Too tall for ballet, a teen found her calling on the hardcourt—and Canada Basketball is all the richer
Emma Wolfram is a perfectionist, always has been. Likewise, she is an achiever. She sets her mind to something and achieves it through attention to detail, hard work and talent. As a young girl, she had a dream: She wanted to be a dancer. “It was just something I could do to spend time with my friends,” says Wolfram. “I wasn’t really into sports at all.”
They say many things about destiny. That it’s in character or other parts of our fabric of being. That it’s in the stars or stuff beyond our control. In Wolfram’s case, though, Sigmund Freud captured it best: “Anatomy is destiny,” Freud said.
Standing well over six feet in her early teens, Wolfram had hit the ceiling for ballet. Her parents, Mike and Jane, six-foot-four and six-foot-one respectively, could see it coming, especially with her older brother, Joshua, standing six-foot-ten. She had to find another outlet for her talent and character. “I had watched her over the years spend so many hours practising and sacrificing to get what she wanted,” says Jane, a schoolteacher. “She was so goal-oriented. She had to find a goal other than dance.”
Wolfram tried other sports, including track and field and soccer. Hardly surprisingly, nothing suited her as well as basketball, the same game her mother played at the University of Victoria, the same game her brother played at the University of Calgary. Wolfram poured herself into it, enrolling in the local Steve Nash development programs, going to camps and following her brother to the gym and playground. Ballet’s loss has been Canada Basketball’s windfall.
From the beginning, it was clear big things were in the offing. In Grade 9, Wolfram and her best friend, Maya Olynyk, led South Kamloops Secondary School’s junior team to an undefeated season and a provincial championship. In her second year of high school, now standing six-foot-four, she hit a last-second turnaround jumper that moved the Titans into the provincial senior semifinals, though they lost to Abbotsford’s W.J. Mouat, the eventual champs.
The Titans were the top-ranked team in the province going into the 2011–12 season, but by mid-winter they had fallen out of the top 10. “Injuries killed us,” says Titan coach Ken Olynyk, father of Maya and Gonzaga University All-American Kelly Olynyk. “We didn’t have [our five starters] on the court together until the week before the playoffs.” None of the injuries were as serious as Wolfram’s. On Christmas Day, she was driving her parents’ GMC Yukon en route to her grandmother’s when she skidded on a patch of black ice and hit a telephone pole. She missed all of South Kamloops’s games in January with a concussion. “It was so hard to see her those first couple of weeks after the accident,” says Maya. “Emma had black eyes and she was in a lot of distress [with] dizziness and headaches. She couldn’t even watch our practices. It left her feeling awful.”
The Titans struggled in Wolfram’s absence, losing five games in January. She was back in the lineup in February, and the team went on a run, displaying the form that was expected of them as they advanced through the playoffs to the title game against Vancouver’s York House. Everything seemed to be falling into place, at least until Wolfram took a bad fall and hit her head on the hardwood a minute or so before halftime. Only after she was cleared by officials on site was she allowed to come back in the second half. The game came down to the final 10 seconds. With South Kamloops ahead 62–61, Wolfram blocked consecutive shots by York House’s top players Alisha Roberts and Cherub Lum. Even though she was reaching for the rafters on the blocks, she had a sinking feeling each time she came down. “Both times I worried that the refs were going to call a foul,” she said. The refs deemed the blocks clean, and the Titans went on to hit three foul shots for a 65–61 victory. In that championship game, Wolfram had 11 points, 17 rebounds, seven steals and seven blocks, and the school came away with its first girls’ senior title since 1964. “That was really the best moment for me,” Wolfram says. “We overcame adversity and pulled together. It never felt like a sure thing.”
The defence of that title felt like something close to a certainty. Wolfram capped her glorious high school hoops career and the South Kamloops Titans’ 41-1 season with a 59–49 triumph over the Brookswood Bobcats in the provincial finals in March. The victory gave the Titans their second consecutive championship and provided a sample of Wolfram’s dominance of girls’ basketball in B.C. in the past two seasons: 16 points through double- and triple-teams, 18 rebounds and seven blocks. She also repeated as the provincial tournament’s MVP and top defensive player. She was cited as British Columbia’s top female high school athlete in 2012 and, judging by her Grade 12 season, it’s hard to imagine how she won’t take home the hardware again this year.
Looking ahead, Wolfram figures to be a fixture on Canada Basketball’s teams in the run-up to world championships and Olympic Games over the course of the next decade. Allison McNeill, who coached the Canadian national squad for 12 years before stepping down in December, added her to the roster of the Pan-Am team last summer. “We had a spot open up at the last minute,” she says. “It’s highly unusual for a junior-aged player to be in a national team’s lineup at a major international tournament, especially when you think that a lot of the players have experience in professional leagues. It’s a lot to ask for a teenager. We looked at it initially as just a learning experience, a chance to be around our top players.”
Wolfram’s experience ended up being a lot more than that. Though she had the benefit of only a couple of practices with players she’d never played with before the tournament, she worked her way up from the end of the bench to a spot in the starting lineup. “Really, I see her more as a four [power forward] than a five [centre],” McNeill says. “She is a good enough athlete and is so fundamentally sound and smart that she can play 16 to 18 feet from the hoop rather than just play with her back to the basket.”
After her performances at the provincial level and at the Pan-Ams, Wolfram heard from more than 60 NCAA Div. I schools, but she opted for a school that was very familiar and (reasonably) close to home: Gonzaga University in Spokane, Wash. “I’ve been there for camps and tournaments,” she says. “I know the coaches and I know Kelly [Olynyk] really liked his time there. I think it’s a good fit for me, a smaller campus with smaller classes in the area [kinesiology and physiotherapy] that I want to study.”
Though fans know about the transformation of Gonzaga’s men’s team from the Cinderella mid-major to a force in NCAA basketball, the women’s program has almost matched it over the past few seasons. “I have known Emma for several years,” Gonzaga coach Kelly Graves says. “I believe she has the chance to become one of the all-time great Zags because of not only her skill set and tremendous work ethic, but her incredible basketball IQ.” Gonzaga’s women’s team was disappointed with a loss in the first round to Iowa State in March. But for the next four years, the Bulldogs will be counting on the girl who outgrew ballet to get them back to the Dance.
This story originally appeared in Sportsnet magazine. Subscribe here.