Women’s basketball: For Gophers’ Amaya Battle, a smooth transition

Betsy Helfand, Pioneer Press
·3 min read
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In the time she’s been around her, there is something important that sticks out to coach Lindsay Whalen about freshman Amaya Battle.

“I’ve never seen somebody so excited about tacos before — outside of probably myself,” Whalen said. “ … She just has this, like, unrivaled joy for life that I haven’t seen very often.”

For basketball, too.

And the true freshman point guard, a four-star recruit and the No. 39 overall player in her class per ESPN/HoopGurlz Basketball, has clearly made a strong early impression on her coach. Battle and the Gophers (4-2) will host Wake Forest (4-3) on Wednesday at 7 p.m. at Williams Arena in the Big Ten/ACC Challenge.

“It’s been fun to watch her continue to progress, and even six games and just the improvement she’s had from the start and just very proud of how hard she works,” Whalen said. “She’s an unbelievable person, and really happy to have her on the team.”

Battle has come off the bench to start the season by design — Whalen said she didn’t want to put the pressure of running the point from the outset on the freshman — but is third on the team in minutes per game (28.2) nonetheless.

During the time she’s sitting on the bench, Battle said she and sophomore Maggie Czinano are using that time to assess exactly what they need to do when they hit the court.

“We’re like, ‘OK, when we go in, we need to do this. We need to bring this,’ ” Battle said. “We basically just read how the game is going, and then when we get in we take what we found and then we try to apply it to help the team.”

It seems to be working.

Battle has made a splash, averaging 11.3 points, 5.17 assists and 7.2 rebounds a game, good for ninth in the Big Ten. Rebounding, the 5-foot-11 guard said, has always come naturally to her, and she takes pride in the fact that even if she’s having an off night shooting, there are still plenty of ways her skillset will allow her to help the team.

Battle said she’s hoping to cut down on her turnovers; she had five in a three-point loss at Virginia last Saturday and four in a victory over Liberty, also in Charlottesville, Va., on Sunday.

But while the pace may be faster than what she experienced at Hopkins High School, Battle said she was “pleasantly surprised” that she hasn’t had to change her game much.

“Some people may get here and they have to change their whole game because college is different,” she said. “But I’ve found that I’m still able to do the same things that I was able to do in high school, and that makes me feel good because it shows that I can be a pretty consistent player when I want to be.”

And when things aren’t going her way, she has a built-in sounding board to turn to: older brother Jamison, a junior on the men’s basketball team.

Jamison, she said, has been helpful in telling her exactly what to expect, especially during a freshman year full of changes.

“It’s really valuable,” she said. “It’s nice to have him here and it’s nice to see us both doing things on the court at the same school. It’s just cool because we’re representing our family in the same way and doing it together.”

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