{"id":33019,"date":"2020-11-01T14:47:07","date_gmt":"2020-11-01T19:47:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/?p=33019"},"modified":"2024-07-09T14:49:25","modified_gmt":"2024-07-09T18:49:25","slug":"a-basketball-life","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/a-basketball-life\/","title":{"rendered":"A Basketball Life"},"content":{"rendered":"

FEW HAVE OVERPOWERED THE SOUTHERN CONFERENCE\u00a0more than\u00a0Rushia Brown \u201994<\/strong>, the only Furman basketball player to ever compete in the WNBA. But she got a taste of her own medicine early in the league\u2019s inaugural 1996-97 season.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Brown while playing for the Cleveland Rockers in 2000.\/Danny Moloshok, Getty Images.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

The Cleveland Rockers were in California to take on the Los Angeles Sparks, and Rockers coach Linda Hill-MacDonald penciled Brown into the starting lineup for the first time because she thought Brown was the team\u2019s best hope of matching up with Lisa Leslie. That would be the same 6-foot-5-inch Lisa Leslie who once scored 101 points in a half in high school, was the first woman to dunk in a game, won four Olympic gold medals, and is set to have a statue erected in her honor outside the Staples Center in Los Angeles.<\/p>\n

Brown was somewhat less well known, but two quick baskets got Leslie\u2019s attention.<\/p>\n

\u201cShe was just looking at me, because I\u2019m jumping around, I\u2019m all excited. Then she blocked my next two shots, threw \u2019em in the stands,\u201d Brown says with a laugh. \u201cAfter that, I calmed down.\u201d<\/p>\n

Lives after retirement<\/h2>\n

There are few women \u2013 or men \u2013 who have been considered a legitimate matchup for Lisa Leslie, which by itself would make Brown one of the most accomplished Furman athletes in any sport. But that was just of one of many nights during Brown\u2019s 10-year professional career that saw her go against the best competition in the world and propelled her into the front office of two WNBA franchises \u2013 first as player programs and franchise development manager for the WNBA\u2019s Las Vegas Aces and, most recently, as director of community relations and youth sports for the Sparks.<\/p>\n

With the Aces, Brown helped prepare team members for life after basketball and served as the public face of the franchise. In Los Angeles, she\u2019ll be tasked with growing the Sparks\u2019 presence within the community. Both positions reflect skills Brown developed after her playing days were over that may be as impressive as the ones she developed on the court.<\/p>\n

Though they\u2019d never even met, Aces coach and president of operations Bill Laimbeer of Detroit Pistons fame offered Brown a job with the organization based on her reputation as a nationally known motivational speaker and founder of the Women\u2019s Professional Basketball Alumnae Association (WPBA), an organization dedicated to helping athletes create new lives for themselves after retirement.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Brown interviews Liz Cambage after a game.\/David Becker, Getty Images.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\u201cOne of Rushia\u2019s greatest qualities is she likes to help people,\u201d says Edneisha Curry, who would know. Part of the reason Curry is the only full-time assistant coach for an NCAA Division I men\u2019s basketball team, at the University of Maine, is because Brown steered her toward the NBA assistant coaches program when she wasn\u2019t sure which direction to go when her WNBA career ended.<\/p>\n

A desire to help<\/h2>\n

Brown was inspired to start the WPBA after learning a one-time WNBA star was homeless. She was similarly inspired to found OverTime Basketball Academy, a nonprofit dedicated to helping girls and young women in Atlanta, when she realized many weren\u2019t being given the foundation they needed to succeed. Her motivational speaking is also born from a desire to help by sharing lessons learned from her own struggles to transition from being a player.<\/p>\n

\u201cI did not know what I wanted to do, so like every other athlete, I went into a state of depression just trying to figure out who I was without the ball,\u201d Brown says. \u201cIt was really difficult for me. But the thing that helped was I have always been a people person.\u201d<\/p>\n

Brown\u2019s basketball journey started on a tragic note. She took up the sport for the first time in the 10th grade as a way to cope with the death of her father the year before. Although she rapidly developed into one of the most highly recruited players in the country, the shadow of his passing was the biggest reason she backed out of a commitment to the University of North Carolina to attend Furman.<\/p>\n

\u201cMy family still wasn\u2019t doing well,\u201d says Brown, who lived in Summerville, South Carolina. \u201cWe didn\u2019t have anything. I didn\u2019t have a car. I just wasn\u2019t comfortable leaving home, and Furman was close to home.\u201d<\/p>\n

Her place in history<\/h2>\n

Furman coach Sherry Carter never gave up on recruiting Brown, and she was rewarded with one of the biggest coups imaginable. By the time Brown was done, she had led the Paladins to their first three regular-season Southern Conference championships and set a truly staggering number of records (her name appears 137 times in the women\u2019s basketball media guide). At 6-feet, 2-inches tall, Brown was taller than most of her competitors and also more athletic, and that fearsome combination helped her pull off the unprecedented feat of leading Furman in scoring, rebounding, steals and blocked shots all four full seasons she played, while twice being named the Edna Hartness Female Athlete of the Year.<\/p>\n

\u201cShe is the best player other than\u00a0Frank Selvy \u201954<\/strong>\u00a0in Furman history, and I think anybody who knows anything about basketball who saw her play would have said the same thing,\u201d says Carter, who won 300 games over 20 seasons.<\/p>\n

Nonetheless, Brown expected her basketball days to be over when she graduated with a sociology degree, but agents representing players in Europe had other ideas. The most competitive women\u2019s basketball in the world was played overseas, and Brown rose to the challenge to carve out a career there that saw her play in five countries and win three European titles.<\/p>\n

Despite that success, however, had she not beaten out approximately 200 other hopefuls at an open tryout to earn a place on Cleveland\u2019s practice squad, she may never have played in the WNBA. Once again, Brown proved she belonged, averaging 5.9 points and 3.4 rebounds over 250 games, while helping the Rockers to Eastern Conference regular-season championships in 1998 and 2001.<\/p>\n

Not bad for someone who says she never saw her life being all about basketball.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt was nothing I had aspired to do, but once I started playing, I wanted to be the best that I could. So every experience, every country I got to go to, every Olympian I had the opportunity to play with or against \u2013 it was just something really exciting for me, because I wasn\u2019t supposed to be there,\u201d Brown says. \u201cI just wanted to go to school and get my degree and be a social worker and work with kids. In the end I\u2019m still doing the things I want. It\u2019s just in a different way.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Becoming Furman\u2019s finest player was only the start for Rushia Brown \u201994.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":295,"featured_media":33020,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2892,2894,1963],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-33019","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-fall-2020","category-feature-fall-2020","category-furman-magazine"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33019","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/295"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=33019"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33019\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":33022,"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33019\/revisions\/33022"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/33020"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=33019"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=33019"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=33019"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}