Sabrina Ionescu shows everyone can use a mentor. WNBA stars help girls to dream big

Sabrina Ionescu looked courtside at the arena in Los Angeles, and her jaw dropped.

There was Kobe Bryant, his daughter, Gianna, and two of Gianna’s school-aged teammates. They were there to watch Ionescu and Oregon play USC.

This was in early 2019, when Ionescu was already a Pac-12 player of the year and first-team all-American. But there is just something about meeting our heroes, no matter how accomplished we are.

“I grew up watching Kobe Bryant game after game, ring after ring, living his greatness without apology,” Ionescu would say about a year later at a memorial service after Bryant and “Gigi” had died in a helicopter crash. “I wanted to be just like him.”

More than 1,400 miles away from LA in Bison, South Dakota (population: 302), Cora Besler used similar words when she submitted her entry for a contest that gave her a chance to meet Ionescu, now a star guard for the New York Liberty.

“I set the goal to start on varsity my eighth-grade year,” Besler, 14, would say in her winning video. “I knew I’d have to work harder than ever to earn it and found myself looking to the WNBA for ways to improve. It only took watching one Liberty game to make me instantly become a huge fan of Sabrina.”

When Besler found herself shooting from a rack of basketballs at the National Basketball Players Association training facility in New York, she heard a familiar voice call out.

“Need a rebounder?” Ionescu said, standing behind her in practice gear.

Something familiar happened. Besler’s jaw dropped.

“She hugged me about five times,” says Besler, now back home in Bison. “I still can't get over it."

Ioenescu and Las Vegas center A’ja Wilson, the WNBA’s MVP, recently partnered with AT&T for a mentorship-focused content series called Beyond the Bleachers. Besler and another teenager, Addyson Stockton of Springfield, Oregon, won a chance for one-on-one sessions with one of the players ahead of the WNBA playoffs.

Besler and Stockton’s lilting reactions at that moment of first sight, but also how Ionescu and Wilson were affected by them, highlight the profound impact a mentor can have.

USA TODAY Sports spoke with Besler about her experience with Ionescu to find lessons that can benefit young athletes. As Wilson and Stockton also learned from their experience together in Las Vegas, we all need mentors, who can be crucial to success in our pursuits.

“I was once (in) the same exact space she was,” Wilson says in her episode.

A mentor doesn't have to be famous, just a figure – a teammate, coach or friend - who encourages us.

'Practice like you play': Developing a passion for sports starts at home

It began with the hoop over the garage. When Cora Besler was five, she saw it, hanging near her uncle’s house next door, and told her mom she wanted a basketball.

Our sports experience can start with the simplest of acts from a parent or a sibling. Cora’s came when Will, her father, gave a little rubber ball to make the task easier.

Cora remembers going out there about every day for a couple of weeks, under Dad’s gentle supervision, until she made a shot. She was hooked, as Ionescu had been at a young age.

“What did you do to get to where you are today?” Besler asked her mentor during their episode.

“You gotta practice the way you play,” Ionescu responds. “Intensity, competitiveness, getting like, live reps in practice, because then it really helps when you get to the game. You feel like you've, like, been there.”

When they were young, Sabrina and Eddy Ionescu watched Andrei, their older brother, shoot on the full-sized hoop outside their house in Walnut Creek, California.

“We just tried to mimic everything he was doing,” Ionescu recalled for TNT’s Ernie Johnson  in 2020.

Sabrina and Eddy, separated by 18 minutes (Sabrina is older), developed a ferocious level of competition with each other.

“He didn't take it easy on me, regardless if I was a girl, if I was smaller,” Ionescu told ESPN’s Maria Taylor while she still played for Oregon. “He tried to do everything he could to win, and I did, too.”

In the process, they became inseparable. During the summer, they would go to the local park and play pickup games with men on their lunch breaks. The men didn’t think Sabrina could play, and the twins would bait them for Slurpee money.

“When the game started, I'd start hitting free throws, hitting threes,” Sabrina Ionescu recalled for Johnson. “And then that's how it got to where we were able to get enough money to go to 7-Eleven across the street.”

Don't give up on your goals. Mentors, and role models, can help you dream big.

The local Golden State Warriors weren’t very good in those days. During Stephen Curry’s first three seasons, which began in 2009-10, the team averaged a 28-48 record. Ionescu says season tickets were about $200.

She had courtside seats, and at about 10, she recalls leaning against a railing trying to high-five Curry, and the thrill it gave her when he touched her hand. This same little girl would one day compete against him in a 3-point competition at an NBA All-Star Game.

Curry was her favorite, something Ionescu's style of play reflects.

“She seemed fearless and confident going toe-to-toe against a male athlete,” Cora Besler says. "She can make it anywhere she wants, kind of like she has control of the court.”

Watching Ionescu allowed Besler to dream, too. In fact, the night before she saw the “Beyond the Bleachers” advertisement, she dreamt she had met Ionescu.

“It felt so real I had to get up and check if my jersey was signed,” she says.

When the two met, Besler learned that achieving your dream is often not a coincidence. The best players, like Ionescu and Curry, who is listed at 6-2 yet drives and shoots with confidence among a sea of taller players, are relentless workers.

Curry’s 3-point precision, like Caitlin Clark’s, is a result of thousandsupon thousands of shots per week. Ionescu is constantly working on her footwork, she told Besler, to work all of the different options she has to pass and score.

If you have a dream, you need to go out and earn it

Besler says the best sports advice her parents have given her with her sports, though, is that she plays better when she’s having fun.

Throwing herself into her sports without worry her parents will discourage her if she fails has given her a path to thrive.

“My dad's told me multiple times, if you want it, you have to earn it,” Besler says.

Coach Steve: Is your kid having ‘fun’ in sports? Andre Agassi has advice

Being from a small town, Besler often found herself competing against older kids. She made the varsity basketball team at Bison High in seventh grade, a school year in which she qualified for a South Dakota state track meet at the 100-meter dash.

“I think that was your ‘Aha’ moment,” Will Besler said to his daughter during our interview. “It was kind of like her, 'Sports are fun, but I like to be really good at sports.' I think, and it just motivated her to for more.”

“That has given me confidence, so when I am on the court, I use my speed to my advantage," she says. "Volleyball and track are a filler to feed my competitive nature. I tend to be very competitive and turn everything into a competition. It doesn’t matter what it is."

'Give yourself some grace': It's OK to struggle, and to be a late bloomer

“If I had to sit 16-year-old A’ja right here,” Wilson says in her episode of ‘Beyond The Bleachers,’ “I'm like, ‘Baby girl, give yourself some grace.' It's OK. Your hair's gonna grow. You're gonna get cute. Like, give yourself some grace.”

Stockton, her mentee, learned that version of Wilson wasn’t so dissimilar from her in that they both started basketball late.

“I was a late bloomer, so my dreams were pretty, like, low key,” Wilson says. “I was just like, ‘Hey, I'm just trying to get through school.’ But then my dreams changed drastically when I became good at basketball.”

“That definitely makes me feel a lot better,” Stockton said.

Having someone who can relate to you can make such a difference in our lives, whether we play sports or not.

After she met Bryant, Ionescu was feeling pressure as her status as a college basketball superstar continued to rise. Then she would hear from Bryant, who became her texting buddy, who eased it.

"Be you, it’s been good enough, and that will continue to be good enough," he told her.

“He didn't just show up in my life and leave,” she recalled during her remarks at his memorial. “He stayed. We kept in touch, always texting, calls, game visits. I'd drop a triple double and have a text from him a double, triple double I see with a flex emoji. Another game, another text, ‘Yo,Beast Mode,' or ‘Easy money.’ ”

'It doesn't matter what everyone else is doing': Don't compare yourself to others

Besler says the biggest takeaway she has from her time with Ionescu is to be patient with her game. Everything isn't going to come right away. Nothing in life does.

In the meantime, focus on what you – and not others - are doing.

“I think I compared myself to a whole bunch of other players,” Besler says. “And I think hearing her say, ‘Don't compare yourself to others,’ I think that really made me think differently on what I'm doing in that it doesn't matter what everyone else is doing. It matters what I'm doing to become better.”

The whole experience was kind of surreal for Besler. The girl from the tiny town in South Dakota looked out from the top of the Empire State Building. She watched Ionescu and the Liberty play from right behind the scorer’s table. From that spot, the players look impossibly tall.

She says her meeting with Ionescu, which she estimates lasted about an hour, left her star struck. She couldn’t seem to fully verbalize her thoughts. However, the experience has inspired her even more in going after her goals, starting with becoming the first Division I basketball player from her hometown.

“I am confident after meeting Sabrina that whatever dreams I would have stated to her, she would wholeheartedly support me,” she says.

She’ll be watching Sunday’s Game 2 and the rest of the WNBA Finals between the Liberty and Minnesota Lynx fueled by a life-altering experience. Mentors, whoever they are, can work that way.

“I'd probably tell her I want to be her,” Besler says. “I probably would have asked her how she got colleges to know her and what the Olympics were like since I want to be able to go there sometime, and that someday I think it'd be pretty nice if I could go to Oregon and take her records."

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Steve Borelli, aka Coach Steve, has been an editor and writer with USA TODAY since 1999. He spent 10 years coaching his two sons’ baseball and basketball teams. He and his wife, Colleen, are now sports parents for two high schoolers. His column is posted weekly. For his past columns, click here.