Basketballin

With John being a college basketball coach and working on getting into another school to to further his basketball career, I feel another family member's basketball abilities are being forgotten.  Another Kleber has had a life full of basketball and thought you might want to take a little stroll down basketball memory lane:

A 5'5" 6th grader ...

Senior year of high school

The official photo

AAU basketball during high school summers

ECI Shooters

Note the broken fingers.

Parkland College 2006-2007

Action shot!

I waited until the last day of practice to do this.

Some of my IWC teammates when we went out the first weekend of school

I had kind of an odd basketball timeline.  Here's the short version.  I played all through high school and wanted to play in college.  Senior year I decided I was burnt out and done.  I went to Illinois State for a semester for Elementary Education.  I decided that I didn't want to be a teacher and therefore didn't want to waste money at ISU if I didn't know what I wanted to do.  I was thinking nursing, but not sure.  So I made plans to come back to Champaign and go to Parkland until I figured out my major.  I moved in with Aimee Houchens, Christy Luth, and Megan Riggs, who were all Parkland softball players.  After I was living there for a little while, the Parkland women's basketball coach called me and offered me a scholarship.  I accepted and played for a season.  I could have stayed another season because of my eligibility, but knew that would set me back a year academically.

I was recruited by Iowa Wesleyan College in Mount Pleasant, IA and was deciding between going there and going to Bradley and major in nursing.  I decided to go to IWC because they would let me play basketball and do nursing.  They did tell me how difficult it would be juggling a demanding major and playing collegiate basketball.  During that first semester, we had 5 am work outs and late practices on top of clinicals and ridiculous amount of homework and tests.  At that point, I decided that my career was more important than basketball, and if I was to screw up on my classes and have to retake anything, it wouldn't be worth it because it would set me back an entire year academically.  It was take me 6 years to get a 4 year degree if I messed this up because I wanted to play basketball.  Right before finals of that first semester at IWC, I quit.  It was a really difficult, but necessary decision.  I was missing games for clinicals and not playing in the other games because I wasn't at the last one and falling asleep in class daily.

So, now you know my basketball story!  Since quitting in 2008, I've had very little desire to play at all.  I've been beyond burnt out.  A few high school and college teammates of mine did play in a rec league in Urbana a few summers ago, and that was really fun.  But other than that, I'm done.  I no longer own basketball shoes and am pretty happy about that.