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Women’s basketball: Back in comfort zone, Gophers transfer Destinee Oberg will ‘shoot for the moon’

john shipley, pioneer press
·4 min read

Destinee Oberg’s college basketball career started inauspiciously. One of Minnesota’s highest-ranked high school recruits as a senior, she was a freshman at Arkansas when she was hit by a truck. Literally.

“I was riding my scooter back to my dorm,” she said.

Oberg suffered broken bones in her face and wrist and a concussion. The injuries kept her off the court until late in the season, which itself was cut short by the coronavirus pandemic. She played only eight games.

It was the beginning of a tough run for the 6-foot-3 post from Burnsville, a nationally ranked prospect — Prospects Nation had her ranked the sixth-best post player in the nation — who never found a home in a guard-oriented offense at Arkansas. She stuck it out for three seasons before entering the NCAA transfer portal this spring and will start over at Minnesota when summer school begins in June.

She is coach Lindsay Whalen’s second portal addition, joining graduate guard Mi’Col Cayton from Nebraska, since the Gophers lost a total of seven players from last year’s roster to the portal.

“I’d say that through all the years that I’ve been playing, I play my best basketball when I’m happiest and feel like the people around me have my best interests in mind,” Oberg said last week. “Especially being surrounded by people at home, and that’s something I’ll be able to do.”

Oberg’s numbers overall won’t catch anyone’s eye — she averaged 1.1 points and 1.2 rebounds in 39 games at Arkansas — but upon closer look is an intriguing addition for a team that finished 15-18 overall, 7-11 in the Big Ten, last season and welcomes a nationally ranked freshmen class for 2022-23.

When Oberg was given a shot, she was productive. As a junior last season, she played double-digit minutes only four times in 19 appearances, three straight in December. In victories over Jackson State, Arkansas-Little Rock and Central Arkansas, Oberg averaged 8 points and 5.6 rebounds in 19.3 minutes a game.

Two games later, she failed to dent to scoresheet in 14 minutes against Tennessee and essentially never played again, 13 scattered minutes in eight games.

Why?

“I wish I could tell you, I really don’t know,” Oberg said. “I am wondering the same thing. That was, like, the main reason that I chose to leave.”

Oberg had options as a senior in high school. She started at Holy Angels, where she played with former Gophers forward Laura Bagwell Katalinich, before a back injury forced her to miss her junior season. She transferred to Bloomington Kennedy for her senior season and had scholarship offers from the Gophers, Michigan, Michigan State, Purdue, Maryland and Washington.

She chose Arkansas because she liked the people she met in the program, which wound up helping during her junior season. After producing in her few chances and falling out of the rotation, Oberg said, she was miserable.

“It was really hard. Like, it was awful,” she said. “At that point I wasn’t doing it for me, I was doing it to be there for my friends and teammates, and that was what got me through it. My friends were really good to me.”

When Whalen called, she sensed a kindred spirit.

“I would say I’m a pretty intuitive person and in the times that I talked to her, I had kind of seen some of myself in her,” Oberg said. And, she acknowledged, “there was a little bit of a fangirl moment when I heard from her because, you know, it’s crazy. There’s just a lot of opportunity.”

Oberg will have two seasons of eligibility and is petitioning the NCAA for a third, a medical redshirt for her freshman season cut short by a pandemic and a truck.

“I’m going in (to Minnesota) to do my best,” she said. “I don’t want to say, ‘I’m going to do this, I’m going to do that.’ I’m going to go in and do the best I can, you know? Shoot for the moon.”

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