By: Bob Vail - Athletic Communications Assistant
Ask anyone about Kayla Stroman and they will say she likes basketball. Basketball is what she does because it’s all she does.
Stroman was the youngest child, and only girl, in her house growing up. She has three older brothers, Anthony, now 30; Keith, now 26; and Allen, now 23, and it was a tough environment to be a girl.
“I wasn’t treated like a girl very much,” said Stroman. “My mom tried to, but I was a tomboy. I was always playing basketball with [my brothers] and their friends.”
All of the Stroman children played basketball. Her brothers Anthony, Keith, and Allen all played in high school and at the park and Kayla was next in line. When she was six years old her mother, Kathy Terry, would make her older brothers take her along when they played pickup.
“They would go to the park and they would be playing pickup on the full court and I would be on the side shooting around,” Stroman said. “Whenever they had a break they would come over and show me something. They’d show me how to shoot or show me how to make a layup.”
“It was just fun. I was outside and it was summer or spring time and it was just something fun to do besides sitting in the house playing with Barbie dolls.”
Those afternoons at the park hooked Kayla for life; basketball became her passion or, as some might call it, an obsession. There were three things in her life – family, school, and basketball – and with her brothers as coaches you can combine two of those.
“I was little so they always told me to keep my handle up and learn how to dribble,” she said. “We’d be in the driveway and I’d be dribbling right and left, up and back, for hours.”
Soon she would be good enough to get called from the side baskets to the main court and into her brothers’ pickup games. From there it was onto the local Boys & Girls club before things got serious heading into middle school, and especially high school.
“[Basketball] was always the main focus,” she said. “I didn’t play any other sports in high school or when I was little. It was always just basketball and school.”
Stroman was a stand-out at Christian Brothers Academy where she helped lead the team to an 85-11 mark over her four years in high school. The team won two sectional championships but Stroman was able to accumulate an impressive amount of individual honors; she was named to the all-league second team in her sophomore and junior seasons leading up to a senior year where she was named the league MVP and All-Central New York First Team.
Growing up in Syracuse, N.Y., watching the Orange, college basketball was always the goal for Kayla and her intense focus paid off; she became the point guard on a Division I basketball team. She came to Monteagle Ridge and had an immediate impact, starting all 31 games and averaging 9.4 points per game. That early success was rolled into her sophomore season, where she averaged 12.0 points through the first eight games before she sustained a knee injury that forced her to miss the rest of the season. For the first time since she was six years old Stroman wasn’t allowed to play basketball.
She fought her way through the injury to come back last season to start all 32 games and lead the team with 10.8 points per game (a career high for a full season). Stroman would go on to score a career-high 24 points in the double-overtime game against Marist on Feb. 19, 2012. That season the Purple Eagles would advance all the way to the MAAC-tournament semi-finals.
It’s too early to look back on her career but knows there isn’t much she would change about her time in basketball so far. As far as going forward is concerned, Kayla hopes for more of the same.
“Everything has been a learning experience,” she said. “Everything has been a teaching moment and I wouldn’t change anything. I’m going to keep working on school and focusing on basketball; getting my degree and doing what is necessary to be successful on the basketball court.”
For now Stroman still has a year to go at Niagara and she is thankful for all the opportunities she has gotten so far; beginning with becoming the point guard on the Purple Eagles. Her favorite basketball moment is when the Purple Eagles defeated the Marist Red Foxes her freshman year. It was the second game of a five-game winning streak and the Purple Eagles defeated the perennial powerhouse by 10 points.
“It’s been a great privilege to have played all four years, well three years, since I’ve been a freshman,” she said. “It’s just fun to be around this group and to be able to play for so long. I like being to be able to be the extension of the head coach on the court. It’s fun to have the relationships with my teammates and be able to help them on and off the court.”
Now with Dwayne (11) and Janiya (9) joining the family Kayla has more support than ever. When the team played in Syracuse last season, there was a lot of Purple in the stands, 90 percent were there to see Kayla. Her family comes to majority of the home games since they live only two and a half hours away in Syracuse. Her brothers have families of their own now but make sure to make it to campus for games when they can.
Basketball is still a family game for Kayla, as it always has been.
