Inside HOKIE SPORTS | Vol. 11 No. 2 | October 2018

Kenny Brooks remembers the day vividly . On a late April day in 2017, he was driving north on Interstate 81, using the time to think about numerous things, with the welfare of his family and the state of his Virginia Tech women’s basketball program predictably at the top of the list. On the latter, he expected to hear some news about a recruit whom he viewed as a difference maker. His phone started vibrating, and he recognized the number. He happened to be driving near a rest area, so he pulled off to focus fully on the person on the other end of that cell signal. The two of them talked, just casual conversation. But Brooks started getting impatient. “I didn’t want to be driving, knowing that she was about to give me information about whether she was coming or not,” he said. “I pulled off, and she small-talked me for a little bit—and I’m nervous.” Then he added, laughing, “I’m like, ‘C’mon, just get to the point.’” Taylor Emery knows how to get to the point. She does so her way, and in this case, stealthily. She also knows how to get a point—actually, a bunch of points. That attribute made Brooks willing to wait, albeit impatiently, for her news. “Coach, I want to be a Hokie,” she told him. “I let out the biggest yell,” Brooks said. “I’m getting out, walking and pacing, and I immediately tweeted, ‘BOOM!’ because I couldn’t say her name. I think a lot of people knew what was going on, but we knew at that moment that we had gotten a very important piece to the puzzle that we were trying to put together.” Truthfully, Emery may have been the most important piece to the Virginia Tech women’s basketball puzzle a season ago. She provided the scoring punch that the Hokies lacked at times in 2016-17, setting a school single-season mark with 667 points, but more importantly, she brought the passion, that competitive fire that wills a group to success. Emery fit Brooks’ mold, too—an athletic guard with the ability to score, but also one who could look at the jersey of an opponent, whether it say “Duke” or “Syracuse” or “Louisville,” and respond by saying, “Challenge accepted.” The numbers prove that. In last year’s postseason, when Emery and a beaten-up, yet gritty, Tech bunch advanced all the way to the WNIT championship game, the second-team All-ACC choice scored at least 19 points in six of eight games, including 23 in each of the final two games. Now, with the 2018-19 season set to begin Nov. 6, she and four other seniors plan to go out with their own “BOOM.” They’re thinking NCAA Tournament—and a long run in it. “We have plans to make it to the Final Four and beyond, honestly,” Emery said. “We have to take it one season at a time. I split things up. You have the non-conference games, conference games, the ACC Tournament and the NCAA Tournament. You just take it piece by piece.” That’s pretty big talk for a 5-foot-10 guard leading a program that hasn’t been to the NCAA Tournament since she was 10 years old (2006). But Emery never has been afraid of challenges. The youngest of four children—“I was an accident,” she admitted, laughing—she learned the game from her father, Emmett, a Navy veteran who played at Western Illinois. Her brother, Emmett Jr., took her to the local parks in Chicago, during a time when her dad was stationed in the Great Lakes area. Emmett Jr., six years older than Taylor, made her play with the high school boys. Only 7 or 8 at the time, she managed to hang—and nearly started a brawl once when she bloodied a dude’s nose while going in for a layup. “My brother was like, ‘That’s what’s up. That’s what you do,’” she said. “But my father has always engrained that in me. He just engrained in me that you’re not really a women’s basketball player. You’re a ball player, and you have to remember that no matter who you go against and where you play.” While in middle school, Emery’s parents divorced, and her father moved to the Tampa, Florida area. She stayed back in Illinois with her mom for two years, but decided to move to Florida with her father right before her eighth grade year. With her dad training her, she gradually became a basketball prodigy, averaging better than 20 points per game as a sophomore at FreedomHigh School and 26 as a junior. College recruiters took notice. Emery committed to Tulane over Ole Miss, Penn and others before her senior season—and admitted she made a mistake. “It was my first visit, my only college visit, and you kind of go the first time ever and you’re smitten,” she said. “I liked it. I did like New Orleans. I liked the people there. I enjoyed everything about New Orleans, but their style of basketball wasn’t what I was looking for. I didn’t see myself staying there many more years because of their style of basketball, and I couldn’t see myself reaching my dreams, which was going pro, by staying there.” Emery decided to leave Tulane and return to Florida. She actually made a rather curious decision, opting to attend a junior college instead of transferring to another Division I school. She wound up at Gulf Coast State College in Panama City, Florida. The move left her with one less season of Division I eligibility, but she was willing to sacrifice that to get back on the court, and more importantly, get into game action. “I had already taken a whole year, and I wasn’t able to play the game that I was taught to play,” Emery explained. “I needed one year where I could just go play and go do what I was supposed to be doing in the first place, just play my style of game and not have to sit out. “Plus, you take the chance of you going somewhere, and you’ve already gone one year of not playing and then you sit out a year and you could lose everything you had worked for. I just didn’t think that was the way I wanted to go. It ended up working in my favor.” But not before the junior college experience humbled her. She received one pair of shoes to last her for the season. She received just one warm-up outfit. The team bused everywhere, regardless of distance, and meal money was scant. Yet she felt herself on the court, and she loved being able to do her thing. She led her team to the junior college national championship, averaging nearly 20 points per game for the season and earning tournament MVP honors. She again drew interest from recruiters, and both Brooks and Tech assistant Britney Anderson made multiple visits to watch her. Not about to make the same mistake twice, Emery took all of her visits during this recruiting process and ultimately narrowed things down to Tech and Oklahoma State because both schools featured acclaimed veterinary schools. A visit to Blacksburg ultimately sold her on what she needed to do and prompted that late-April phone call to Brooks. 26 Inside Hokie Sports “ A t the end of the day, it’s about who you’re around and not exactly where you’re at, and that makes Virginia Tech home – because of the people that are in it and surround you every day. Taylor Emery on coming to Virginia Tech ” Continued on page 28