VANCOUVER — Keep your head up, the little girl was told.
When you dribble your basketball, always keep your head up.
Lauren Bondi realized that to be a dervish on the basketball court, to get to wherever she wanted to go with her ball, that she would need to heed the advice.
So on a tiny section of tiled floor in the basement of her Vancouver home she got to work on her dribbling, always looking straight ahead.
“It was on little square patch in front of a TV and every day, for 30-to-45 minutes, that’s what I would do,” the senior point guard at Notre Dame Secondary says. “That is when I started to fall in love with basketball and I have never looked back since.”
And while those basement sessions paved her way to becoming one of the most dynamic point guards in B.C.’s high school Class of 2015, Bondi also realized early that she was helping herself to pave an even more significant path to a future in medicine.
“I knew I wasn’t going to be a (NCAA) Div. 1 player and I wasn’t going to play pro, it just wasn’t realistic,” explains Bondi, who despite her 5-foot-5 height dominated at the high school level, averaging 23 points and seven assists per game this past season as a senior with the Jugglers. “But I wanted to get to a good academic university, and use basketball as my vehicle to get there because I want to go to med school.”
None of that took anything away from the passion she brought to the game, for the joy she felt in leading her team into the recent B.C. Double A tournament as one of the favourites, and the agony she experienced when the Jugglers were beaten in the semi-finals by crosstown rival Little Flower Academy.
Yet in the end, Lauren Bondi getting the best of both worlds.
In the fall, she begins her collegiate career at Smith College, located just outside of Boston. An NCAA Div. 3 school, Smith does not provide athletic scholarships, but Bondi’s marks in her science-heavy curriculum at Notre Dame presently soar in mid-90 percent range, and thus her skills on the court and in the classroom add up to an academic scholarship at a school which has been referred to as a liberal arts Ivy.
Pro-active in her basketball skill devleopment, Bondi adopted the same spirit when it came time to finding her university.
“It was actually a bit of reverse recruiting,” explains Bondi, who also showcased herself over the summer on the AAU circuit with the club team B.C.’s Finest. “I sent them some information, and when they responded, I sent them some film. And then they came to see me play AAU. Then in November, I started to make visits.”
Bondi, in fact, visited three academic heavyweights — Smith, New York’s Vassar College and Wesleyan University in Connecticut — on one trip, eventually choosing Smith, which has an 89 per cent success rate of getting its graduates into their first-choice medical schools.
“Everyone is there for a reason, to succeed, and in the classes I was able to visit,” says Bondi of her time at Smith, “the profs were very engaged with their students. It just seemed like such a different culture.”
And now, with her senior year of high school entering its final few weeks, and with her grad dress already selected, the little girl who listened well and heeded the best advice, is ready to take her biggest step yet.
“I think my defining moment came during a practice in Grade 5 when the coaches brought in Diana Lee,” Bondi remembers of the current UBC Thunderbirds point guard who was then starring at North Vancouver’s Handsworth Secondary. “She was so honest with us. She was the role model of what I wanted to be. She said if you want to be good, you have to practice. She said to be a great, you had to keep your head up.”
