Aaliyah Chavez's unlikely route to top girls basketball prospect

AALIYAH CHAVEZ IS always one of the first players on the floor.

You can't miss her at the Alamodome in San Antonio on March 1, before her Monterey Lady Plainsmen face the Liberty Hill Lady Panthers for a Texas state championship, her brown curls bouncing in rhythm with the basketball as she drives to the hoop in bright pink sneakers. The entire crowd seems to focus on the No. 1 girls high school basketball prospect in the nation, going through her shooting drills before joining her team for warmups.

Minutes before the game, she shares a special handshake with her father, Sonny, one they made up years ago, before she became a McDonald's All American, or the Naismith Prep Player of the Year, or Gatorade Player of the Year (again). Before she broke a host of school records, including most points in a game (57) and career 3-pointers (639).

At the jump, Monterey's Ari Johnson tips the ball to Chavez, who drives to the basket but misses a floater. The failed attempt is met by a mix of cheers and jeers from the crowd. Chavez is used to it. It comes with the territory when you're 18 and grabbing headlines about seven-figure NIL deals, and people are calling you the next Caitlin Clark. But it doesn't affect her approach.

"Everyone's the same to me now," says Chavez, a 5-foot-11 point guard. "You could be the No. 1-ranked player, you could be 100, I'll still play you the same. So, like, that has no pressure."

Chavez can make shots from anywhere on the floor, which leads most teams to keep her in double coverage. On most days, she handles the pressure with ease. On great days, she'll rain 3-pointers and rack up 50-plus points in a game, which she has done nine times in her high school career.

She's drawn interest from more than 100 schools, and according to her father she's narrowed the field to a top six of Texas Tech, Texas, LSU, Oklahoma, South Carolina and UCLA. She will announce her decision Tuesday during the 2 p.m. ET "SportsCenter."

"The things that make her really good are her focus, her determination, her competitiveness, her preparation. Her shotmaking is elite," says ESPN recruiting analyst Shane Laflin. "Her ability to be bigger than the moment and not let the moment shrink her is hard. Some people crumble under that stuff."

Spend any time around Chavez and it becomes clear: She was not built to crumble.

GROWING UP IN Lubbock, Texas, Chavez was a lot of things to her parents Sonny and Andrea. She was smart. Sometimes shy but always bubbly. She was family oriented, happy, energetic.

Everything but athletic.

"She couldn't ride a bike, couldn't skateboard," Sonny says. "She didn't have an athletic bone in her body."

She enjoyed watching television and movies or hanging out with her family. But sports were something she wouldn't volunteer to play on her own. So it was a surprise when 8-year-old Chavez approached her parents with a very specific request: She wanted to attend a basketball camp.

She'd seen other kids playing basketball at the park, working on skills like dribbling and layups and making friends along the way. She didn't want to be the kid sitting around doing nothing.

Sonny was stunned by his daughter's request. If she really wanted to play basketball, he decided, he would be her trainer. And he wouldn't make it easy.

Sonny, who played football in high school, threw together a conditioning plan and some drills. They spent hours together with a hoop in their driveway and later in a church auditorium.

"Early on, I would take a 3-pound medicine ball, just to teach her how to catch," says Sonny, who owned an auto body shop at the time. "She was kind of clumsy. She couldn't catch the ball." But she showed up for all of the workouts -- the wall touches, ball jumps, pushups or wall sits -- and her talent quickly became apparent.

A month after she started training, Aaliyah joined a team in the Frenship Youth Basketball League. In her first game, Aaliyah, a ball of energy, couldn't be contained. She blocked shots, handed out assists and finished with 26 points. Her skills, Sonny says, were improving almost daily -- so much so that she needed to find a new team to hone them. But they couldn't find a travel team for 8-year-olds.

"I ended up trying out for an older team and they told me I wasn't good enough," Chavez says. "So it kind of motivated me. I was like, 'Uh-uh. I'm gonna show 'em.' I just started working and was like, 'Oh yeah. This is the sport for me.'"

Another coach agreed to let Aaliyah, a fourth grader, work out with his team of sixth graders, and when he saw her skills, he was ready to hand her a jersey.

Chavez's playing time was limited to 30 seconds here or a minute there, but she studied her teammates and the best players at tournaments and set out to match their work. Back in the gym with her dad, she no longer needed his encouragement to push herself. She was doing it on her own. Soon, a minute of playing time turned into six. Six minutes turned into nine.

"It took a lot out of me because a long time ago I used to just break down and was like, 'I'm done with basketball,'" Chavez says with a laugh. "It was hard because I was just like, I can't. I'm having bad games. But I think once I started getting older and learning that it's just a game, win or lose, you're out here having fun. You're out here just to compete. So, next game, win or lose, I'm gonna be out there. I don't care who's in front of me. I'm gonna play the exact same way I played.

"I loved it."

Sonny put together a fifth grade team with the same organization for Aaliyah to get more playing time while she continued with the older team.

"I wanted her to understand that yeah, you're good, but you can always get better," Sonny says. Her mental strength and work ethic became her calling card.

"She has an elite mind, so that's where she separates herself from most competitors," says Earl Allen, who coached Chavez on Houston's CyFair Elite AAU team, which won the Nike Elite Youth Basketball League National Championship in August. Allen admires how easy it is for Chavez to read the game, picking up offenses in a matter of minutes, seeing the court and different angles, and paying attention to details others may miss completely.

"I've told every college coach that I talk to about Aaliyah Chavez: 'You may have more talented players at your school right now, but there is not gonna be a kid at your school that is going to outwork her,'" he says.

The fierce, focused competitor may seem at odds with the soft-spoken teenager Allen sees off the court -- "She don't talk about basketball; she talks about other things. She loves to have fun." -- but he counters with a story about a game last May, when an opponent stepped on Chavez's foot. Coaches heard Chavez scream as she went to the bench. Was she hurt? Would she be OK?

"No, I'm not hurt," Chavez told Allen. "I screamed because she pissed me off. And I need to get back in the game and show her she pissed me off."

Chavez entered the game after a short break and hit four consecutive 3-pointers.

WALKING INTO THE Lab Certified, the gym Sonny opened a few years ago, is like walking into a personal museum. There are T-shirts, sweatshirts and other merchandise ready for purchase to the left. To the right, Chavez's awards and accomplishments line the walls. The accolades that aren't on the walls are settled in glass cases.

A short walk down a narrow hall opens into the training facility, adorned with Fathead stickers of Kobe Bryant, Allen Iverson and Steph Curry. But straight ahead, on the back wall, is the showstopper: a mural with images of Chavez at different stages in her career. When asked how it feels to see the larger-than-life versions of herself on the wall, Chavez offers a shy smile and shrug. Just like all of the other aspects of her life -- the autographs, the hugs, the photos, the media -- she's used to it now.

A frenzy of media coverage has surrounded Chavez for some time, as the recruiting world awaits her college choice.

At one point, LSU seemed to be a top contender with Texas, but according to a report by On3, LSU removed itself after Chavez's camp asked for $1 million in NIL money. Sonny denies that, stating that LSU may have assumed they would ask for that sum because Texas Tech softball player NiJaree Canady received a one-year deal with more than $1 million. He insists all NIL discussions about Aaliyah have been started by the interested programs, not by him. An LSU media representative said the university was unable to comment on the status of an unsigned prospective student-athlete.

While Chavez is used to the attention, it provides fodder for opposing fans.

In February, during Monterey's last district game against Palo Duro High School in Amarillo, chants of "Overrated!" rang out from the crowd after Chavez missed a shot. She finished with 33 points in an 84-39 victory and met with a long line of fans -- including many of the dissenters -- after the game.

Chavez says she has learned to block out most distractions, a skill that eludes her mother, Andrea, who still struggles to remain composed when she reads unsavory comments strangers make about her daughter. ("Everybody will tell me to stay off of social media," Andrea says.) But there is one area of negativity that irks Aaliyah.

Chavez is Mexican American and proud of her culture. Coming from West Texas, where the Hispanic population jumped from 45.8 percent to 53.1 percent from 2012 to 2022, Chavez's early fame exposes her to children who excitedly see themselves in her. She says that representation matters just as much to her as her accomplishments on the court. But no matter what part of the state or country she travels to, she says she frequently hears older men mutter that she's "good for a Hispanic girl."

"At first, I took it as a compliment," Chavez says, "but as I got older I'm like, for a Mexican? I don't want to be good for a Mexican. I want to be good all around. That I'm the best. That I'm changing women's basketball."

Sonny encourages her to focus on her game.

"I love the smoke," he says. "I used to chirp back and they didn't like that. One thing I've told Aaliyah, especially playing basketball, is that you're going to get your licks and they're going to get theirs, but at the end of the day, it's not that serious. We're playing basketball. There's no reason to be scared of nobody."

It's a message he preaches at The Lab Certified. Now with a client roster of about 30 kids -- some whose parents drive hours for sessions -- training is Sonny's full-time job and certainly a family effort. After a training session last spring, Aaliyah and her siblings, Bel'A, 12, and Kingston, 16, jumped in to help the next group of kids with warmups and stretching.

Sonny thinks about what family time looked like when Aaliyah was younger. The countless practice hours upended a family schedule set and maintained by Andrea. Before, the family would always sit together to eat by 7:30 p.m. But as Aaliyah's basketball career took off, the table was often empty at dinnertime. So, Andrea would load the slow cooker into the car and head to the gym, determined the family would still eat together. Basketball became family, with Sonny as the vocal patriarch.

Monterey coach Jill Rankin Schneider, a co-captain of the 1980 Olympic team and a Women's Basketball Hall of Fame inductee, has had an up-close seat to the family dynamic. As a freshman in 2021, Aaliyah scored 1,001 points in 39 games, yet Schneider saw a potential pitfall.

"She was so focused on Sonny on the sideline and what he had to say," Schneider says. "He could yell from the sideline and she'd just burst into tears because it would freak her out."

Since then, Schneider has seen an evolution in both Sonny and Aaliyah.

"He says less and less each year and she's more and more confident in herself and less reliant on anybody else's input," Schneider says. "She's gotten to the point where she doesn't really need him to help her during a game or me to help her during a game. She's able to help herself."

Schneider says she and Sonny have a good relationship and they've learned to work together. Sonny remains unafraid to offer real-time feedback at games, where he sits as close as possible to the court. Sometimes he's quiet in his critiques, other times he's not.

During a playoff game last season, Chavez got the ball and flew down the court, pulling up to shoot and ... missing everything.

"Air ball!" Sonny yelled with a smirk.

The next time Chavez got her hands on the ball, she stepped back and nailed a jumper, then looked directly at her father. Challenge accepted.

WITH A LITTLE more than 20 seconds left in the fourth quarter of the championship game at the Alamodome, Chavez exits the game to a standing ovation. Monterey begins an early celebration en route to a 64-35 victory, its first state title since 1981. Chavez, who scored 19 points, runs off the court, giving high-fives and hugs to teammates and embracing her coach.

Then the tears fall.

A decade after she first picked up a basketball, Chavez finishes her high school career with 4,796 points, 1,279 rebounds, 771 assists and 476 steals in 150 games and is named MVP.

After the game, a line wraps around a section of the stadium, with fans waiting for pictures and autographs. Chavez smiles widely for more than an hour, ensuring that everyone in line gets a picture or an autograph.

She and her family celebrate the win at a nearby barbecue restaurant. A server at the restaurant approaches Chavez, wide-eyed. He's wearing her jersey.

"I manifested this," he says excitedly. He'd asked a friend to buy a jersey for him because he knew Chavez would be in town for the championship. He just didn't know she would walk through the doors of his restaurant.

After signing the back of his jersey, Chavez returns to her seat on the patio furniture on the restaurant's rooftop, stretching out on the side with the most shade, a gold University Interscholastic League medal clinging to the front of her shirt. She chats with her mother, a moment of quiet that's becoming more and more rare.