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Highlands Today

Lee follows new lead

Mark Pinson, Highlands Today

Former Sebring standout Whitney Lee enjoyed her time in the gym during the girls basketball clinic on Tuesday.

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By RYAN LAVNER

Highlands Today

Published: July 10, 2009

SEBRING - Former area star Whitney Lee spent her winter on the end of the bench, wearing a T-shirt, not a jersey, with Limestone College's logo emblazoned on the front. She would occasionally pop up to huddle with the team, or to assist with warmups, but never to play.

"I've never sat the bench that much," Lee said, reflecting on a freshman season she'd rather forget.

Though she competed in just one official game, Lee was relegated to the sidelines per NCAA rules, which state that a student-athlete must sit out an entire season after transferring from another school.

So she watched her teammates play. She sometimes trained alone when their schedules conflicted. And she totaled just five minutes of game action all year.

But after an intolerable experience at North Carolina Central University, where she was offered a full Division-I scholarship during her senior year at Sebring, Lee was just eager to start anew.

"When I went to Central, I had confidence in my ability, not that I was the best thing to come out of Highlands County, but just that I knew what I could and couldn't do," Lee said. "But I kind of lost that confidence and started questioning for the first time in my life if I should play basketball."

That alone was a stunning reversal for the former two-time All-Heartland girls basketball player of the year, who had established herself as one of the most prodigious talents in the area.

But it didn't translate at NCCU, where Lee clashed with everything from the coaching philosophies to the party culture to the rest of the student body.

"She learned a lot during the whole recruiting process," Whitney's father, Mike, said, "and what you see is not always what you get."

Lee, a 5-foot-8 guard, played 10 minutes during a November exhibition, then five more in a season-opening loss to West Virginia. After missing a practice for health reasons - which she said may have been stress-related - Lee was benched for the second game.

"It was the first time I felt like maybe I shouldn't play basketball," Lee said. "I didn't go to Central because it was Division I. I went because of the work ethic they talked about and how they were always playing. It really wasn't like that. It didn't match up."

Unsure of her role with the team, Lee met with head coach Joli Robinson in mid-November and was told that "we're not going to change."

And with that knowledge, Lee looked to continue her collegiate career elsewhere.

"I've been playing basketball since third grade, and I hadn't missed a season, so this year was kind of different," she said.

Lee, who will turn 20 in September, then enrolled at Limestone College, a private 3,500-student institution in Gaffney, S.C., in time for the spring semester. She practiced and had individual workouts with her new teammates, who were already midway through the season, but never played.

"It was good to travel and see how things worked, but I wanted to go out there really bad," Lee said. "I missed playing, and that was sort of an indication to me that I still wanted to play, and it was hard."

Harder still was coming back to the Heartland during winter break and seeing Sebring play. But it also served as motivation to get better, and Lee has spent countless hours in the gym during the spring and summer rededicating herself to the game.

Forced to chart the number of shots she takes during the offseason, Lee reported to her college coaches that during a recent two-week stretch, she attempted more than 3,500.

This week, Lee was back in the Sebring gym working out during the Blue Streaks' summer camp - all in an attempt to ensure that she never spends that much time on the bench again.

"She's just a gym rat, always has been," Sebring High girls coach Mike Lee said. "I know she's going to be fine because she works so hard. That has never changed."

Ryan Lavner can be reached at 863-386-5841 or rlavner@highlandstoday.com.

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