How Emma Young became East Jessamine’s unlikely success story

Emma Young became East Jessamine’s all-time leading scorer, boy or girl, on a three-pointer off an assist by Abby James early in the second half of a victory at Tates Creek last Wednesday. Those points came three years and a few months after her first as a Jaguar, and three months after she signed her letter of intent to play college basketball at Texas A&M-Corpus Christi.

Not too shabby for someone who could barely read and seemed destined to be the next in a procession of talented athletes who couldn’t turn their lives around.

Young moved to East Jessamine in the fall of 2012, the newest line on an enrollment record that spread to nearly three pages after multiple moves from relative to relative. After joining the basketball team and getting a few weeks into conditioning, she was displaced from another relative’s home and once again faced leaving a school midstream. She came to Coach Jacqueline Coleman in tears.

Coleman, whose husband is East Jessamine boys’ coach Chris O’Bryan, couldn’t believe Young’s situation and was able to make contact with her mother. Young’s mother asked Coleman if Emma could live with them because she wasn’t in a position to take care of her. That night Young — a just-turned 15-year-old with unrefined basketball skills, a personality as fiery as her red hair and a 1.2 grade point average — moved into the coaches’ home.

“It’s been a roller coaster that’s went all the way up and all the way back down,” Young said. “I’ve had some setbacks and I’ve learned from them. It’s been this wild thing that keeps happening over and over again.”

‘Truth of the matter’

People are quick to give Coleman and O’Bryan credit for turning Young’s life around. That’s not fair to the girl who made a choice to become a Division I athlete.

“The truth of the matter is she turned her life around,” said Coleman, now in her seventh season at East Jessamine. “ … At any point in time she could have left and she could have run from the discipline, run from the structure that we provided for her. And she decided that she wanted a different life and she did the hard work of making that happen. As a 14-, 15-, 16-year-old, those are pretty big decisions.”

Improving upon her raw basketball talent was the tip of the iceberg for Young. She read on an elementary-school level and had developed a knack for memorization to cope. Many early nights at the kitchen table were spent butting heads over homework.

“They didn’t allow me to do anything. I just sat at home, sat at the kitchen table and didn’t get to get up until I had all A’s and B’s,” Young said. “At first (Coleman) was like, ‘Well you can have one C.’ She tried to compromise and stuff and I didn’t want that.”

Lashing out at Coleman during practice was common early on, which resulted in extra laps around the gym that weren’t forgotten when the two got home. Young had to learn not just to be a better player, but a better teammate on and off the floor.

In the midst of all the voluntary struggles, she lost her boyfriend, Jacob, after he drowned in the Kentucky River the final week of her freshman year. “She had (to) overcome more at 15 years old than most people do in their entire lifetime,” Coleman said in a text message.

Notions like “trust” and “gratefulness” were things Young had seldom been exposed to and she had a difficult time suddenly accepting that as part of her life. A little more than a year into living with her coaches, the then-sophomore was dishonest about a potentially harmful experience and was grounded for a lengthy period. As she went to bed the night the punishment was handed down, Coleman feared she was going to wake up in the morning and discover that Young had run away.

She stayed. The entire family — O’Bryan has two sons, Nate and Will, from a prior relationship — went to church that next morning. Coleman and Young had a heart-to-heart later that evening, which Coleman recounted on a blog she started to chronicle her and her husband’s road to adopting a child. Wrote Coleman:

“The most striking, unforgettable comment Emma said to me was, ‘You know when you said that I lied to you and you couldn’t believe that I would lie to the one person who has been here for me? Well, I’ve never had anybody say that to me before. Until you said that you would always be here for me, I was afraid you all were going to kick me out because you were mad at me.’ Verbatim. I could recite it one hundred times.”

Journeys

Small victories eventually started piling up. “Please” and “thank you” became staples of Young’s vocabulary. She began scheduling her own study sessions with teachers after school. Punishments for mistakes in practice were accepted with grace (as much as a teenager can muster, at least) rather than met with inflammatory remarks. She got a part-time job at Zaxby’s and started her own checking and savings accounts.

Major wins, on and off the court, have been secured, too. East Jessamine had one winning season in its history prior to Young’s arrival. The Jaguars set records for wins her first two seasons, matched the record her third season and became the first girls’ team in county history to reach 20 wins with their victory at Sayre on Monday.

Young built lasting relationships with players from outside Kentucky and across the state — Frankfort’s BriAnna Burbridge, Jenkins’ Whitney Creech and McCreary Central’s Kaylee Cotton among them — by participating on an AAU travel team, the one that helped her get on the radar of Corpus Christi and dozens of other college programs. She said that team “could trump” any school in the state. “We just ran, ran, ran.”

Her GPA soared to a 3.3. The girl who barely cared about being in the classroom, let alone performing well, will be the first member of her biological family to graduate high school and strives to exit East Jessamine with honors. She wants to be a nurse or possibly join the police academy.

Her shooting form has already graduated.

“That shot was broke three years ago,” Coleman said. “ … She couldn’t hit free throws. She just had no form.”

Young, who stands 5-foot-9, scored 44 points in the Jaguars’ Senior Night win over Frankfort on Tuesday. That total broke a school record she’d set nearly a month before. The first nine came from behind the line as she started 3-for-3 from long range.

She thinks her work ethic is better than anyone else’s on the court and relishes testing her limits against strong foes.

“If I’m not going hard (my coaches) will call me out,” Young said with a laugh. “That makes me more mad than just going hard, so I’d rather go hard and not hear it from them.”

Coleman and O’Bryan called it a blessing to have welcomed Young into their home. The now 18-year-old Young showed some rare tears while reflecting on a journey that could have ended much differently.

“We fought through it and I had some terrible mistakes and all that blah, blah, blah,” she said. “ … It’s been awesome. I’m really thankful for them.”

The journey on the court isn’t over. East Jessamine is focused on winning the program’s second district championship and making a run at the 12th Region’s berth to the Sweet Sixteen in Highland Heights next month. That would be another first in a record-setting season fueled by the unlikeliest of protagonists.

“We can do it,” Young said. “ … It’s just gonna be a lot of hard work and staying on the same page the whole rest of the way.”

This story was originally published February 17, 2016 at 5:50 PM with the headline "How Emma Young became East Jessamine’s unlikely success story."