LAKE STEVENS — Tammy Holder watched the game between two select basketball teams and saw some things her Cal State Northridge women’s basketball program could use.
Size. Toughness. Fearlessness.
She saw the 6-foot-4 center she believed could make an immediate impact on her team of players who topped out at 6 feet.
The former coach of the Seattle Reign of the defunct American Basketball League watched Lake Stevens’ Katie Holloway rip down a rebound and thought she might look good doing that in a Matadors’ uniform.
She didn’t bother thinking about the makeup of Holloway’s legs. Skin, bone, carbon-fiber, plastic — Holder couldn’t have cared less. She simply saw Holloway as a Division I basketball talent.
That is all Katie Holloway ever wanted to hear.
Holloway signed a letter of intent in November to play at Northridge, becoming perhaps the first person with a prosthetic leg to receive a full-ride scholarship to play Division I college basketball.
"It confirmed to me that if your heart is there — which hers is — and you’re determined, you can be successful," said Holder, currently in the midst of her second season at Northridge.
Former Cascade High School and current Northridge player Ciara Papac had told her coach about Holloway. Papac, who also starred at Everett Community College, mentioned the prosthetic leg. When Holder watched Holloway play for the first time, however, she had forgotten about it.
"The first time I watched her play, I was kind of spacing out and didn’t put two and two together until afterward," Holder said. "What that tells me is that we saw her and wanted her for all the positives we saw on the floor."
There have been cases of athletes playing college sports with a prosthetic leg. Holloway was inspired by Mike Edwards, who walked on to the Notre Dame basketball team and played sparingly. Neil Parry played football for San Jose State last fall, three years after an injury suffered in a San Jose State game led to the amputation of his lower leg.
For Holloway, the scholarship means much more than college funds. It is additional proof that, despite the fact that her lower right leg was amputated when she was 18 month old, she is not handicapped. It is a sweeping "How Do You Like Me Now?" for every person who didn’t believe she would ever achieve the goal she set in middle school of playing college basketball. The cruelty of the comments that pelted her in elementary and middle school has wilted. The select basketball coaches who cut her, she believes, are even more wrong.
"People say to you that what you’re working through is going to pay off in the end," said Holloway, who was born without a fibula bone in her right leg. "You never realize it until it actually does. All the things you go through. The things you put up with. The letdowns."
Middle school was a bumpy ride, but high school has brought increasing increments of success to Holloway. She averaged 20 points on the freshman team, and was a key contributor off the varsity bench as a sophomore. She started as a junior and is the focal point of the Vikings’ offense this season, averaging 17.8 points, 12.3 rebounds and 21/2 blocks per game in Lake Stevens’ 7-1 start.
Though first-year Vikings coach Tom Tri appreciates Holloway’s physical abilities, he also makes use of her basketball I.Q. Few high school players, he doubts, know as much about the game as his starting center.
"She really does love the game of basketball, and you can tell by the way she practices and by the way she plays," Tri said. "I can think of a couple of times when I’ve actually asked for her advice during either timeouts or at halftime. I trust her opinion."
It didn’t take long for Steve Berg, who retired as the Vikings’ coach after last season, to realize Holloway was going to be something special. While coaching Chelsey Holloway, Katie’s 6-foot-3 sister who currently plays for Seattle University, Berg heard about Katie’s dream of playing college basketball.
"You hoped for it, but based on some of the circumstances you kind of wondered if that was kind of a long shot," said Berg, whose team qualified for the state playoffs last season for the first time in 17 years. "She worked really hard at it, and every year just got better and better until it wasn’t much of a surprise when she did get (a scholarship)."
"When you are around her, you forget that she has a disability."
Holloway believes she is headed to the right school, but admits she wonders about some of the college coaches who lost interest in her. In the Wall Street-like world of college recruiting, it is common for coaches to treat a kid like the second coming of Wilt Chamberlain one moment and Gary Coleman the next. Holloway will never know for sure what some coaches were thinking.
"One of the schools, it wasn’t much of a letdown because I knew that I really wasn’t interested," said Holloway, who chose Northridge over New Mexico State and Alaska-Fairbanks. "What ended up happening at the end was that they told me, quote-unquote, that my mobility was not for their school. I took it a different way. It sounded to me like it was about my leg."
She got a completely different vibe from Northridge’s coach.
Holder said the school is thrilled about Holloway’s playing ability and her 3.94 grade point average. She said the training staff is looking forward to the opportunity to uncover some new methods that could maximize Holloway’s ability.
"Our strength coach and our trainer are excited about that," Holder said. "We hope that she’ll see that our commitment is not just "Hey, look what she can do, let’s use it," but ‘Look where Katie is, let’s continue to help her get better and be the best she can possibly be.’ "
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