Louisville's Hailey Van Lith prepared herself for the best (2024)

Hailey Van Lith spent a year in the gym with her older brother’s AAU team before she went to her first official basketball tryout. Her dad Corey was the coach of the Wenatchee Panthers 9-and-under boys’ team. Hailey started the season as the 6-year-old little sister and daughter of the coach who attended every game as a statistician and videographer and every practice as a way to expend some of her energy at a side basket.

But by midseason, when the team was short a player or two, Corey had Hailey jump into some drills for an extra body. And by season’s end, with Hailey sometimes running full-court scrimmages with the 9-year-olds, Corey knew she was a bit different. She wasn’t the biggest player on the court (not even close) nor the best (she was closer there), but she was the most competitive and arguably the toughest.

If Hailey could hang with 9-year-olds when she was 6, then she could probably play with the 10-year-olds when she was 7, Corey assumed. So, he called the local 10-and-under girls’ AAU club and asked if he could bring Hailey to the tryout. They adamantly said no — there was a tryout for the 7-and-under team that Hailey was welcome to attend, but the club didn’t allow anyone to play up an age group, and certainly not three age groups. But Corey was adamant, too, and ultimately he got the team to budge under a simple agreement: If it were not blatantly obvious that Hailey was the best or second-best player at the 10-and-under tryout, she would happily join the other 7-year-olds.

That season, 7-year-old Van Lith — as the smallest and youngest player on the court — was the starting point guard on the 10-and-under team.

“It helped me learn to play using my body a lot and change tempo, change speed because obviously I don’t have that length or that height advantage on people,” Van Lith said. “It taught me a lot and how to be a little bit crafty.”

The experience laid the roots for Van Lith’s smooth transition to the college game.

A freshman at Louisville, Van Lith has started every game for the 10-0 Cardinals and is the team’s second-leading rebounder and third-leading scorer. Earlier this week, the 5-foot-7 guard picked up her second ACC Freshman of the Week honors. But it’s Van Lith’s comfort level and preparedness on the court, against players up to four and five years older, that might be the most impressive aspect of her game.

In her first college game against a ranked opponent in DePaul, Van Lith dropped 21 points on 8-of-11 shooting. In last week’s close game against Virginia Tech, the freshman sealed the victory by putting the Cardinals up four with two free throws in the final four seconds of the game. On the court with senior Dana Evans, a top WNBA prospect, a freshman could understandably slink into the background. But Van Lith hasn’t done that.

“You go from your senior year in high school, where you’re 17- or 18-years-old playing against freshmen who are 15, to now: You’re the 18-year-old playing against 22-year-old women, 21-year-old women,” Louisville coach Jeff Walz said. “They’ve benefited from two, three years in the weight room, their bodies have changed, they’ve gotten stronger. But Hailey was physically ready for that. She had worked so hard.”

Hailey Van Lithis our 𝗙𝗿𝗲𝘀𝗵𝗺𝗮𝗻 𝗼𝗳 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗪𝗲𝗲𝗸!

For the week, she shot 11-of-27 from the floor, averaging 11.3 points and 7.0 rebounds per game👏@UofLWBB | @haileyvll pic.twitter.com/r5APoy1CoI

— ACC Women's Basketball (@accwbb) January 11, 2021

For Van Lith, there isn’t a surprise factor to it; there’s no adjustment she needs to make when playing against people more experienced and advanced. For nearly her entire basketball career, she worked to put herself on courts where she was (by far) the youngest and smallest, so that when she did step on the court in college and beyond, she would be at her best.

After Hailey played up three and four years at the AAU level through elementary school in Wenatchee, Wash., the Van Liths decided to expand her game, quite literally. In sixth grade, she tried out for a team in Seattle, nearly a three-hour drive from the family’s home. When she arrived at the tryout, comprised of mostly 11th graders, she got the same incredulous stares that met her when she showed up to the U10 tryouts. But again, the result was the same.

For several years, the Van Liths made that drive to Seattle almost every weekend to ensure Hailey was constantly facing competition that was older, more developed, more fine-tuned.

“Don’t get me wrong, there were moments in games when she got her butt handed to her, but there were definitely moments when she competed and held her own,” Corey said. “Then we knew — this girl’s going to be different. She has a chance to do something really special if she keeps it up and continues to have this mental approach to the process.”

Van Lith honed her ball-handling skills because, if she wasn’t perfect, her taller and stronger defenders would pick her pocket. She studied the game’s passing angles so she could thread the needle with her assists. And she developed a quick release for her mid-range game, knowing that defenders would recover more quickly than someone her own age. Defensively, she learned to make good decisions and to not leave her feet. Those were the types of mistakes that would make her look like the sixth grader playing against juniors in high school.

The following year, between the weekend trips to Seattle, seventh-grader Van Lith began showing up to Wenatchee Valley College, a two-year community college not far from her house where longtime family friend Rachel Goetz was the head coach. While the college players practiced, Van Lith ran individual workouts at a side hoop, until a situation similar to when she was 6 years old arose. The team was down a body and needed someone to play. Goetz asked Van Lith if she wouldn’t mind jumping in for the scrimmage and there was no hesitation.

Of course, Van Lith wanted in.

“I’m setting all these boundaries and rules for my players saying, ‘If she’s in the air, we don’t touch her — she’s a seventh grader. You can defend, but no need to prove a point,’” Goetz said. “I think I should have been pep talking them in the other way that, ‘This girl is about to school you.’”

Throughout high school, as Van Lith practiced with men’s and women’s junior college players and all over the world with Team USA’s youth and 3-on-3 teams, she found success through her preparation. She played for teams where she wasn’t the best or most ready, and saw the level she needed to reach; she put herself in situations that weren’t comfortable and found ways to make herself comfortable or, at the very least, enjoy the discomfort.

“I think the progression from my first team and just always playing older girls and not being scared, I think that’s actually helped me a lot being a freshman in college,” Van Lith said. “I was always used to playing girls four years older than me.”

Even in a freshman season full of delays and disruptions amid the COVID-19 pandemic, Van Lith has found stability on the court, where the players around her are two, three and four years older than she is. It’s what she’s always known. Two thousand miles away from Wenatchee, Van Lith, the 19-year-old starting guard for second-ranked Louisville, is home.

(Top photo: Jessica Hill / Associated Press)

Chantel Jennings is The Athletic's senior writer for the WNBA and women's college basketball. She covered college sports for the past decade at ESPN.com and The Athletic and spent the 2019-20 academic year in residence at the University of Michigan's Knight-Wallace Fellowship for Journalists. Follow Chantel on Twitter @chanteljennings