When Brett Kingma graduated from Mill Creek’s Jackson High School in 2011, he had the world of basketball at his fingertips. As a senior he averaged 30.3 points a game and was the state’s Class 4A Player of the Year, and he was rewarded with a scholarship to play at the University of Oregon.
Four years, three schools and one devastating knee injury later, that world looks very different.
The 23-year-old Kingma spent one year at Oregon and one year at Washington State, and both stays ended in disappointment. The next year he was away from both school and basketball, assessing his life and his opportunities. He enrolled at Western Washington University and was preparing to join the basketball team there, though a torn anterior cruciate ligament in his right knee suffered in a pickup game in the spring of 2014 set him back another year.
But if life lessons can be trying and even painful, so they can be beneficial and sometimes a blessing. With patience, perseverance and the support of a loving family, Kingma is again succeeding on the basketball court, albeit now with a new sense of purpose and, more importantly, a new sense of self.
“If you’d told me when I graduated from high school that this is where I’d be (four years later), I probably would’ve been disappointed,” Kingma said last week. “But even though this is not exactly what I’d envisioned, I wouldn’t want to be anywhere else in my life right now.”
The setbacks and adversities of recent years “allowed me to mature,” he explained. “I’ve lived out hitting rock bottom and kind of losing my sense of pride. … Going through those experiences is really the only way I was going to mature and come to terms with who I am as a person.”
The day after his high school graduation, Kingma headed to Oregon for what was to be, he assumed, the start of a successful NCAA Division I basketball career. Instead he went through a so-so freshman season, averaging 3.1 points and 9.8 minutes in 19 games. Looking back, Kingma admits he was “real immature,” but also says he wasn’t “really comfortable with the basketball situation there. … I felt like I needed a change of scenery.”
He transferred to Washington State and, in accordance with NCAA rules, was required to sit out one season. But early in that school year came one of the low points in Kingma’s life. On a night in October of 2012 he was stopped while out walking by Pullman police, and they found “some marijuana that I shouldn’t have had,” he said.
Kingma was suspended from the team for six weeks, and although he was later reinstated, he withdrew from school in the spring. He returned home, got a minimum-wage job at an Edmonds car dealership, played only occasional basketball, and mostly “tried to figure out what I wanted to do,” he said.
College coaches were calling, though “for a couple of months I didn’t know if I wanted to play again. But as time went on I started missing the game more and more. … There was kind of a fire that got lit inside of me that I knew I was going back to school and that I was going to play basketball again. I didn’t know where or what level, but I knew I wanted to play.”
Western Washington head coach Tony Dominguez, an Everett native, was one of the coaches who kept in touch. A connection grew, and in time Kingma decided to resume his college basketball career with the Vikings. But as he was training for the coming season in June of 2014, he tore the ACL in his right knee, resulting in reconstructive surgery two months later.
It was May of this year when Kingma started playing again, and in the fall he joined the WWU team. He still has minor issues with his knee, though “a lot of that stuff is mental,” he said. “The more I play, the more comfortable I get.
“I think I took basketball for granted before. I’ve played for as long as I can remember and I’ve worked really hard at it, but it always came naturally and easy. But (this year) it’s been a challenge for me to get back in the game. … Every time I’m on the floor now it’s just a blessing to be out there, and I want to make sure I do everything I can to be the best player I can be.”
Playing as a reserve in 12 games this season, Kingma is averaging 8.7 points in 15.7 minutes, with a high of 19 points against Simon Fraser on Dec. 15. He leads the team in 3-point accuracy for players with seven or more attempts at 47 percent (29-for-62).
According to Dominguez, Kingma’s knee injury “really slowed him down, but he’s fought back, got healthy and he’s ready to go. He looks good. … He’s just catching up in a lot ways, and his injury slowed that process down a little bit. But I’m very excited about Brett and what he adds to the team. He brings a lot of intelligence to the game and he can really shoot the ball.”
Dominguez understands that Kingma “got caught up in the wrong things” a few years ago, but he also knows that “Brett is really not that kind of kid at all. Brett’s a great citizen, a great kid and a good student.
“He had a real rough year at WSU mentally … (and afterward) he was looking for a fresh start. I met with him extensively on all these issues. I’m in coaching to mentor guys and I love that aspect of it, so I took it as an opportunity to not only help him emotionally — and he has real good family support, too — but also in basketball. And so far it’s been a good fit.”
Because Western Washington is a Division II program, and because the rules are different from Division I, Kingma is just a sophomore in eligibility. Which is kind of funny, given that he is three years older than siblings and fraternal twins Dan and Kelli Kingma, who are both sophomore basketball players at the University of Washington.
“My family kind of jokes around that me, Dan and Kelli are triplets now because we’re all sophomores,” he said with a smile.
The extra years of school will allow Kingma to complete a degree in finance, and he is considering a second degree in either economics or supply chain management. He expects to be 25 when he closes out his college playing career, and by then some of his peers from years ago will be in the NBA and other professional leagues. Some are there already.
But at this point none of that matters. “I want to finish strong,” he said. “The whole pride thing for me of playing at the highest level or of going to the NBA, in the grand scheme of things it’s not a big deal. I just want to make sure I have a vision of the future beyond basketball.”
And in the meantime, he said, “I’m happy to be back playing, though I’m not even close to satisfied with where I’m at. But that’s part of the beauty and the challenge of coming back. My shooting is coming along, but there are different parts of my game where I know I can improve. So even though I’m not close to where I want to be, I know what it takes to get there.
“I kind of have a vision for myself, and it’s nice to be able to work hard, to see improvements, to get better every day, and to have fun while I’m doing it. Because playing basketball is fun for me again.”
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