Shooting for the next level

Being the new kid at school is never easy.

When you’re transferring from one rival school to another, that makes it even harder.

It’s safe to say Terrebonne senior Tamitris Bryant made the best of her difficult situation.

After spending time at both H.L. Bourgeois and Terrebonne throughout her high school career, Bryant has overcome adversity and the odds to stake her claim as one of the area’s best female athletes.

“What can you say about Tamitris? I can go on all day,” Terrebonne girls’ basketball assistant coach Jerwaski Coleman said. “When she plays, she plays with all of her heart and plays with a lot of enthusiasm. She’s one of those kids that are the first one to show up to the gym and the last one to leave. She’s just a great player to coach.”

Bryant is an elite competitor in track and field, but her first love and her athletic future is in basketball.

Bryant started playing hoops at 5 years old when her stepfather signed her up for Iddy Biddy with her sister.

But it wasn’t until Bryant reached “about age 9” when she started to realize she had a future in the sport.

“I didn’t make the All-Star team till when I was maybe 9,” Bryant said. “The coaches kept telling me I was too short.”

Bryant continued to play as she advanced through the school system, starting her high school career at H.L. Bourgeois.

She played there a couple of seasons before transferring to Terrebonne for her 11th grade season.

That’s a move that isn’t exactly easy for a budding athlete to make.

She said her teammates at Terrebonne didn’t initially accept her, because she was “the kid from rival H.L. Bourgeois.”

“It was hard because coming from H.L., we are naturally big rivals, so at first nobody really liked me at Terrebonne,” Bryant said. “I didn’t have a lot of friends at school and on the team. They’d always give me a hard time and it always came back to me having gone to H.L.”

Likewise, she said she lost several of her old friends at Bourgeois, because she was “the traitor.”

“We’d go back to H.L. and it was the same thing, nobody liked me because I transferred to Terrebonne,” Bryant said. “They’d rip into me pretty hard. When I left, they all told me I wouldn’t play over there, they told me I wouldn’t make it.”

But despite the adversity, Bryant eventually earned the respect of her new teammates at Terrebonne.

She did so with her self-described natural-born toughness.

From being the young child who was “too short” to succeed in Biddy, Bryant, who now is just 5-foot-6-inches and weighs just 119 pounds, learned how to make an impact, with effort.

The prospect is like a tornado at times on the basketball floor, spinning, diving and hustling her way to virtually every loose ball, regardless of the bumps and bruises that will come along the way.

“That was something I really had to learn how to do,” Bryant said. “From being the smallest one on the team all of the time, it didn’t take long to figure out I had to work hard to make an impact.

Bryant hustled her way to 7.5 points per game and 2.7 rebounds per game as a junior on Terrebonne’s district championship team, playing alongside elite players like seniors Alaina Verdin and Sierra Lyons.

This past season with Verdin and Lyons in college athletics and people expecting the Lady Tigers to drop off the map, Bryant took Terrebonne to another district championship and was the unquestioned leader of the team during their 16-10 season.

Oh yeah, she never lost to H.L. Bourgeois in her career, either, a statistic she’s proud to point out to anyone listening.

“The kids really kind of held that grudge at first,” Coleman said. “But we started doing some team building exercises and they started to realize, ‘You know what? Tamitris is a really nice girl.’ You know, it was a big issue when she came over as a junior as to whether or not she should be the leader of this team. But she earned her teammate’s trust and the team actually named her a captain. We voted at the beginning of the season and every player said Tamitris Bryant should be one of our team captains, so that says a lot about the work that she does.”

With her prep career complete, Bryant is hoping to take her game to the college level, something she said would be a dream come true.

She had received interest from a handful of college programs, but expects to field more interest closer to April 13’s National Signing Day.

Coleman said he also expects that number to rise because of the prospect’s versatility.

“Colleges will be getting a player that can have an impact at the point guard and the two-guard position,” he said. “At junior colleges, she can even play and defend at the 3-guard. … Whoever gets her will be getting a very solid player. She’s got the heart of a champion.”

Bryant said above anything else in her career, signing a college scholarship would be like icing on the cake in her underdog story.

“That moment will bring relief, it will be like all of my hard work will have finally paid off,” Bryant said.

But it wouldn’t last long because Bryant said it would be right back to work shortly thereafter.

She’d have a whole new batch of classmates and teammates to win over as the new kid on campus again.

“I’d be proud of signing, but after a little while, all it would mean is that I’ll have to put in more hard work to succeed at the next level,” she said. “I’m never going to stop working hard. I need to work on my left hand – shooting, dribbling and passing. I can always be better.”

Terrebonne senior guard Tamitris Bryant soars through the air for a running lay-up during a game this season. Bryant has overcome adversity and a lack of size to become a premiere athlete in the area, good enough to receive collegiate interest. CASEY GISCLAIR