The Truth in First Impressions
Cameron Brink’s promise is becoming reality
By David Kiefer
03/15/2022
CAMERON BRINK first met coach Tara VanDerveer at a Stanford basketball camp at age 13. At least she thought she did.
As Brink was promoted from entry-level middle-school camper to scrimmaging against Stanford players in a single week, she realized it wasn’t Tara on the sidelines after all. It was Tara’s sister, Heidi. Tara was on vacation.
Tara or no Tara, Stanford offered the eighth-grader a scholarship only two years after she reluctantly took up the game in the first place, and Brink, now a Cardinal sophomore, has continued that trajectory ever since.
The Pac-12 Defensive Player of the Year – and the media’s conference player of the year – is evolving into one of the most dynamic players in women’s college basketball, and is helping pull the Cardinal with her.
Going into the NCAA tournament as a No. 1 seed, Stanford was perfect in Pac-12 regular season and tournament play and carries a 20-game winning streak.
“I hate losing more than I like winning,” she said.
It doesn’t happen often. Brink is 159-22 since her freshman year of high school in Beaverton, Oregon.
“She’s a real special talent, and she’s only going to get better,” said Tara, not Heidi. “She’ll be an All-American. I don’t think there’s any doubt she’ll be an Olympian. She’s already a national champion.
“There’s nothing that can stop Cam.”
Fouls maybe, but that’s another matter. Few can do what she can. She’s a 6-foot-4 forward who plays the post and runs the floor. She is fast and agile, an excellent passer and solid ballhandler. But her breathtaking moments come from her footwork around the basket and smothering shot blocks.
Those skills are spectacular enough, and combined with Brink’s fire on the court, make it tough to keep your eyes off her.
“She’s an absolute fearless competitor,” said VanDerveer, Stanford’s Setsuko Ishiyama Director of Women’s Basketball.
Before the 2015 camp at Stanford, word had gotten to Amy Tucker, Stanford’s associate head coach at the time, to pay attention to Brink, who was attending with a friend.
“We made sure to get our eyes on her early,” Tucker said.
The bleachers were pushed in at Maples and the floor was divided into three courts. Tucker and Kate Paye, then an assistant and now the Harry K. and Ida S. Berland Associate Head Coach, leaned against the bleachers by the middle court.
First impressions: “Tall, very thin, and very athletic,” Tucker said.
Suddenly, Brink grabbed a defensive rebound, dribbled downcourt, and took a Euro step to finish at the rim.
Tucker turned to Paye and said, “I’m offering her” a scholarship.
“At that age, and with that size … you don’t see that kind of package very often,” Tucker recalled. “Her frame was thin, but she played strong. You don’t see that strength in kids her size, or that combination of skill.”
Even today, “we’re not even seeing the tip of the iceberg,” Tucker said.
Within a day, Brink was moved to an older age group. By the end of the week, she was invited to Stanford’s open gym, where many of the Cardinal players sharpened their game in the off-season. The thought of joining them both excited and terrified Brink.
“A weird clash of emotions,” described Cameron’s mother, Michelle Bain-Brink. “Happy, scared. Laughing, crying.”
Said Cameron, “I was really just in awe the whole time.”
Tucker remembers approaching Brink after camp, catching her eye and saying, “I’m going to offer you a scholarship.”
But somehow the message got a bit blurred. Michelle heard Paye say, “We’d really like to see you here.” Michelle thought that meant an invitation to next year’s camp.
“If it works with her schedule, absolutely,” Michelle replied.
Soon Oregon offered a scholarship through Cam’s club coach. “Great! Our first offer,” Michelle said.
“No,” the coach corrected. “Stanford offered her when you were at camp.”
So, that’s what she meant …
“It’s not often you can see someone at 13 and project,” Tucker said. “We did that with Kristin Folkl in ninth grade, but she could dunk. Cam was a can’t-miss prospect. Candice Wiggins is another one who made the same kind of impression.”
The attention caught Cameron’s parents a little off-guard.
“Amy Tucker was the first one who really saw the potential in Cameron that we didn’t even see at the time,” said Cameron’s father, Greg Brink. “Cameron’s rise went to 0 to 100 in a very short period of time, from a kid just learning to dribble a basketball, to a bunch of people saying she has all this potential. It’s something we might have hoped for, but never expected.”
FOR THE FIRST 10 years of her life, Cameron had no interest in basketball. Her parents exposed her to different sports, but never pushed her in any direction. Cameron was first inspired by volleyball, from watching the 2012 Olympics at the Curry home in Charlotte, North Carolina. Michelle played a year of volleyball for Virginia Tech, where she was teammates with the former Sonya Adams, the mother of basketball superstar Stephen Curry.
Cameron did indeed play volleyball, winning a high school state championship and receiving a scholarship offer to play middle blocker for powerful Nebraska, where she could play two sports. But, for the most part, Cameron’s interests leaned more toward art than athletics.
That’s where the Currys came in. Basketball’s first family also is Cameron’s family. There is no difference between the two other than they lived in different houses. As much as possible, Cameron and her older brother Cy, and the three Curry kids, were raised together. Cameron is Dell and Sonya’s goddaughter. And Stephen is Greg and Michelle’s godson. The parents have been close – Greg and Dell were basketball teammates – since college and the families are so connected they see themselves as one.
“Cameron didn’t want to play basketball because she knew we played basketball,” Michelle said. “When you tell your own kid something, they typically are going to go the opposite way. But Sonya, because she’s a teacher, recognizes things in kids. Just the way Cameron ran and moved, we all felt she could be an athlete of some sort. And Sonya recognized that.
“Every time we were with her, Sonya would say, ‘So, you still want to be an artist? You don’t want to play any sports?’ She kept asking her and probing. ‘Why Cameron? Why don’t you just try?’”
Finally, Cameron did, but wasn’t happy about it. Living in Amsterdam for three years while Greg and Michelle worked for Nike in the European market, the Brinks returned for the birth of Stephen and Ayesha’s first child, daughter Riley. The stay in Charlotte coincided with Dell’s summer basketball camp.
“You can’t just sit here by the pool all week,” Michelle told Cameron. “You’ve got to be active.”
Cameron wouldn’t budge. However, through some negotiating, Cameron finally agreed to go, but only for half-days.
“I’m so proud of you for coming today,” Dell said.
“No you’re not,” she snapped.
At first, Cam was predictably miserable. But each day, she got a little bit better and her confidence began to grow. When they returned to the Netherlands, Cameron joined a team. The rules were a little funky – lower hoops, no backcourt defense – but Cameron found she was really good compared to the other kids.
“That’s when the bug bit,” Michelle said.
When they moved back to Oregon a year later, Cameron connected with a strong club with good coaching and quickly evolved into the eighth-grader that caught Amy Tucker’s eye.
“If she wasn’t so competitive, she probably wouldn’t have turned the corner,” Greg said.
Cameron has called her competitiveness her greatest strength, but it can get her in trouble. Stanford’s final two games of the Pac-12 tournament provided a glimpse at the two sides of Brink -- dominant play and frustration.
In the semifinal against Colorado, Brink was involved in a confrontation with the equally fiery Mya Hollingshed. Brink responded to the incident by stepping up her game, with nifty baskets, two blocked shots, four steals, nine rebounds and 14 points.
“I’m Cameron Brink and you’re not,” remarked Pac-12 Network analyst Mary Murphy during one dominating sequence.
Brink even hit a three – jogging downcourt with three fingers in the air like her godbrother -- as Stanford ran away from the Buffaloes, 71-45.
“She’s an incredible athlete,” teammate Anna Wilson said. “It’s really up to her for how good she wants to be.”
The following afternoon against Utah, Brink was limited to 18 minutes because of foul trouble. Stanford outscored Utah by 20 with Brink on the floor, but was outscored by one with Brink on the bench, until the Cardinal padded a big lead in the final minutes of a 73-48 blowout.
Fouls are Brink’s kryptonite, preventing her from playing more impactful minutes.
“She does have some lack-of-discipline fouls, where she comes down on people or reaches,” VanDerveer said. “I also think in some games there’s a microscope on her. Sometimes, she gets no love from the officials. And, there are a lot of times she gets clobbered and they don’t call anything, and she plays through it.
“As a player, you have to adjust to the officiating. My dad always used to say, ‘A repetition of errors shows a lack of intelligence.’ You can’t keep doing the same thing wrong. You have to make adjustments in your game. If they’re calling things, don’t do what they’re calling.”
VanDerveer has considered benching Brink to teach her a lesson.
“No excuses,” Brink said. “But I’m still starting.”
Even when the subject switched to shot-blocking, one of Brink’s most spectacular skills, it wouldn’t go away.
Asked to recall her favorite block, Brink replied, “Any block that doesn’t get called a foul.”
EACH TUESDAY, Fred Luskin, known around campus as the “happiness professor,” speaks before practice about mental health.
Luskin, director of the Stanford Forgiveness Projects, gives the players something to remember – a snippet to focus on for the week. This one stuck with Brink: You are loved.
“You have to remind yourself,” Brink said. “When you’re shooting a free throw with the game on the line, you need to know you’re safe and you’re OK, or else that anxiety will take over.”
The lesson became a source of levity late in the season against Oregon. When Agnes Emma-Nnopu was on the line in a tight game, her teammates yelled, “You’re loved, Agnes! We love you!”
“It makes me emotional to think about,” Brink said. “Because it really does help. Yes, you want to perform well and do your best on a big stage, but if you don’t … so be it. You’re loved.”
In each of the past two seasons has offered a gut punch to the team’s psyche. That Stanford won a national championship last year after being on the road for nine weeks remains one of the remarkable achievements in Stanford history. There certainly was no blueprint for coping with strict COVID protocols that prevented contact sports within Santa Clara County and caused the long road trip.
Playing on the road was only part of the issue. But with it came: Eating alone, no roommates, limited in-person contact, no visitors, remote learning. The isolation was unbearable.
“Everybody was really struggling,” Brink said. “It was hard. I don’t think people realize how much of a burden it was. I’m still feeling the effects of it this year.”
Brink said one area of growth was becoming more comfortable with herself. Another was the closeness of the team, going through so much together. But, in just about every other area, it was a nightmare.
“I didn’t really have a sense of home, of being grounded,” Brink said. “Our lives were all basketball. We would go to the gym and bus back to the hotel, and then you were just kind of stuck with your thoughts, continuously replaying ‘Oh, I did this thing wrong. Or, I could have done this better.’”
Gillian R. Brassil of the New York Times reported on a chance encounter between Cameron and her mother at the Final Four.
As Michelle brought books and a container of macaroons for hotel security to pass along, Cameron was in the lobby delivering a bag for the security guard to give to her mother.
Wrote Brassil:
From 20 feet away, through the glass doors of the Marriott Rivercenter hotel in downtown San Antonio, the mother and daughter yelled “hello” and “love you” to one another.
It was their first face-to-face conversation in person over the past three months.
“I got quite emotional, because although I’ve seen her from the stands, seeing her like that, unexpectedly, was really touching,” Bain-Brink said.
“You put on a brave face for them because you just want to keep pouring in positivity: OK, one more step. You got this,” Michelle said. “But you could tell at the end, with the stress of the Final Four, I could start to see her cracking. But she was so hyper-focused on the team goal to win a championship that she suppressed it. Then came the relief of winning and finally being able to come home. That’s when she needed to talk to someone professionally.”
The months of separation finally were over, but the mental challenges were not.
This year, on March 1, two days before the Cardinal was to open the Pac-12 tournament, the university was emotionally slammed by the death of senior Katie Meyer, a Cardinal soccer star, friend, and supporter of the women’s basketball team, who took her own life.
On the eve of Stanford’s quarterfinal against Oregon State in Las Vegas, the Cardinal gathered by the pool outside the Mandalay Bay hotel. Players and staff circled together and honored Meyer with a candlelight vigil, at the same time a large vigil was taking place on campus.
A pool party accompanied by loud music forced the players to speak a little louder than the mood allowed and Brink was among those who did so. When it was done, candles were blown out and hugs were exchanged as the tears flowed.
Afterward, Brink returned to the hotel and collapsed on her parents’ bed, emotionally drained.
AMONG THE WISDOM that Brink has gathered from the Curry siblings is the value of being open about your own mental health, and the understanding that it’s OK to seek help. That lesson came from her godsister, Sydel Curry-Lee, who has advocated publicly in that area.
Among the brothers, Seth, the oldest and guard for the Brooklyn Nets, “is the quietest guy in the room, but also the most confident guy in the room,” Cameron said. “I look up to Seth for that reason. I aspire to have his level of confidence, because that’s honestly one of the most important things in basketball. You need to have confidence in yourself because it’s such a mental game.”
Having Stephen and his family only minutes away was a factor in Cameron’s decision to come to Stanford. Not the factor, but one that certainly made a difference.
Stephen and Ayesha have opened their door to Cameron, for meals, visiting, and hanging out. And to Greg and Michelle whenever they’re in town. For that, they are grateful.
“What people don’t really understand is that Stephen really is the kindest, most genuine person,” Cameron said. “He’ll make a conversation with anybody and remember their name and specifics. He truly cares.”
“I know he’s the greatest shooter of all time, but I look up to him so much because he does everything the right way. He treats his teammates the right way. He gets excited for them. That’s how I’ve modeled myself after him.”
Greg sees Steph’s influence in the way Cameron approaches the game, through his work ethic and commitment. Both are characteristics of Cameron.
As Cameron’s stature grows, the pressure does too. And that’s another area ripe for Curry’s advice.
“I remember having a conversation with him in his kitchen recently with my dad,” Cameron said. “He was saying, ‘It’s OK to have bad games. They’re going to happen. All you can do is get back up and be resilient.’”
Cameron, by the way, played a part in one of the most iconic moments in Golden State Warriors’ history -- the night Curry, who had crashed on the Brinks’ couch the night before, returned from an injury to score 40 points in Game 4 of the 2016 Western Conference semifinals against the Trail Blazers.
As Curry nailed a dagger three in Portland, he turned to 14-year-old Cameron in the front row, and pronounced, “I’m here! … I’m back!”
“Mom, did he just look at me?” she asked.
He did.
But now, eyes also are turning toward Cameron Brink. And the spotlight is growing ever brighter.