March 17, 2016"Her sprained right ankle throbbing in pain, Cara Ursin had pleaded all day with her coach, begging Angi Butler to let her play in that night's game. Doctors had cleared Ursin -- there was no fracture -- but Butler saw her star player limping and kept her on the bench. Without Ursin, who was just a freshman at the time, Destrehan (Louisiana) fell behind by 12 points at the half against District 7-5A rival Thibodaux.
"At halftime, I went to our [practice] gym and warmed up," Ursin said. "I had to run and jump and show [Butler] I was ready."
When halftime was over, Thibodaux coach Damon Robinson emerged from the visitors' locker room to see Ursin taping her ankle, preparing to enter the game. A minute into the third quarter, Thibodaux's 12-point lead had been cut in half after Ursin hit two 3-pointers. Ursin finished with 18 second-half points and Destrehan rallied to win.
"She put her [Superman] cape on at halftime," Robinson said. "Even as a freshman, her older teammates looked up to her."
Everybody in the state looks up to Ursin now. A 5-foot-7 guard, Ursin's stock in recruiting circles is skyrocketing. She was the Louisiana Gatorade Player of the Year as a sophomore and won it again last week in recognition of her standout junior year.
Ursin has numerous college scholarship offers she favors Baylor, Texas, South Carolina and Tennessee and it's easy to see why. This past season, she averaged 25.1 points, 13.2 rebounds, 7.4 steals, 6.0 assists and 5.3 blocks.
"I'm not going to compare her to Michael Jordan, but I can understand what the Cleveland Cavaliers felt like when they had to face the Chicago Bulls," said Robinson, who is 0-9 in games against Ursin. "
Cara can jump out of the gym, and she can run like the wind."
Ursin had a quadruple-double this past season vs. St. Katharine (New Orleans): 24 points, 10 rebounds, 12 assists and 12 steals. She also had four triple-doubles and 21 double-doubles in 28 games. Her team has fallen short of a state title but is 84-8 in three years, including 40-0 in district play. The Wildcats reached the state final in her freshman year, the semifinals her sophomore season and the quarterfinals this past season.
Butler said she recently got a visit from Louisiana native Pokey Chatman, the head coach and general manager of the WNBA's Chicago Sky.
"[Chatman] said she told South Carolina coach Dawn Staley, 'You don't need to worry about recruiting her. We'll take her straight to the WNBA,'" Butler said.
Butler said Chatman was joking ... but not by a lot.
Ursin's aunt, Karen Wilson, gave her niece the nickname "Moon" because she believed she had a "moon head" at birth -- nobody is entirely sure what that means.Given Ursin's out-of-this-world leaping ability -- she can grab the rim and she's come close to dunking twice -- the moon nickname fits. In fact, Ursin's twitter handle is "TouchDaMoon."
Ursin grew up playing basketball with her two older brothers and their male cousins. But Ursin is on a track to outperform everyone in her family ... and pretty much every other family, too.
"Her talent is just a gift from God," said her mother, Erica Burise. "She is awesome and phenomenal."
But Ursin is more than just an elite athlete. She
has a 4.0 GPA and sings in her church's youth choir.
"One day, she was singing to us," teammate Brandi Mason said, "and it was, like, mind-blowing."
After basketball, Ursin said she wants to become a pharmacist or a physical therapist.
She spends two nights a week tutoring student-athletes who are struggling academically.
A fan of the TV show, "The Walking Dead," Ursin has been known to make some comical mistakes when it comes to figures of speech.
"As smart as she is, she once thought 'schizophrenic' was 'skinzophrenic' -- she thought it was a skin disorder," Butler said laughing. "She thought 'bedside manner' was bed-side man.' She's so cute."
Her mother agreed.
"She is a quirky, goofy girl," Burise said. "She's always got something funny to say."
Butler said
Ursin weighs 165 pounds of solid muscle and could be a track star because of her speed and leaping ability. But Ursin wants to focus on basketball, even if she has gone about her development in an unconventional way.
Ursin played travel ball from fifth to eighth grade. But in the summer of her ninth-grade year, she decided to stay home and work on her academics as well as individual skill development in basketball.
The plan worked. Ursin's scoring average jumped from 14 points as a freshman to 22 points as a sophomore, and she has followed the same course of action every summer since. Ursin said Butler and her mom supported her plan, but she heard plenty of criticism from the outside.
"That's all I heard -- 'You have to play AAU to get better and to get colleges to look at you,'" Ursin said. "But I've sprouted since I stopped playing AAU. Inside, I am full of joy. But on the outside, I stay humble because I know I have a long way to go."
Ursin, who
has been able to touch the rim since eighth grade, has done all this with minimal weight training, and she said she looks forward to getting even stronger in college. One of her major goals for her senior season is to finally dunk in a game. She missed a dunk try as a freshman. This past season, she nearly dunked, but the ball slipped out of her hand.
"It's so important," Ursin said of dunking. "I thought it would have come easier since I got up there as a freshman, and I have to have grown since then."
Butler wants her to dunk, too, but she is terrified that her star will hurt her fingers in the attempt or that someone will undercut her, causing injury. Ursin, though, has seen the future, and that's not how it goes down.
"I picture a perfect atmosphere and fans running all over the place," she said. "I picture myself just getting back on defense, no big deal, like I do this all the time."
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Walter Villa, espnW- photo gathered from the web