Young continues to grow
Senior lives up to billing as preseason conference POY
Posted on January 31, 2008
A practical Tamera Young wouldn’t speculate about how her situation would be different if she played at a “major” school.
Fresh off breaking the JMU women’s basketball scoring record last Thursday against Hofstra, Young is focused on two things: winning the Colonial Athletic Association championship and building her resume for the WNBA.
“I feel confident right now with the way things are going for my future, so I’m satisfied [with] where I chose to come,” she said.
The preseason CAA Player of the Year is on pace to finish second in conference history for scoring, but milestones like that seem to matter very little to the senior forward. Numbers may not affect how she plays the game, but they tell a great deal about the kind of talent she has.
Sheila Moorman, James Madison’s coach in the ’80s and ’90s, set the bar for JMU women’s basketball. She led the Dukes to the NCAA tournament six times and was named CAA Coach of the Year five times. But she doesn’t hesitate to identify Young as the best player she’s seen at JMU.
“She doesn’t remind me of anybody that I coached, I’ll say that up front,” Moorman said in a phone interview Tuesday. “For somebody to continue to work on their game and not feel as if they’ve ‘arrived,’ as talented as she is I think that bodes well for her prospects of continuing to get better.”
JMU coach Kenny Brooks called Young very “family-oriented” and said that transitioning to the pro level will take some adjustment for her.
“She could have gone to a higher level, but it would have been corporate; it would have been very business-like,” Brooks said. “She needed a situation where it [would] be family. That’s what she gets in our program.”
Young said the professional level will take some adjusting to, but pointed out that Harrisonburg was not always home for her. She grew up in Wilmington, N.C., where she was coached by former JMU assistant Sherri Tynes. If Young gets the opportunity, she would like to play for a WNBA team on the east coast.
The player Young passed for JMU’s all-time scoring lead, Meredith Alexis, now plays professional basketball overseas. Her WNBA aspirations were derailed by a saturation of forwards and centers on the teams she tried out for. But Young’s versatility has people thinking her chances of making the WNBA are better.
She’s listed as a guard/forward, and displays strengths at both positions. She grabs rebounds like a forward and can handle the ball like a guard, something she’s been asked to do more since the injury of JMU’s starting point guard Dawn Evans. But more than anything else, she knows how to create her own shot.
Young has scored 1,803 points in her career and this season leads the conference in scoring (20.8 points per game) and rebounding (9.9 rebounds per game). She has 11 regular season games remaining and the CAA tournament to extend her JMU scoring record.
