Hard work rewarded
procession of ballet, tap dancing and piano classes. “I was going to make a dancer or the next Alicia Keys,” she said, laughing. Yet Shatori daily found her way to a basketball court behind the family home. Often, she returned toting worn, deflated balls, which she would then rehabilitate. Andrea, a Beaver County probation officer, still has her daughter’s reclamation projects.
“I wish I was as disciplined as she is,” she said.
Not that Walker-Kimbrough is a one-note character. Teammates widely rate her the funniest player in the program. For example, after a dispiriting loss at Ohio State on Monday, she lightened the mood by cracking jokes about a rip in her mother’s jeans.
Walker-Kimbrough grew into an outstanding three-sport athlete at Hopewell High, where she was an all-state volleyball player and triple jumper in addition to the best basketball prospect in the Pittsburgh area. Despite her work ethic and obvious gifts, however, she did not regard herself as a future Division I star. That’s where Frese, whom she’d first met at a youth basketball camp on Maryland’s campus, came in.
“I knew from the moment I started recruiting her that her ceiling was going to be so high,” the Maryland coach recalled.
She just needed to convince Walker-Kimbrough, who showed up as a skinny bundle of nerves with terrible sleep habits and a tendency to criticize herself for not cracking the starting lineup immediately.
“You wondered, ‘Is she going to survive this?’ ” Frese said. “She just constantly looked in a state of duress.”
So the coach built her player up relentlessly, frequently saying Maryland could not reach its potential if Walker-Kimbrough did not play with maximum swagger.
“She gave me the confidence when many coaches didn’t,” Walker-Kimbrough said. “I wouldn’t want to play for any other coach in the world. I would not be sitting here talking if it were not for that lady.”
She did survive, of course, growing from Maryland’s most potent threat off the bench as a freshman to an All-Big Ten performer as a sophomore. As a junior, the player once known for her speed and knifing drives made a remarkable 54.5 percent of her 3-pointers. On Monday, she became just the fifth Terp to score 2,000 or more career points.
Today will be a time for powerful emotions in the two seniors’ families.
Andrea Kimbrough, who becomes so nervous during her daughter’s games that she usually hides in the bowels of the arena, plans to arrive with 70 friends and family members on a chartered bus from Aliquippa.
She’ll think of the daily breakfasts she shared with Shatori, when they’d talk about the future and how basketball could be a passport to the world.
Mike Jones will remember his eldest daughter grinding away to rebuild the strength in her knee and the doubters who said she’d never play at Maryland, much less earn a spot in the rafters.
“I grew up in Maryland, and I don’t even have words for what it’s going to be like to see that,” he said. “I’m going to think about the long journey. It’s going to all cycle through my mind. It wasn’t easy.”
Jones, a kinesiology major, plans to attend medical school and become a pediatrician once she sets aside her sneakers. Walker-Kimbrough, a sociology major, sees law school as a long-range possibility.
They’ve squeezed just about everything they can out of their Maryland years, and now their friendship will continue into realms beyond.
Frese’s former stars stay in touch, no matter where they land in the basketball world, and Jones and Walker-Kimbrough expect to cross paths for many years as they both pursue professional careers in the WNBA and overseas.
“Even if we wanted to get away from each other,” Walker-Kimbrough said, “I don’t think that would work.”