FRUITPORT – Over the past few years, Cierra Fri has been developing into a pretty darn good basketball player – on her own time, in her own neighborhood.
She had played one year of organized basketball, back in elementary school, but didn’t really like it and quit after the season.
She preferred a less formal format, on outdoor courts, playing with and against her older brother and her friends – mostly boys – who pushed her and made her better.
Fri never really thought about going out for the team at Fruitport High School.
Meanwhile, Fruitport girls basketball coach Bob Packard had no idea there was a student in the school, right under his nose, who could help his team a lot.
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That all changed last summer, when Fri went to an open gym session at the high school, just to shoot around, and was noticed by someone who recognized her abilities.
“Our softball coach reached out and said there was a player in the gym that we needed to be aware of,” Coach Packard said.
So Packard made a point of meeting Fri, encouraged her to try out, and she decided to take the plunge.
“We started working with her around mid-June,” the coach said. “We had a few workouts and a scrimmage and she was already making moves. I was like, okay, she can definitely play a little!”
Fri has added a lot to the Trojans’ attack this season.
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She can shoot three-pointers. She can drive through traffic to the rim. She has brought another scoring element to a Fruitport offense that has sometimes relied too much on top scorer Izzy Hanson-Wilbur.
The only sad part is that Fri is a senior and can only play this season. You have to wonder how good she would be right now if she had joined the program a few years earlier.
Fri wonders, too.
‘I’m really enjoying it,” she said. “I wish I would have started sooner.”
Fri has always been a kid who did her own thing. While her current teammates were coming up through the system, playing middle school, junior varsity and varsity basketball, she was developing under the radar playing street ball.
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She played just because she loved to play, with no particular goal in mind.
“In my old neighborhood, everybody loved to play basketball,” Fri said. “I enjoyed it, but I was never good at it. I wanted to be able to play with the older kids, so I decided to practice every day on my own and get better, and I always tried to play with people who were better than me, which helped me. They were mostly boys. I never really hung out with girls until high school.
“We played other sports too, like football, which also toughened me up. I didn’t want them to go easy on me. I wanted them to be the way they were with each other.”
The better she got, the more people around her started urging her to play for the school team, but she resisted for a long time.
“At first I was like, no way I wanted to play competitive, organized basketball,” Fri said. “It just wasn’t my thing. I just wanted to have fun with it. But now I see that organized basketball is really pretty fun, too.”
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Fri has had some really nice games so far this season.
She scored 11 points in the first half of a win over Kelloggsville and finished with 14. She scored 11 points in a victory over Comstock Park and 12 in a win over Whitehall.
She nailed three triples in the second quarter in a win over Belding, and ended up with 14 points.
Fri led the Trojans with 13 points in another victory over Comstock Park on Friday.
She has hung in there and continued to improve and contribute, despite spraining her ankle in the first game, and being sick for a few weeks in the early part of the season.
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“She’s tough as nails,” Packard said. “I think her big welcome to high school basketball was the Belding game. She hit three three-pointers in the first half, then they face-guarded her and didn’t let her score, but she never quit.
“She got the tip that led to Ava Powell’s game-winning layup. She just kept battling on the boards to get that opportunity. Some kids might have said, forget it, but she figured out a way to help the team keep going and get the win.”
Packard isn’t surprised that Fri is doing so well, because he saw a lot of confidence in her on the first day of practice.
“She was a little cocky,” he said with a chuckle. “She knew she was good. I haven’t wanted to stifle that too much, because she is still very coachable.
“It’s been fun watching her develop as a teammate. I knew she had the skill, but I didn’t know what kind of teammate she would be. But she’s pretty quiet, just goes about her business, and never really gets too up or down. The team really enjoys having her around.
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“She’s just a girl who wants to play basketball, wherever and whenever she can. I love it that she has found a place where she belongs.”
Fri said there have been some definite adjustments to playing organized, indoor basketball.
“Playing with four teammates is very different, mostly the communicating and talking part,” she said. “It was easier to score when I played with fewer people!
“Going to practice was definitely different for me, too, but I am used to it now and I enjoy it. Talking with teammates on defense, as the ball moves around and everybody has to shift, has been different, but my teammates have helped me a lot with that.”
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Packard is hoping Fri, who is a good student in the classroom, will consider going out for the Muskegon Community College women’s team next year.
Fri said she will consider that idea. In the meantime, she has some advice for the many kids out there who are quietly good at a lot of different things, but are too shy or uncertain to step out and show it:
Don’t wait too long!
“You miss 100 percent of the shots in life that you don’t take,” she said. “You might as well go for it. You can’t wait forever. Start as soon as you can and you won’t regret it.”
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