Leslie Knight - photo courtesy of Gopher Athletics

By Danny LaChance

This past summer, during a youth basketball camp at the University of Minnesota, an ambitious middle-schooler posed a question to visiting members of the Gopher women’s basketball team. “How can I get to where you are? What advice can you give us?” Without hesitating, Jordan Barnes, a senior guard and co-captain of this year’s team, replied, “Always surround yourself with good people.” Standing next to her was her co-captain, senior guard Leslie Knight, who nodded in recognition. It just might have been the sagest advice Knight has ever heard about how to find success in basketball.

It’s not difficult to understand why. A year earlier, in spring 2006, Knight was feeling isolated after three teammates who had joined the Gophers at the same time she did, in 2004, decided to leave the University. Their departure hit Knight hard and created uncertainty in a program that abruptly lost a lot of talent and experience. “We came in this together, we’d been going through this together, we lived in the dorms together,” Knight says. “It was our little group and all of a sudden, I was the only one.”

In addition to those who left the team unexpectedly, the program also graduated six players. But when practices began a few months later, Knight began feeling hopeful about all of the new people surrounding her. “We had all these freshmen that came up and it was like a burst of new life and new energy,” she says.

And then there was the addition of Barnes, a force in her own right who was a familiar presence on the court to Knight: The two grew up near each other in Minnetonka, Minnesota, and had played together on the Hopkins High School basketball team.

After high school, Barnes had initially gone to Winthrop University in South Carolina, eager to play Division I basketball in a close-knit, small-school atmosphere. But soon after she arrived, she says, she found herself on a mediocre team that was trying to reinvent itself. Her teammates didn’t challenge her in practice and, worse still, they didn’t even seem to want to challenge each other. It was the opposite of her high school experience, where you had to prove you could run the ball with older, more experienced players and had to earn every second of playing time.

“I thought, ‘Is this what college basketball is supposed to be about?’ ” she recalls. And so, after a semester, Barnes left Winthrop and returned home. After regrouping, Barnes emailed her old friend Knight and asked if she might have a shot at transferring to the U and playing for the Gophers. It was shortly after the team had lost several players, and Coach Pam Borton was on the hunt for new talent. Barnes filled the bill. Surrounded by new energy, back on the court together with a coaching staff dedicated to rebuilding morale, Knight and Barnes found new opportunities to become the players they always dreamed of being.

Until the

Jordan Barnes

overhaul of the team roster, Knight—a former Ms. Basketball of Minnesota who had set Hopkins High School records with 2,335 career points and 1,125 rebounds—had seen little playing time as a Gopher. Her 5- foot, 11-inch frame made her too small for the post playing she had done so well in high school, so Borton began training her as a guard, a position she had never played.

Going to practice those first two years had felt a bit like showing up to a French exam and being asked to conjugate Japanese verbs. “I was playing guard with Division I girls who have been playing guard their whole lives,” Knight says.

Games were especially tough: It was hard, those first two years, hearing her teammates’ names called over the public address system at Williams Arena, watching as they ran to center court to throw T-shirts into the stands during the pregame ritual while she sat on the bench.

The dramatic change in the Gophers roster and a growth spurt to 6 feet, 1 inch gave her a chance to show just how tough and improved she had become after two years of drills. “Reality set in and I thought, ‘I’m going to have to step up. I’m going to have to play,’ ” Knight recalls. Not only did she play, she was a starter in every game last season. She scored double-digit points in 15 games and led her team with a free-throw percentage of 83 percent. She easily became one of the most improved players in the Big Ten.

Meanwhile, Barnes, a marketing and coaching studies major, added even more to a team that was already strong on defense. “Her strengths are her passion, her heart,” Borton says. “She’s a hard-nosed player. She fits really well into our system—we’re a very tough-nosed defensive team.”

The two co-captains, who share an apartment in Dinkytown, are enthusiastic about the team’s prospects for the coming season. A young team that ended in the middle-of the-pack last season (7–9 in the Big Ten, 17–15 overall), they believe that the Gophers are poised for a Big Ten Championship this year.

“We’ve had great players in Lindsay Whalen and Janel McCarville,” Knight says. These days, however, the team’s strength is in the breadth of its talent. “We don’t necessarily have specific superstars, but everyone is really good.”

That’s the message Borton wants all of her players to hear. “The biggest thing is getting the kids to believe that we can do it, because physically we can,” Borton says, noting the team’s perimeter strength, speed, and athleticism.

“We do have confidence,” Knight says. “We’re getting to the point of knowing that even though we’re young, we’re dang good.”

Borton is lucky to have two co-captains who have learned to expect—and embrace—the unexpected. Indeed, the past three years have taught Barnes and Knight that the quest for basketball greatness can lead to the unexpected—to a position you’ve never played, to a team you never thought you’d captain, to a friend from high school who originally went to college a thousand miles away. And maybe, just maybe, to a Big Ten championship.