Newly drafted Minnesota Lynx of America star, Erica Ogwumike is looking beyond her expected exploits in USA’s Women National Basketball Association (WNBA ), as she has opted to take the that lane two of her older sisters refused to follow, as she is bent on committing her future to representing Nigeria at senior level, megasportsarena.com gathered.
Having made some high marks playing for God’s Own Country in youth cadre, Ogwumike is now thinking of the bigger picture in green-and-white, even as she mixes playing basketball with her medical studies in the US, where her older sisters are both senior internationals.
Even as she seeks inroads into national team relevance with regular action in the WNBA, there is already a lot of drama heralding Ogwumike’s arrival, as she had initially been drafted with the 26th pick by New York Liberty, only for a turnaround to occur same night when her rights were traded to Minnesota Lynx.
Ogwumike attended college at Rice University where she became the fourth Owls’ player to be taken in the draft and was selected by the WNBA as All-American Honorable Mention early last month, having spent her freshman year at Pepperdine before moving on to Rice for her final three years and will now join her two older sisters, Nneka and Chiney, in the WNBA.
This comes after The Owls star guard finished her college career by joining the 2,000 points and 1,000 rebounds club and was named back to back Conference USA player of the year, having averaged 19 points per game in her senior season.
In three years at Rice, she averaged a total of 17.7 points per game and, although she is not a great three-point shooter, shooting only 17 percent from behind the arc last season, she can drive to the basket well and has an excellent mid-range game, with 45 percent from the field in the past season.
At 5’9″ and playing the guard position, Ogwumike is not scared to mix up with the forwards and centers to battle for rebounds, as she averaged 10.3 per game, and for an excellent rebounding guard, made the Conference USA All-Defensive Team twice, she does an excellent job moving her feet and staying in front of the person and averaged 1.7 steals in three years as a Rice Owl.
The fairytale took another eventful turn early February for this fast-rising point guard, youngest sister of the Ogwumikes, who both star for Los Angeles Sparks and former No. 1 overall WNBA draft picks, when she was still on the cards of Rice University, as she boarded a plane to Dallas alone, a night after she hit 25 points during a home game against University of Alabama.
While her team remained in Houston to practice, Ogwumike prepared for her team’s next opponent on the plane and spent the day on the campus of University of Texas Southwestern Medical School in Dallas, one of nine medical schools into which she was enrolled to last winter.
The next day, she dropped 25 points and 17 rebounds in a victory against Middle Tennessee, much to the admiration of Nneka, who beamed about his younger sis, saying: “She’s in quite a unique situation. Whether she plays basketball or not professionally, she very much knows what she is going to do.”
Despite winning a state title in high school and being named MVP of the championship game, Ogwumike said she didn’t receive as much attention as other players in her state but, while she was not ranked as a top-10 recruit in the country, she played on an AAU club team that included DiDi Richards, who recently won a national championship with Baylor University.
Just few years ago, Ogwumike focused more on her medical studies, as she did not believe professional basketball was a part of her future at all, and her path to the WNBA became far different from that of her sisters, but Friday’s WNBA draft turned her story around full blast.
The 22-year-old lass of the moment, however, concluded the story by noting that she decided on a pre-med track as a sophomore, before which she developed a passion for the field through shadowing opportunities at Texas Medical Center, which sits blocks away from the Rice campus and is widely acclaimed as the biggest health services complex in the world.
“Nobody in my family does anything medical-related, so it was kind of like a shot in the dark. I always knew what elite competition and talent looked like because I played with it. But I never really got that type of publicity or recognition. I never really knew it was possible,” Ogwumike submitted.
