A blend of talents: Carys Baker benefits from the family gene pool, including an NBA All-Star dad, but is making her own way on the court

She’s a lefty, like her mom. She got her height from her father.

Carys Baker’s mother is Maura Rodgers, a member of the Northwest Catholic Hall of Fame who played at the University of Hartford. Her father is Vin Baker, who also played at the University of Hartford and was a four-time NBA All-Star.

Baker, a 6-foot-1 fifth-year senior guard at Loomis Chaffee who lives in West Hartford with her mom, was the top-rated recruit in the state in the Class of 2023 by ESPN’s HoopGurlz. She will play at Virginia Tech next year.

“We always have this debate, who is the best basketball player in the family,” Carys said. “I always say, me, easily. My mom says it’s her. My dad says it’s him.”

When Carys went to visit her dad, who is an assistant coach with the Milwaukee Bucks, last year, he suggested a game of H-O-R-S-E.

“I was like, ‘I’m going to take her into some deeper water here and make her shoot from the 3-point line,’” Vin said this past week. “And she absolutely destroyed me from the 3-point line.

“I was kicking myself for getting beat but I was also super proud like, ‘This is so incredible.’ She’s a great, great shooter.”

“It wasn’t even close,” Carys said.

Carys is the leading scorer for Loomis (8-4), averaging 22 points per game. She missed games due to an ACL tear her sophomore year and in 2020-21, Loomis didn’t play at all because of COVID-19, but she still scored her 1,000th point last month. She is on the Naismith Girls High School Player of the Year Trophy preseason watch list and was nominated to play in the McDonald’s All-American Game.

Last year, the Pelicans won their first New England Prep A title, beating Thayer Academy 53-38 and Baker was the MVP, with 17 points, eight rebounds and four assists.

“She loves the game, she wants to learn and be better,” Loomis coach Adrian Stewart said. “As a person, she’s one of these kids, you’re standing there and everybody walks by – ‘Hey, Carys, hey, Carys.’

“She’s a planet. She has gravitational pull. She’s the kind of person people want to be around. She’s been the Pied Piper of this program, probably since her sophomore year.”

Carys grew up with her mother in West Hartford and didn’t have much contact with her father, who played for 13 years in the NBA and struggled with addiction to alcohol and drugs before he became sober in 2011.

It was her mother, whose four sisters played college basketball, who coached Carys, starting when she was 5 years old.

“My son Gavin, who is three years older, he was in travel basketball,” Rodgers said. “I helped coach his team so she went to all of his practices. We would put her into shooting drills, defensive drills. She loved it. They didn’t care she was a girl.”

Rodgers was a point guard; it was important to her that her daughter learn how to handle the ball and shoot from the outside and so that’s what they worked on in travel team practice and in the driveway at home.

During her freshman year at Loomis, Stewart remembered a close game the Pelicans lost before the holiday break. Carys had the last shot of the game and missed on a drive to the basket.

“The day after Christmas, she came to my house to watch film,” he said. “She had her mom drive her to my house. We didn’t have practice or anything.”

Soccer went by the wayside after eighth grade. That’s when Carys tore the ACL in her right knee. She played her freshman year, then tore the ACL in her other knee her sophomore year.

And for a while, she struggled with her confidence.

“You hear it everywhere you go,” she said. “You have an expectation to be super talented because of your parents -’Your parents are really good at basketball, you must be good.’ When I was young, I wasn’t confident at all in my ability to play basketball. It started in high school, I started to get really confident.

“When I was younger, it was hard to hear. Now it’s like I take it, it’s true, I understand where I’ve come from and I’m really grateful to have parents who have given me this ability to do what I do.”

She credits the Nike-sponsored Exodus team in New York, one of the top travel teams in the country, for helping her develop her confidence.

“Thomas Davis, he was my coach, I’ve been with him three years and I think that’s why I built up so much confidence,” she said. “New York basketball is very different from Connecticut. I had to adapt to it very quickly. I was like, ‘I can run with these girls, I can play with them.’”

Stewart noticed it too.

“She needed to bring a little bit of bite to her game,” he said. “A little more toughness. By going down and playing on a Nike team and playing against really good competition week in and week out, she was able to do that. She brought that back to the gym.”

Most of the players are back from Loomis’ New England championship team. The goal is to win another one.

“Last January, we lost a lot of games, we were struggling,” Baker said. “In the playoffs, we went on a complete run. It was a great feeling.”

Lori Riley can be reached at lriley@courant.com.