By Jeff White ([email protected])
VirginiaSports.com
CHARLOTTESVILLE, Va. — Alana Walker in volleyball, Megan Gordon in women’s lacrosse, Ethan O’Donnell in baseball, Malik Washington in football, Jasmine Nocentini in women’s swimming, and Jillian Brown in women’s basketball. Before they became Wahoos, all of them were Wildcats.
“The Northwestern-to-UVA pipeline is strong,” Brown said this week at John Paul Jones Arena.
In this era of the transfer portal, players often change schools. Its excellence in academics and athletics makes Virginia an attractive destination for student-athletes with college experience, and in recent years an impressive group has relocated to Charlottesville from the Big Ten school in Evanston, Ill.
The college careers of Walker, Gordon and O’Donnell have ended, but Washington, Nocentini and Brown are on Grounds this fall, and they’re excelling in their respect sports.
Brown, who spent her first two years at Northwestern, didn’t know Nocentini when they overlapped there, but she and Washington were friends. Washington, a wide receiver, is having a record-setting season for head coach Tony Elliott’s football team.
“He’s doing amazing,” said Brown, who like Washington wears jersey No. 4.
Virginia’s football team has two games remaining. Basketball season is just getting started at UVA, and Brown and her teammates will take a 3-0 record into its Sunday afternoon clash with No. 25 Oklahoma at JPJ.
Brown, a junior guard, has started all three games. She’s leading the Cavaliers in rebounding (9.0 per game) and is second in scoring (14.3), behind forward Camryn Taylor (16.7 ppg).
At 5-foot-10, Brown isn’t the tallest player on the court, but she grabbed a career-high 13 rebounds in Virginia’s season-opening win over Maryland Eastern Shore. She’s not likely to reach double figures in that category every time out, but she pulled down seven boards in each of her next two games.
“I’m definitely a good rebounder,” Brown said.
Her numbers don’t reflect it yet—Brown is 2 for 11 from beyond the arc—but she’s also a capable 3-point shooter. That’s one of the reasons Brown appealed to the Hoos when she entered the transfer portal.
“We wanted somebody that could shoot the ball,” said Amaka Agugua-Hamilton, who’s in her second year as Virginia’s head coach.
Once Brown started working out at JPJ, Agugua-Hamilton said, the coaching staff “realized that she wasn’t just a shooter, that she could handle the ball, she could get downhill, she can get into paint and create. She has a midrange game. So we saw that she had the foundation of [shooting], but we really worked with her just to develop her confidence in other areas, and I think she’s flourishing.”
Born and raised in Grand Rapids, Mich., Brown grew up in a family known for its athletic prowess. Her mother, Noelle, coached her in AAU ball, with the Michigan Basketball Academy, and Brown starred at East Grand Rapids High School.
Her sister Olivia also plays college basketball. She spent two years at St. Bonaventure before transferring to Valparaiso University in Indiana, where she’s a fifth-year senior. Brown chose Northwestern coming out of high school and started 34 games in her two seasons there.
Brown said she loved the school, but from a basketball standpoint Northwestern “just wasn’t the best fit for me.” And so she entered the portal, hoping to find an opportunity at another school with a stellar academic reputation.
One of Agugua-Hamilton’s assistant coaches, Tori Janoska, is the all-time leading scorer at Michigan State, and she called Brown’s mother. Brown didn’t know anything about UVA and had rarely been to the East Coast, but she remembered watching Janoska play for the Spartans.
“And so I talked to her and then I talked to Coach Mox ,” Brown said. “It was kind of random, because Virginia hadn’t really been on my radar.”