Sometimes all it takes is a single event; an occurrence that awakens the desire in a player. For Wayne County High School junior point guard Amani Trice, it happened last season when the Lady Yellow Jackets basketball team lost a big game.
“We had come up short in the final minutes of the region championship game,” Amani says. “It made me want to work harder.”
And so she did. The loss to Burke County still stinging, Trice took every opportunity to get in the gym to improve her game. Rather than settling for finishing second, she worked on new skills like using her left hand and pulling up to shoot. Luckily, she had a built-in practice partner in her brother, Marcus, who plays for Coach Robert Cotton’s boy’s Yellow Jackets. He and Amani’s friends would play one-on-one against her to help her become a better player. She worked day after day to become a more accurate shooter and ball handler. The hard work has shown this season, as Trice has greatly improved her shooting ability from inside the paint and beyond the three-point line. She has also worked on being able to play with either hand, which has given her an advantage. She credits Lady Yellow Jackets’ Coach Kala Hires-Hobbs for teaching her the correct way to shoot and play defense.
“Defense; defense is what wins games,” Amani says of her favorite part of the game. Trice may not be the most technically skilled player on the court, but she excels in other areas. She has become a major part of the Lady Yellow Jackets’ success as a leader in practice and on the floor during games.
“We put her defensively on our opponent’s best player every game, and very rarely does she come up short,” Coach Hobbs says of Trice, adding that she has improved her overall skill set and is taking more, and better, shots this year.
“She has already scored more than she did last year, and we are only halfway into our season,” Coach Hobbs says.
Trice has the ability to handle pressure as well, once performing as a backup dancer for a crowd of more than 500 people. But it was her skills out front on the basketball court that helped the Lady Yellow Jackets to big pre-Christmas victories over Bradwell Institute, Long County, and Richmond Hill.
As she hit her teens, Trice started playing basketball and soccer and running track when she was in seventh grade at Martha Puckett Middle School in Jesup. In basketball, her first big play came when she hit a three-pointer in overtime to win a game 34-33. She continued to play, and now as a high school junior, she is a three-sport athlete. On the soccer pitch, she is a goalkeeper; she runs the 4×100 meter relay, 100 meters, and long jump in track. She is a point guard on the basketball court and keeps her head in the game at all times, constantly telling herself to concentrate on the task at hand.
“Play this game as if it was your last,” she says of her on-court thought process.
While she has worked hard to step up her game on the court, she is also a standout in the classroom, where she holds a 96.5 grade point average (which calculates to a 4.0). Although she does not have a preference of schools yet, her goal is to attend a four-year college and earn a medical degree so that she can become an obstetrician and gynecologist (OB/GYN).
In the meantime, she continues to impress teachers with her academic prowess and coaches with her can-do attitude and constant desire to improve.
“Since I have had the pleasure of coaching Amani, she has improved in every aspect of the game,” her coach says. “We look for great things to come from her at the end of this season and her continuing to develop next year in her senior season.”
SE-RS-0116-Trice
Amani Trice
Wayne County
By Rob Asbell
Photos by Jeffrey Griffith
The Desire to Work Harder
