At three months old, Ava Tompkins sponged up the game from her father\u2019s chest as he hollered at high school players as a coach in Australia.<\/p>\n
At three years old she knew what a jump stop was and could deliver a chest pass. As a middle schooler she led her coed Hoop Rats community team as the only point guard who could break a full-court press. Then, as a senior this year, she became only the third player to score over 1,000 career points for the Thunder Mountain High School girls basketball team.<\/p>\n
Tompkins has always been a precocious basketball player, so it\u2019s no surprise she committed to Wesleyan University as an early decision recruit, deciding to play for the Connecticut college in December. Wesleyan is a NCAA III school competing in the New England Small College Athletic Conference.<\/p>\n
\u201cI have family on the East Coast, so I have been going for eight summers now. \u2026 I always knew I wanted to go to an East Coast school because of the education,\u201d Tompkins said of her decision-making process. \u201cAcademics are more important to me than athletics, so I was looking for somewhere I could play on the East Coast that had great academics.\u201d<\/p>\n
A four-year science student at TMHS, Tompkins plans to study neuroscience in college.<\/p>\n
\u201cScience is just really interesting to me,\u201d she said. \u201cI took psychology and now I\u2019m in sociology and I like both. Neuroscience is not only psychology, it\u2019s also the science of the brain, so it\u2019s a bit like psychology but it goes beyond that.\u201d<\/p>\n
The Tompkins are rooted in basketball. Ava will become the third among her cousins to move on to the next level, with her Hoop Rats teammates Guy Bean and Kaleb Tompkins committing to Grays Harbor College in Washington and Warner Pacific University in Portland, respectively.<\/p>\n
\u201cI always wanted to be better than them,\u201d Ava said of growing up playing with her boy cousins. \u201cI used to beat Kaleb one on one up until about eighth grade, and then he started growing and I just couldn\u2019t score on him anymore. It was definitely a different kind of atmosphere growing up playing with my boy cousins. I played with boys up until my freshman year, so it gave me a different perspective. <\/p>\n
\u201cThere hasn\u2019t been a day really where I haven\u2019t had basketball in my life,\u201d she continued. \u201c\u2026 I was shooting and dribbling since I was three years old.\u201d<\/p>\n
Guy Tompkins, Ava\u2019s father, coached her Hoop Rats team, driving around town every Sunday to pick up players who didn\u2019t have access to transportation or the money for gym time. Ava\u2019s father and mother, Maggie Ferguson, are moving with her to Connecticut, where her mother has family.<\/p>\n
Guy Tompkins remembers his daughter as the smartest basketball player on their youth squad.<\/p>\n
\u201cShe was our team captain, she ran the show and was the smartest player on the court,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
Ava Tompkins has always played with a fire for competition. During one Hoop Rats game down south, her father had to sit her to find room for a new player on the team.<\/p>\n
\u201cAva said, \u2018Dad, what are you doing?,\u2019\u201d her father recalled. \u201cI said, \u2018Ava, if I sit Guy, Kaleb, Treyson or one of these other boys, they\u2019re not going to recover from it. You understand how good you are, and you know I am sitting you down so we don\u2019t have to hurt one of their feelings, and I guarantee you two or three minutes into the game one of these boys is going to run over and ask me to put you in the game.\u2019 \u2026 We went down 14 points because nobody knew how to deal with the full-court press. Sure enough both Guy and Kaleb came running over about three minutes into the game and asked me to put Ava in.\u201d<\/p>\n
Falcons head coach Tanya Nizich has huge holes to fill in her lineup with Ava moving on.<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019ve said it before and I\u2019ll say it again,\u201d Nizich said, \u201cAva played every game since her freshman year like it was her last time on the court. She gives it her absolute all, she has a burning fire for competition and I\u2019ve enjoyed being a part, coaching and watching her play. \u2026 Best advice I could give Ava is set high goals and strive to be the best at everything and don\u2019t let anything ever stand in your way and you will succeed far in life.\u201d<\/p>\n
She continued: \u201cTM will miss you, your teammates will miss you and coach will miss you.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
At three months old, Ava Tompkins sponged up the game from her father\u2019s chest as he hollered at high school players as a coach in Australia. At three years old she knew what a jump stop was and could deliver a chest pass. As a middle schooler she led her coed Hoop Rats community team […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":427,"featured_media":16015,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_stopmodifiedupdate":false,"_modified_date":"","wds_primary_category":6,"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"yst_prominent_words":[],"class_list":["post-16014","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16014","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/427"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=16014"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16014\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/16015"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=16014"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=16014"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=16014"},{"taxonomy":"yst_prominent_words","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/yst_prominent_words?post=16014"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}