The Baltimore-area athlete with the best inside track for the 2012 Olympics in London isn’t swimmer Michael Phelps.
It’s not swimmer Katie Hoff.
It’s not even NBA star Carmelo Anthony.
It’s Loyola women’s basketball player Siobhan Prior.
The 5-foot-10, brown-haired, 21-year-old from England has been a staple of her country’s women’s basketball team since the age of 14, when she began competing at the national level. And in the summer of 2012, the native of Nottingham will be one of the top candidates to make the 12-player roster that will represent the host country in the XXX Olympiad.
“I never miss the Olympics,” Prior said after a recent game. “It’s a huge deal in my house and it’s always on. Every year, I watch the opening and closing ceremonies and get tears in my eyes. I get goose bumps and it’s crazy to think I could be out there and on the floor hearing my country’s national anthem — I’m getting goose bumps just talking about it now.”
England has never had its senior women’s national team qualify for the Olympics, but it receives an automatic berth since it’s the host country.
Prior, a senior, starred in 2006 at the FIBA Under-20 European Division B Championships in Lithuania, where she averaged seven points, 3.4 rebounds and 2.9 assists as a starter to lead her team to the bronze medal.
This season, she has led the Greyhounds to a 7-5 record, as she is averaging a team-high 14.3 points, 2.1 rebounds and 1.9 assists per game. She also has made 40 percent (28-of-70) of her shots from beyond the arc, sixth-best in the Metro Atlantic Athletic Conference.
But traveling 3,600 miles across the Atlantic Ocean four years ago wasn’t an easy transition for Prior.
“She cried every night on the phone with me when she arrived on the Sept. 1 to Jan. 10,” said her mother, Pauline, who comes to Baltimore once a year to visit her daughter. “But my husband, Chris, and I told her if you take the scholarship, you can’t come home until the end of the year, and she battled it out.”
Pauline coached her daughter at the club level with the Nottingham Wildcats of the Division I Women’s National League, as both her and Chris were former coaches with the national team. Siobhan, whose name is Irish for “God is gracious,” said having her parents take active roles in her development never led to a rocky home life — at least not at meal time.
“We never let it get back into the house,” she said. “In the car, on the way home, it was tough sometimes, but in the house we forgot about the game and had a nice dinner and weren’t at each other’s throat.”
Chris and Pauline, however, didn’t want Siobhan to choose basketball because of them — they wanted her to have a passion for it and play because it’s what she loved. That’s why they had her parents had her try another hobby first — Irish dancing.
From the age of six through 14, Prior busted a move on the dance floor — becoming so good she qualified for the world championships four years in a row. But as entered high school, she turned in her dancing shoes for a pair of high-top sneakers.
Now, she is just three years away from dancing to her sport’s biggest stage.
“I think she is going to get there,” Loyola coach Joe Logan said. “She’s a person you look at and you think ‘It’s the Olympics and only the best 12 or 13 people in the country make the team.’ But she will represent the country well, she won’t mess up off the court and she is going to play hard.”
