A highly motivated hoopster

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This article was published 10/02/2023 (942 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

A weekly series in honour of Black History Month, Taylor Allen highlights the stories and incredible accomplishments of Black athletes and coaches in Manitoba.

To understand the impact Marjorie Kelly could have on a basketball game, watch the tape from Dec. 2, 1994.

Kelly, a first-year guard at the time, and the Manitoba Bisons were taking on the heavily favoured Winnipeg Wesmen inside a sold-out Duckworth Centre.

The Wesmen, the back-to-back national champions, were riding a remarkable 88-game win streak and were one victory away from surpassing the 1972-74 UCLA Bruins — who were led by legendary coach John Wooden and star centre Bill Walton — for most consecutive wins by a North American university team.

The Bisons were expected to lay down and let their crosstown rivals make history, but Kelly had something to say about that. Sandra Carroll, a three-time national player of the year and arguably the greatest women’s basketball player to ever come out of the province, was the face of the U of W’s dominant program, and Kelly was given the near-impossible task of slowing her down. The Daniel McIntyre Collegiate product — who was named the country’s rookie of the year that season — was up for the task and was a thorn in Carroll’s side the entire game. Carroll averaged 27 points per contest, but on that night, she was limited to 17, with most of those points coming when Kelly wasn’t guarding her.

Thanks to Kelly’s suffocating defence and a game-high 28 points from veteran guard T.L. Johannesson, the Herd spoiled the party and won 64-62.

“Oh Marj, I did not enjoy playing against her at all. Playing against her was not an endeavour that I wanted to take. I was really happy that she was on our team because she stopped some of the best back in the day,” said Johannesson in an interview from Halifax.

“We wouldn’t have had any kind of success without her on the team. You couldn’t get anything by her. It didn’t matter how big you were, how small you were, how good you were, Marj was better. She was unstoppable in terms of her defensive prowess.

“There’s no way we would’ve won that game without Marj. She was a catalyst in terms of making sure Sandra was off her game.”

That night was just the beginning for Kelly. The Bisons would lose the national title game to the Wesmen that year in Thunder Bay, Ont., but the U of M would regroup and win the Canadian crown in 1996 and ‘97. Kelly went on to become a two-time all-Canadian before leaving for a year to play professionally in Germany before returning to the Herd for the 2000-01 campaign where she closed out her time on campus with the CIS (now U Sports) Defensive Player of the Year award.

“It’s funny, when I was playing, it’s not like I was saying ‘I’m a great defender,’ I just wanted to win. That’s what it was,” said Kelly recently. “I knew if we could steal the ball or if I could shut somebody down that we could win the game. That’s what motivated me.”

A basketball career wasn’t always the goal for Kelly, now 46, as she originally wanted to follow in the footsteps of her older sister Janis and play volleyball. Janis led the Wesmen to a national title in 1993 and went on to star for the Canadian national team that qualified for the 1996 Summer Olympics in Atlanta. Midway through high school, Kelly decided to hone in on hoops. She first started playing for fun when she was younger with her three older brothers and quickly earned their respect with her ‘never give up’ attitude.

“I just remember having a lot of fun and learning how to be tough otherwise I wouldn’t be able to play. In all my free time, I was kind of a basketball junkie,” said Kelly, the youngest of seven siblings.

“I’d put on my headband, and I’d be out anywhere I could find pickup games and I’d be playing with all men. Sometimes they’d say to someone ‘Oh, you get the girl’ and I just felt motivated by that and always wanted to make them eat their words. It was just super motivating and I loved playing with intensity and toughness, and I think I brought that to the court.”

What Kelly brought to the court didn’t go unnoticed, as she was inducted into the Manitoba Basketball Hall of Fame in 2011. Kelly is the only Black woman from Manitoba to be inducted as an individual.

For most of her time with the Bisons, she was the only Black player on the team.

“It’s always good to have representation and it’s nice to see yourself in other players as well. I look at the game now and I’m really happy to see the diversity of the game. I’m so happy to see so many diverse players on the court,” said Kelly.

“It’s amazing to see the transition of the landscape of basketball in Manitoba. Whereas for myself, I don’t know if there were a lot of faces that I could look to that looked like me. At the time, you don’t realize you’re making a path for people. Now looking back, it’s like wow, I hope I motivated some young players.”

Some lingering hip and back injuries forced Kelly to move on from basketball after university. She lived in Toronto for 13 years before moving back to Winnipeg in 2013. When she returned home, she became a personal trainer and ran two fitness studios. She’s now a social worker who works with employment and income assistance. Kelly isn’t too far removed from the game though, as her 15-year-old daughter Jasmene, a Grade 10 student at Churchill High School, recently started playing and the similarities are already evident.

“She’s taken a liking to basketball, so we’ll see. No pressure. But she is pretty tenacious on defence. I talked to her about taking a couple steps off because of the foul situation, but she’s a hard worker on defence so it’s exciting,” said Kelly.

“But I want her to be more than me, though. I had my defence and my jump shot, but I want her to have more of an outside game than I did.”

taylor.allen@freepress.mb.ca

Twitter: @TaylorAllen31