Nice focused article in the Athletic where her basketball career / recruiting / WNBA is discussed.
Back home in Tennessee, Dangerfield's parents are DVR-ing every game of her rookie season with the Lynx, just as they've done for years.
theathletic.com
The recruiting is of course of most interest and I do not recall the details being particularly well known. Other stuff includes her maniacal devotion to film study from her earliest days.
“I was all set to (go to UT),” Dangerfield said. “I was always watching Candace and the teams that she was on then. Everywhere I went, people were asking me, ‘Oh, are you going to go to Tennessee?’ That’s what I got when I was growing up.”
Dangerfield was a standout player at Blackman High School in Tennessee. (Davonna Dangerfield)
But by the time she started getting recruited, Summitt had retired and other schools were after Dangerfield. She took three official visits as a junior, to Vanderbilt, Maryland and UConn. During her weekend at Maryland, she nearly committed because of the feeling she got on campus, and if she was going to be leaving Tennessee for the first time in her life, she wanted something that felt like home. But on the advice of her mother, she decided to wait until after her final visit — UConn.
During the visit to Storrs, she felt something that was even more familiar than a home 16 hours from home — the feeling of a raised expectation, sometimes on a minute-by-minute basis from coach Geno Auriemma, for everyone that touched the UConn program. Dangerfield committed.
“He has this vision of what you can be, if you just trust him to build you into the player that he sees you being,” Dangerfield said. “And it’s hard, because most of the players that go there, you’re all that where you come from — you’re All-American, McDonald’s All-American, your Gatorade Player of the Year and all of that. And you get there and they basically strip that away — you’re a freshman. You haven’t earned anything. You haven’t proven anything.”
She was a sly old vet when she left, ready for the pros. She was a young kid fresh out of HS with her eyes wide open, not really knowing what to expect.
www.wnba.com
