The Register Citizen (Torrington, CT)
Trip to Oregon a homecoming for Westbrook
SALEM, Ore. — UConn senior Evina Westbrook has always felt different.
She grew up the only girl in a house with three brothers.
She played basketball on boy’s teams until high school. She wasn’t into the more traditional girly things and only went to her high school senior prom because her mom made her.
She had one passion and it was basketball.
Yet even while pursuing the sport through all it highs, Westbrook felt like an outsider.
It wasn’t just the looks she got on the court for being the only girl during a game or for choosing to play on a California AAU team instead of one in Oregon. It was all the looks, and sometimes heckling, she got growing up as a 6-foot Black girl in Salem, Ore., that made her stand out.
Unlike more diverse Portland to the North, Salem had a Black and African American population of 1.35 percent during Evina’s senior year in high school.
“I didn’t feel like anyone really understood me,” Evina said last week. “I was looked at as different. I don’t know if it was different in a bad way, it was just, ‘Evina’s different. She’s not like the other girls. She doesn’t want to put makeup on. She doesn’t want to go to these dances.’ All my friends were talking to boys at the time. I just felt like everyone else had something else like they just didn’t have that one thing. For me, basketball was that one thing.”
Evina left Oregon in 2017 and began her collegiate career at Tennessee. Since then, she’s grown through her transfer to UConn, through her knee injury, and through the process of losing and regaining her confidence.
Now, as a 23-year-old in her final college season, Evina returns to the state that made her feel so different to begin with when the No. 10-ranked Huskies face Oregon at 5 p.m. ET Monday in Eugene.
She returns to her home state to play in front of a home crowd for the first time since high school, ready to show those who supported her, who celebrated the differences that made her special, they were right.
“I’m more excited, not to prove people wrong or to prove it to all the hecklers, but just for all the people who have supported me throughout everything; throughout middle school, high school and now being in college playing for one of the bests, if not the best, historically known women’s basketball programs ever,” Evina said.
A BASKETBALL LIFE
Evina grew up in the gym. The sound of a basketball being dribbled and the screech of sneakers running up and down the hardwood once put her to sleep as an infant.
Her dad, James Westbrook, coached at the local gym called The Hoop, where her older brother, LJ Westbrook, also played. It didn’t take long for Evina to fall in love with the sport. She saw the passion her dad coached with and the hard work LJ practiced with, and wanted to experience it herself.
Evina learned how to be aggressive from pick-up games against her brothers at home and at the gym. Being competitive came naturally as the Westbrook family made everything a competition, from Guitar Hero battles to two-hour UNO games and racing separate cars home from the gym.
Her parents first started Evina on a local Boys and Girls Club girls team only to soon realize she didn’t quite fit in and needed something a little more challenging.
“She’d steal the ball from all the girls. The referee would blow the whistle, give the ball back to those kids and she was so mad at me because I put her on that team,” James laughs as he recently recalled the story at a local gym in Salem. “We saw early that her skill level was above normal.”
Evina found her solution on a local boys AAU team. She was the only girl, yet never let that become a factor. She embraced her boy teammates as brothers, as best friends, and played with them until high school. If any opponent gave her a hard time, she knew her teammates would back her up.
“My coach at the time, he was always adamant on, ‘You’re not a girl. You’re a basketball player,’ ” Evina said. “If someone was trying to ice on me or say something mean, ‘You’re just a girl out here,’ they would hear it and be like, ‘Oh OK. He’s done for the game.’ They 100 percent had my back.”
Outside of playing for South Salem High School’s girls varsity team, Evina’s first all-girls team experience was playing for Cal Stars in Orinda, California. The nine-hour drive or short flight every weekend was worth it as she helped lead the team to a national championship in 2015.
Evina’s life was all basketball. When she’d get out of school in the afternoon, she’d rush to the gym and wouldn’t leave until it closed after 9 p.m. On weekends she was either working at the gym or playing in local games. She got invited to elite high school tournaments and even junior U.S. national team tryouts.
Her name became nationally known and college coaches began reaching out when she was in eighth grade.
She was named a twotime Gatorade Oregon Girls Player of the Year, a McDonald’s All-American, a Naismith All-American and the 2017 USA Today National Player of the Year. She played in the 2017 Jordan Brand Classic, won gold with Team USA at the 2016 FIBA Americas U18 Championship, led South Salem to back-toback state titles and was the No. 2 overall ranked recruit in the Class of 2017 … yet it all only made her feel more alone.
When Evina looked around she didn’t see anyone else like her. She was one of two Black girls on her high school team and there were little to no local women’s basketball figures. No one else was as deep into a single passion like she was.
“I played basketball and that’s all that I knew,” Evina said. “I made sure I had to work out every day. There was nothing else on my mind. … I was just kinda known for being ‘Evina the basketball player,’ so I was Evina the basketball player.”
In middle school, she’d spend recess and lunch in the gym playing basketball, but in high school she once felt so alone that she ate in her car. Her teammates were her friends but even then she was still getting used to playing with all girls. Eva Westbrook, Evina’s mom, remembers Evina once being insulted on the bench during a game when her teammates would talk about boys and braid each other’s hair. Not once did she ever think about doing that on her boy’s teams.
“I think people didn’t get her,” Eva said. “I think there’s nobody like her here.”
When her senior year came, Evina was ready to leave Oregon. Her high school games were often spoiled with hecklers calling her a traitor for not playing on an Oregon AAU team.
She chose to play at Tennessee because it was a team full of girls just like her. Girls who ate, slept and breathed basketball. Girls who spent all their free time in the gym and physically looked just like her: tall, Black and strong.
“I felt normal,” Evina said. “I just felt like I was surrounded by people who were just like me. Who looked just like me. Wanted just to play basketball just like me. They had the same passion and intensity that I had coming out of high school. I just felt like a sense of ‘Oh my gosh, this is what I’ve been looking for.’ I didn’t feel alone anymore.”
NEXT LEVEL
Westbrook was an SEC All-Freshman Team selection in 2017-18. She averaged 14.9 points as a sophomore, but decided to transfer after the season.
After Tennessee was eliminated from the NCAA Tournament in 2019, Westbrook alluded to issues within the program: “I just think off-the-court stuff, steps need to be taken with our staff and just overall off the court with this team,” she told reporters.
Tennessee fired Holly Warlick and Kellie Harper was hired, but Westbrook still left.
In May 2019, she announced she was transferring to UConn. However, after the NCAA denied her appeal to immediately be eligible to play, she was met again with feelings of isolation.
She had two knee surgeries in the first half of the season that year to fix an injury she suffered her freshman year in Knoxville. Watching from the sideline while trying to focus on her own recovery was challenging. She wanted to be out on the court, helping her new teammates. In high school, when she felt upset, she could sneak away to an open gym. But now on crutches and working her way through rehab, that wasn’t an option.
“She was surrounded by people who support her and love her that she didn’t get in high school with her peers that she was getting at UConn, but yet she couldn’t do she wanted to do,” Eva said.
Now she was different because she was the new kid who couldn’t play. She got scared. She worried she’d never be the same player again.
“I’m getting healthy but I don’t feel like I’m a good enough player,” Evina remembers feeling. “I’m doubting myself basketball-wise. Am I even supposed to be playing basketball anymore? Do I just stop? I feel like at a point, I was like, ‘Basketball isn’t for me.’ ”
She kept these feelings to herself and put her head down into focusing on recovery. She earned a spot in the starting lineup in her first full season as a Husky (2020-21), starting all 30 games and averaging 9.4 points, 5.3 rebounds and 30.7 minutes.
Instead of being frustrated she wasn’t where she wanted to be skillwise, she focused on being a good teammate. She offered rides, cooked dinners, helped with school and even surprised her teammates with Valentine’s Day gifts.
It was when her teammates first jokingly called her ‘Mom’ because of how she took care of them that she realized they had confidence in her. And if they believed in her, so could she.
“These are my freshmen who are calling me ‘Mom,’ like these young guys, not knowing how I feel on the inside like, ‘Oh my gosh, I’m a (bad) player.’ And they’re like, ‘No, you’re one of the best role models, players that we’ve ever seen,’” Evina said. “(It gave) me that confidence that little did they know that I needed.”
Evina never had an upperclassman take care of her when she was starting her collegiate career and she loved being able to be that person for the younger Huskies. While some may have thought being ‘team mom’ was something small, to her it meant so much more.
“It was really one of the biggest signs of respect for me to be called mom,” she said. “Because whenever I think of my mom, I think of someone who I can depend on 24/7, someone who’s gonna figure it out, someone who I know is going to love me endlessly whether I mess up, whether I get it right. … At first, I was like, ‘Y’all trying to be funny.’ Then I realized, ‘Y’all truly trust me. Y’all truly love me.’”
Her bond with her UConn teammates was one of the reasons she decided to do a fifth year in college and put off the WNBA Draft until 2022, despite being eligible last season.
Now, in January 2022, that draft is three months away.
For the time being she’s not focused on any mock drafts or scouting reports. Her focus is on the present, helping her team continue to morph into a new identity without star sophomore Paige Bueckers.
Evina returns home to Oregon on Monday no longer alone with her differences but now surrounded by those just like her. Those ready to celebrate how far the girl from South Salem has come.
“It’s really great for her because I don’t feel like she felt that support growing up here in high school,” Eva said. “She’s not trying to prove anybody wrong. She told me, ‘I’m just trying to prove the people that believed in me right.’ And I think that says it perfectly. There’s no vendetta. She just wants to win and she’s just excited to come home. Nothing else to it.”