Wilmington, N.C. native won’t be far from home
On Wednesday, Tamera Young was given a new uniform. After an impressive showing at Pre-Draft Camp last Friday and Saturday, the senior forward was chosen eighth overall by the Atlanta Dream in the 2008 WNBA Draft.
The first round of the draft was televised on ESPN2 from Innisbrook Resort in Palm Harbor, Fla., about a half-hour drive from Tampa. Young didn’t respond to phone calls after her selection, but flew with team officials to Atlanta for a press conference Thursday at 11 a.m.
“She and I were supposed to be on the same flight coming back, but those plans got changed right away,” JMU coach Kenny Brooks said in a phone interview Wednesday.
She upped her stock at the camp in Tampa, Fla., where WNBA coaches and scouts realized that while Young competed in a low-profile conference, her skills were not exaggerated. But people who have seen her at work knew this long ago, those who have become her “support system.”
Laney High School coach Sherri Tynes remembers a middle school girl who used to shoot during timeouts at her older sister’s basketball games. Young would eventually start all four years for the varsity team at Laney High, the same high school Michael Jordan played for.
And Brooks recalls selling the dream of the WNBA to a high school senior in the fall of 2003, in his first full season as head coach of JMU women’s basketball. By bringing Young to JMU, Brooks accomplished a sort of recruiting coup. Young chose to attend a rebuilding JMU program despite overtures from conference rival Old Dominion, which has won every Colonial Athletic Association championship since 1992.
“Just when you think you know them, they turn around and make a decision like that,” said Tynes, who was also a graduate assistant at JMU under coach Shelia Moorman from 1983-85. “Which I thought was a fantastic decision, because I’ve had kids that have gone to schools because they’re ranked third in the nation but it wasn’t necessarily the best place for them.”
But Young fit in at JMU right away. She started 28 of 29 games as a freshman, averaging 13.8 points and seven rebounds as she helped the Dukes recover from their first losing season in five years.
But even after Young set the JMU and CAA scoring records three years later, some coaches were still surprised when she held her own against other WNBA hopefuls at Pre-Draft Camp.
“Some of the coaches came up to me and the way they were talking it was just like they didn’t know that I was that good,” Young said in an interview Monday. “Everyone looks at the bigger name schools. …Me coming from James Madison in the CAA, I guess they didn’t expect that I could hang with them.”
When she competed against the game’s elite two summers ago in the 2006 U.S. national under-20 team tryouts, Young had her struggles. But that experience made her more comfortable going into the 2008 WNBA Pre-Draft Camp, where she was reunited with many of the same players.
There, Young impressed league officials enough to garner a No. 11 overall projection in the draft on WNBA.com. Of course, she exceeded even those expectations Wednesday when the Atlanta Dream, an expansion franchise, made her its inaugural first-round pick.
“We’re pretty big — in the expansion draft we [got] seven players that are playing the 4 and the 5 position,” Dream coach and General Manager Marynell Meadors said in a phone interview Wednesday. “So we were definitely looking for a guard that we felt could come in and really give us some great playing time.”
Young finished her career at JMU as the school leader in points and steals, while she also set the CAA mark for points. She set that record in a third round Women’s National Invitation Tournament loss at Kentucky on March 26. After scoring 28 points in the 84-76 loss, Young increased her career point total to 2,121 points. The previous record belonged to Celeste Hill of Old Dominion, who scored 2,113 points from 1990-94.
And while Young never accomplished her collegiate goal of winning a CAA championship, her selection by a professional team about six hours away from her family’s home in Wilmington, N.C. left her mother in tears of happiness, according to Brooks.
Young will meet three of her new teammates tomorrow. Atlanta Dream second-year guard Ivory Latta, fourth-year center Katie Feenstra and second-year forward Camille Little will be at the press conference. The San Antonio Silver Stars traded Little, Chioma Nnamaka (a 2008 second-round selection) and their 2009 first-round pick for two former Dream players and Atlanta’s 2009 second-round pick.
