prescient decision to drop her off at that gym almost 10 years ago. Even Lee, who turns 22 on April 1, said she did not foresee a long stay in basketball.
“I went in thinking, ‘I’m going to do one season, and then I’m going to be done, and I’m going to do something else,’ ” she said. “But once the season ended, it was kind of fun because it was competition-oriented. So I thought, ‘Let me do another season,’ and here we are.”
At the age of 12, Lee was already 5-9. She grew another three inches by the time she was a freshman at Old Mill and two more inches two years later. Her size and prowess on the boards drew attention from schools like Furman and UMBC.
But their interest faded after Lee tore the ACL and meniscus in her left knee as a junior during a game for the Patriots when she jumped for a defensive rebound and landed awkwardly to avoid falling on an opponent. She said she rehabilitated her knee for about a year and committed to the Mountaineers, who continued to pursue Lee.
But Lee said she underestimated the toll the injury took on her body.
“Physically, I felt I was out of shape,” she said. “I couldn’t move as fast. My moves were slow. It really made me doubt myself. It’s really hard to come back from injuries, and I was thinking to myself, ‘Man, do I really want to do this?’ But the scholarship from Mount St. Mary’s really motivated me to get back out there and be better than I have been.”
Lee, who also tore the meniscus in her right knee as an eighth grader, said she no longer has cartilage in her knees. Because of that, the pain in her knees can be excruciating.
To alleviate the discomfort, Lee undergoes an elaborate treatment plan to get ready for practices and games. She warms her knees with a heating pad, uses electrical stimulation, massages topical analgesic cream and then stretches her knees and legs. The entire process takes a minimum of an hour and doesn’t include the 10-minute ice bath after each practice and game.
Lee said that preparing her knees for the wear and tear can be exhausting.
“I would think, ‘There are other things you can do,’ ” she said. “But when I look at all that’s around me, this is a once-in-a-million thing, this is a once-in-a-lifetime experience, and not everybody gets to do this. So if you’re here and you’re able to do this, why wouldn’t you just do it?”
Marchesano said although she might hold Lee out of sprints during practice, Lee insists on practicing every day.
“If you tell her you’re taking her out, she doesn’t like that. She’s going to practice,” Marchesano said. “She doesn’t really argue. She just kind of waves her hand at me and says it’s fine, and she’ll go about her business. She’s just Becks. She’s low maintenance.”
The health of her knees has limited Lee’s playing time through the years and affected her on-court numbers. Teammates like redshirt senior shooting guard Kendall Bresee, junior point guard Michaela Harrison and redshirt sophomore shooting guard Aryna Taylor have received more individual acclaim than Lee has.
But this winter, Lee has started every game and has recently emerged as perhaps the team’s most productive player. In her last eight starts, she has registered four double doubles, including performances of 19 points and 13 rebounds in a 77-62 win against Fairleigh Dickinson in the Northeast Conference tournament semifinal on March 10 and 18 points and 11 rebounds in a 70-38 rout thumping of Wagner in the championship final last Sunday.
Bresee, the league’s Player and Defensive Player of the Year, said Lee provides a level of comfort among her teammates when she is on the floor.
“She is a force to be reckoned with,” Bresee said. “When the ball goes in there, I know she’s going to make it, and if she doesn’t, I know she’s going to get the rebound and put it right back up. She’s so amazing. … And she stays very composed, which is really nice. She keeps us levelheaded. So it’s very nice to have her there.”
Lee is still grappling with her recent stardom. Marchesano said 10 minutes after Sunday’s postgame ceremony in which Lee was recognized as the conference tournament’s MVP, she asked if she could hurry home. Lee said that she had to leave early to finish a paper on conflicts between church and state for a History of the High Middle Ages course.
Lee acknowledged that she is gratified for her individual success in her senior year.
“It feels really good because I have more to do,” she said. “It would be disappointing if I got somewhere and said to myself, ‘Wow, this is the best that I can be. There’s nothing more that I can give.’ But now I can go to practice and change every day and get better. If you just push yourself a little bit more, there’s a lot you can do.”
The tournament’s MVP award was Lee’s first postseason honor by the conference. While emphasizing that Lee is excited for her teammates’ success, Marchesano said she thinks the MVP award did serve to validate Lee’s persistence.
“I think that was a little bit of people finally recognizing that she is valuable to this team,” she said. “We tell her that all the time, but for everyone else to be able to see that and to make her parents proud and her family and friends proud, I think that was a cool moment for her.”
Lee has another year of eligibility because the coronavirus pandemic, but she will not remain with the Mountaineers. Lee, who will graduate in May with a bachelor’s in economics, has already applied to enroll at another university — she declined to disclose which one — to pursue a master’s, and she might play her final season at her new school.
For now, Lee said her top priority is helping her teammates and coaches enjoy their time at the NCAA tournament — an experience that could be even more satisfying with a Cinderella-like run in the postseason.
“It’s a really great feeling because I’ve been working for this with my team for four years,” she said. “I know we don’t have all of the same people from my freshman year, but all the pieces that have come in have really propelled us to this moment. We got close our sophomore year, and we felt like we were going to win our junior year, and then it got cut short. So to end on a really high note is really satisfying.”