She’s in 7th grade and has yet to take a single dribble in a high school basketball game, but she’s already committed to play college ball at the University of Evansville.
Meet Katlyn Gilbert, a 13-year-old student at Heritage Christian School in Indianapolis, Ind., who — unlike almost all of her peers — knows where she’ll be in 2019: suiting up for the Evansville Purple Aces.
Gilbert is a (still growing, of course) 5-foot-nine guard/forward who’s made a name for herself on the AAU circuit. Gilbert’s mother, Stephanie Roach, a JV coach at her daughter’s future high school told the Indianapolis Star why she allowed her daughter to choose Evansville while still in junior high.
“It’s a long time away but there is a couple of reasons I allowed her to commit,” Roach said. “We run a basketball program so we are around college coaches all the time. We particularly like the college coaches at Evansville. So if eveything is still the same as it now and those coaches are still at Evansville, we would love her to play for them.”
A lot could change, of course, and early verbal commitments are notorious for being reconsidered. (Like, what if UConn came knocking, for example?)
What do you think? Is seventh grade too early to make a major life decision? Or is this a special case because of her mother’s relationship with the Evansville program?
Read the full article in the Star here.