'This is my purpose.' Israeli freshman Yarden Garzon's quiet fire lighting it up for IU.

The sun was low in the sky when Yarden Garzon’s day began. In a matter of months, she was bound for Indiana to begin her college basketball career on the other side of the world. Until then, she wanted to make the most of her time at home in Western Israel.

She had commissioned her former coach Roi Lazar to prepare her over the summer. There weren’t any gyms available nearby, so they had to work at outdoor courts, essentially public parks. They met each day at 6 a.m., before the sun got too high in the sky and the summer heat became unbearable, and Lazar put Garzon through a series of drills: ball-handling, pick-and-roll, attacking the basket, shooting.

So much shooting.

Garzon was solid away from the basket, but this was about doing it in different conditions. It was about making shots after she had already put up dozens. She shot until she could barely breathe, then took more. The point was to get her more comfortable in uncomfortable situations, late in games when she isn’t at her physical best.

“She’s the one that’s always searching to learn more and improve all the time,” Lazar said in Hebrew through an interpreter. “She likes the court and she’s always looking for chances to practice and work hard. She has no fear in her when she’s on the court.”

Garzon retreated indoors to lift weights by the afternoon. In the evening, she’d come back out to get more shots up. Somewhere in there, the 18-year-old about to leave the country for the better part of a year would make time to see friends.

Months later and some 6,000 miles away, Garzon has started every game for IU this season, the only freshman in a lineup otherwise made up of juniors and seniors. A 6-3 guard with few holes in her game, she’s flashed the potential to be the future of IU women’s basketball as the current generation highlighted by Grace Berger and Mackenzie Holmes moves on in the coming years.

Garzon’s goal isn’t just to go to the WNBA, but to be great when she gets there. Guiding her is unwavering confidence in her work ethic and herself, even if it’s buried under a layer of stoicism on the court and coexisting with the realities of a teenager adjusting to a foreign country off of it.

“I think this is one of my best things, that I’m trying (to) not doubt myself,” she said. “... Whatever it takes, if I really want something, I will do it.”

A long road from Israel

Garzon plays with the outward composure of a poker player. Shots going in or out, the Hoosiers winning or losing, her expression and body language remain the same. It’s not her natural temperament. Growing up, she was different. Fiery. Emotional. She yelled at opponents, teammates, referees, anyone she was unhappy with during games.

She got on a teammate for messing up in practice when she was 14, and her coach told her something that stuck: “It’s not helping.”

Her evolution eventually landed at the stone-faced player for Indiana. She doesn’t actively suppress herself, but she handles the ebbs and flows of a game better. Sometimes she talks to herself, brief messages to move herself along.

“OK, next.”

“What next?”

“What now?”

And sometimes, the passion, the intensity, does come bubbling to the surface, like in overtime against Nebraska on New Year’s Day. As an ugly, gritty win came into focus for IU in the final minutes, Garzon shuffled her feet to stay with Cornhusker guard Sam Haiby on two attempted drives, then leapt, extending her long arms into the air, getting her hands on an entry pass to the high post.

Garzon gained possession, got fouled and let out a roar as she slammed the ball to the ground, feeding off an energized Assembly Hall crowd.

“I think it’s her look and her appearance, a little bit faking,” said Sharon Drucker, who coached Garzon on the Israeli national team. “She wants to win very much, and sometimes when you see her and you watch her, and you think, ‘OK, she is relaxed.’ But inside, she is really hot-tempered and she wants to win, and she will do everything to win.”

Grace Berger returns for IU:Hoosiers are even more dangerous after a win over Northwestern

Garzon started playing basketball in fourth grade. Her twin sister Yuval wanted to give it a shot, so Garzon tagged along. Yuval quickly lost interest, but her sister was hooked. In 2019, she came to the United States to work out with AAU coach Vernard Hollins in Fort Wayne, landing her on IU’s radar.

When she was 16 years old, she started playing with and against professionals, including WNBA players, in club ball. The transition was rough. Her competition was bigger, faster and more polished than her.

Things became easier as she grew and developed. In her second season, she was stronger. She felt more comfortable, like she belonged. She played all five positions. She spent so much time in the gym her teammate Joyner Holmes, now on the Connecticut Sun, had to tell her to ease up to keep from wearing herself out.

“You could see over time, she got more aggressive,” Holmes said. “She would have counter-moves because we played her to whatever her strengths were and made her go to her weaknesses, so she picked up on things pretty well, pretty quickly and it’s developed and it’s translated.”

Added Garzon: “It felt more natural, and I felt like this is my home, this is my league.”

Her team, Maccabi Ra’anana, was young, especially among the Israeli players. The relative veterans were Holmes and Kaela Davis, both American. When the team struggled in practice to implement a 2-3 zone, Garzon, 16 or 17 at the time, stepped in, directing others where to to position themselvs and move, using her limited English to bridge the gap between the Americans and Israelis.

All of Garzon’s experience in her home country — three club seasons, a stint as a starter on the national team — molded her into someone both physically able to play in college and unintimidated by the challenges ahead of her in Indiana.

“She looked in everybody’s eyes,” Drucker said. “It didn’t matter even if it’s professional, 30- year-old woman. She’s playing with them very equal. (She) doesn’t give respect, which I like.”

A new challenge at IU

Little could prepare Garzon for the culture shock when she arrived in Indiana. There was the distance from home, the food, the cultural and social differences. People acted differently in the United States, she noticed. There’s more of a filter, a consciousness of the feelings of others than in Israel.

The time change meant she mostly communicated with family and friends in the morning, before class and practice. By the evening it was too late. The only family member on a similar schedule was her older sister Lior, a forward at Oklahoma State.

Just having someone she could talk to, someone in a similar time zone who spoke her language, helped Garzon through an isolating time. Garzon’s English was good enough to get by, but speaking with Lior brought comfort and familiarity, not to mention the advice of someone who went through the same move and process two years earlier.

Like sharing the court with professionals for the first time, the adjustments came gradually but organically for Garzon. Being inundated with English was difficult, but it forced her to improve speech. Going to class and writing papers also helped.

Even basketball, a constant in her life and the reason she left home in the first place, was more challenging abroad. She struggled to understand her coaches in the first two weeks. If one was speaking to multiple people, a teammate sometimes stood next to Garzon, quietly relaying the message in simpler terms.

“I have to realize it really quick once I’m on the court and coach is saying something,” she said. “I have to react, and once I started to get used to react to English words or something like this, it was a little bit easier.”

The way Garzon plays and carries herself on the court makes it easy to forget how young she is, that she’s barely out of high school. Her experience in Israel gave her an advanced knowledge of the game and forced her to grow up from the child that couldn’t control her temper toward her teammates.

So while she’s come out of nowhere to a national college basketball audience, averaging 12.1 points per game and shooting 46.5% from 3-point range for a top-10 team, it’s been a much slower build to her.

It was a build that, to this point, has landed her exactly where she planned to be: in the United States, contributing for one of the top teams in the country. She has greater ambitions down the road.

“I love the game, and this is my purpose,” she said. “This is my goal, to be a good professional player. I think this is my biggest motivator, that I want it. I know what I can be, and I’m afraid of not doing everything to be the best I can be.”

This article originally appeared on Indianapolis Star: How Yarden Garzon got from Israel to Indiana women's basketball