Kyla Irwin’s life spent on basketball court

It is a picture in her mind that Bethany Irwin remembers fondly.

Her daughter, Kyla, not much more than 2 years old, curled up on a pile of coats in the corner of the State College gymnasium with her brother, Patrick, snacks in hand, watching videos on a television.

A few feet away was the Lady Little Lion basketball team, running through practices day after day.

Sometimes Kyla would leave the pile of coats and turn her attention to the drills, watching the high school girls shoot, pass and run up and down the floor.

Kyla and Patrick, who is 18 months older, could have been somewhere else, but the gym was their home away from home.

“They, seriously, lived over there,” Bethany Irwin said, pointing to the corner of the gym next to a large storage closet where toys were once stashed. “The early days, infants, I had people take them. But at that running-around stage, they wanted to be in here.”

Sometimes Kyla would wander across the hall to the office of former athletic director Ron Pavlechko, park herself in a chair and have a conversation with him. Other times they would join the team in non-shooting drills or head up to the running track around the top of the gym.

“Three or 4 years old, they loved being in here,” Bethany said. “Every aspect of it. Every once in a while they’d take my keys and I’d be like, ‘Where are you going?’ They felt like they owned this place.”

Kyla Irwin has been around the game of basketball her whole life, starting on 6-foot hoops, working her way up against tougher competition, and now on the brink of a few moments not many get to experience.

The 6-foot-2 senior is closing in on scoring 2,000 career points, is one win away from a District 6 title and six wins from a state title. That quest begins at 12:30 p.m. Saturday at Mount Aloysius College in Cresson in the Class AAAA district final against Altoona.

She’s also poised to join the best women’s basketball program in the nation — No. 1 Connecticut.

Kyla has already made history. Early this season, she passed Katie Glusko to become the girls’ program’s all-time scoring leader. She also became the first to secure 1,000 rebounds, and passed Chris Dodds, who holds the boys’ program record, to become the school’s all-time scoring leader.

She is now a mere 18 points away from 2,000, which would make her just the second basketball player, male or female, from Centre County to reach that milestone. Only Dana McDonald, who graduated in 1989 from Penns Valley and went on to play at Duke after scoring 2,269 points, has more than Irwin.

While she was taken by surprise when she hit 1,000 rebounds or passed Dodds, she is fully aware of her career point total. She knew what she had to do before the season even began, and a 12-point game in her second contest of the season had her briefly worried.

“The last couple weeks I knew I was getting so close,” Kyla said. “I want it so bad.”

The past couple weeks have been unlike any other stretch in her high school career. In the past five games, she has scored 186 points — an average of 37.2 per game — and twice tied the team’s single-game scoring record of 43, set in 2002 by Glusko, who went on to play in the NCAA Tournament with West Virginia.

“She can hit so many shots in a row,” junior guard Kayla Hawbaker said after watching a 43-point night for Kyla against Hollidaysburg. “We’ve got to keep getting it to the wing and throw it into the post because she’s hitting so many shots. It’s crazy.”

For the season, she has scored in double figures in every game and scored fewer than 20 just five times. She is averaging 26.6 points and 11.9 rebounds per game, posting a double-double in all but six games, and is also netting 21.1 points and 12.3 rebounds for her career. She is also collecting 2.3 blocks, 2.5 steals and 2.9 assists per outing this season.

She’s pretty accurate, too.

She’s hitting 51.5 percent of her field goals this season, 58.8 percent of her 2-pointers and an incredibly efficient 70.2 percent from the field during this hot stretch over the final five games. She’s also shooting 84 percent from the foul line.

With all those gaudy numbers, she’s also drawing the best defense an opponent can offer, and it’s helping open up the court for her teammates.

“Whenever (opponents) triple- and double-team her, obviously someone else is going to be open,” Hawbaker said. “We have to rely on other teammates to put their shots in.”

A major reason for the big numbers, along with being 6-2, is her knowledge and skill in the post. She has moves that are hard to find in high school.

“She’s such a student of the game,” Bethany said. “I tell her, ‘Would you just do a simple drop step?’ (Husband, father and assistant coach) Rob is always yelling, ‘plain vanilla, plain vanilla!’ You don’t have to do all that other (stuff). UConn’s not that razzle-dazzle. It’s plain vanilla, it’s a drop step, it’s an up-and-under. The last six, eight games she just went back to basics and wasn’t trying to do too much. She was just doing the right thing.”

After those early days running around the gym, Kyla began her first ventures into the game in kindergarten at Our Lady of Victory, shooting at 6-foot rims. Bethany didn’t want Kyla shooting at 10-foot rims because it would have produced bad habits and altered her shooting form — the good form was more important, Bethany felt, than making shots.

As the years went by, Bethany said she never pushed Kyla or Patrick, who is a quarterback on the Stony Brook University football team, into their sports. It was up to them how much they played and how hard they wanted to work.

By the fourth grade she was already dreaming of playing at UConn, with a team poster hanging on her bedroom wall.

She was getting noticed by her freshman year. Playing in the Mid Penn Conference, a few girls from other teams who also played for the Central PA Elite AAU program told their coach to try to recruit Kyla. Tina Thomas, whose daughter, Alyssa, played at Maryland and is now in the WNBA, approached Bethany later that season down in Harrisburg.

Not long after, the freshman was on the court with a number of others who would become Division I recruits and was battling in the paint against girls as big or bigger who were juniors or seniors. Bethany can remember playing against a team from Kentucky, with a post player so big there were times she couldn’t even see her daughter, but Kyla still prevailed.

For being such a student of the game, being surrounded by it so much of her life, Kyla wasn’t that immersed in it outside of the State College universe. She didn’t have a favorite NBA or WNBA player, and other than tournament games in March, she often skipped watching games on TV to hang out with friends.

That changed when it was time to research the programs that were sending recruiting letters.

Bethany and Rob also have done their share of snaring rebounds over the years to help their children work on their shots, and not long ago Bethany started a 10,000-made shot club for her team. Starting in April and ending at the beginning of the season the next fall, the girls had to make 10,000 shots — an average of 54 per day — to earn a T-shirt.

Before the start of this season, Kyla was not taking very long to reach the mark, making 500 shots in less than an hour, “and they’re not layups,” Bethany said.

After hearing from a number of other schools, she caught the UConn coaches’ eyes the summer after her sophomore season.

“(She has) genuine passion for the game, and excitement for other people’s success as much as herself if not more,” said Huskies assistant coach Marisa Moseley, who was on hand for the 43-point night against Hollidaysburg and figures she has seen Irwin play about 10 times. “She competes on every single play, plays both sides of the ball, runs the floor harder than most kids in college do.”

It’s one thing to dream of playing college basketball, another to play for a top-25 team, but practically a fantasy to want to be at UConn.

It is hard to find another college athletic program — not just women’s basketball — that has been as successful as the Huskies’ women’s basketball team over the past quarter-century. They have been to the Final Four 16 times and won 10 titles.

Kyla made her official visit to the campus in the fall of 2014 and gave a verbal commitment by late October of that year. When basketball season began a little more than a month later, she noticed she was getting played a lot tougher.

She also heard the rumors that she wasn’t getting a scholarship to play there, and that she wouldn’t be getting off the bench.

“If they think I’m going to be a walk-on, that’s totally fine,” said Kyla, who earned all-state honors in both basketball and volleyball as a junior. “It’s not going to bother me. (This) has definitely put a target on my back, but it’s only made me better. I’ve had to widen my variety of shots and learn how to get around three people instead of two. They’re making me better, so I just have to say ‘Thank you’ for putting more people on me.”

Head coach Geno Auriemma noted Kyla’s work ethic when he talked about her last fall on signing day, and getting the daughter of a coach, who has practically studied the game since she began to walk, is a rare characteristic. Moseley said only a handful of coaches’ daughters have come through Storrs.

“There’s a certain level of, you’re around the game, you’ve been in the gym since you were a kid, you kind of understand the ins and outs,” Moseley said. “You’re typically a consummate team player because you understand what goes into it.”

So, will she contribute?

“That’s the loaded question,” Moseley said. “She’s going to have the opportunity like any other kid. Coach (Auriemma) is very much equal opportunity, so if she comes in and earns playing time, then that’s what she’ll get.”

Kyla heads to campus Memorial Day weekend, starting the summer session May 31. She will miss a few days of classes, Senior Week and a few other events, but will be back for graduation. She’s not sure what she will study, maybe speech therapy or maybe get into coaching.

The transition will be tough.

“It’s definitely going to be challenging,” Kyla said. “But I’ve never been one not to challenge myself. I want to be the best I can be, always learn something. I think just taking that next step, take in as much as I can (and) be a sponge. Learn from the greatest.”

First, there are still things to accomplish in her maroon and white uniform.

A year ago, Altoona got the best of State College in the district finals with a late-game basket, and Kyla missed a potential game-winning 3-pointer at the buzzer.

In some ways, the Lady Little Lions have overachieved at 19-3, with two of the losses to two-time defending state champion Cumberland Valley.

“(Mom) calls us the ‘Misfits,’ ” Kyla said. “I’m the only one that plays AAU. ... The fact that we’re beating these teams that play year-round is, like, really awesome. That just shows how much team chemistry means, and how hard we work.”

While Kyla may be the only one who plays on a big-time summer travel team, she also is the leader the rest follow, inspiring them all.

“In practice she always pushes all of us,” Hawbaker said. “She’s always a leader out there, and her being a leader makes me want to be a leader, and make me want to help the team out and push us the best we can.”

The Lady Little Lion program has been ingrained in the Irwin family for decades, since before Kyla was even born. Many players, including Glusko, were even baby sitters for Kyla and Patrick. This is Bethany’s 23rd season as head coach, and while there are a number of district titles to her credit, and a long list of women who went on to college programs, she hasn’t gotten a team past the state semifinals and she never before had a senior leader who was destined for UConn.

And no, despite the repeated questions and assumptions, she honestly has not made up her mind if she will continue coaching after this season. She wants to see her daughter play in college, but it’s tough to step away from a program that has been such a rich part of their lives.

“I’ve got to get through this season,” Bethany said. “Whenever anybody asks me that, well, it is what it is. It’s not about me, it’s about the girls and let’s go win a state title. That’s the goal every year.”

With the roll she’s been on lately, and a determination that is hard to find, Kyla Irwin also has her eyes on that goal.

“It’s just that time of year where you get that sense of urgency,” she said. “I really don’t want the season to end. I’m having so much fun with these girls. They are my absolute best friends. I’m going to push myself until we get the win — whatever it takes — and I know these girls are going to do the exact same thing.”

This story was originally published February 26, 2016 at 6:46 PM with the headline "Kyla Irwin’s life spent on basketball court."