Girls' basketball player of the year (3A-A): Amelia Schofield, Manitou Springs

There she stood: 5-foot-6, years of basketball behind her and a stroke that would make Da Vinci blush.

Yes, with Amelia Schofield waiting on the perimeter, all fellow senior Erika Yost had to do was get her the ball.

“On the fast break I would always know where to pass it to,” Yost said. “She’d be behind the line and once I gave it to her she’d hit that shot every time. I think we did that like once a game.”

Schofield hit 52 3-pointers this season on her way to 397 points — and 34 of them came Jan. 24 when she broke the single-game school record.

But through it all she never forgot her roots.

From ages 3 to 8 and then from sixth to eighth grade, Schofield and her missionary parents lived in an impoverished area near Mazatlan, Mexico.

And in a soccer-dominated country, Schofield found basketball.

“The environment I was growing up around, my father was always around old coaches of basketball,” said Schofield whose family helped set up the first basketball program at the Britanico Instituto. “I can’t remember a weekend where I wasn’t playing somewhere. I think soccer was bigger for the guys.”

At the beginning of eighth grade, Schofield and her family moved to Manitou Springs. A year later Amelia met Yost on the hardwood floor and the pair’s chemistry has grown ever since.

“We’re always thinking the same things, saying the same things,” Schofield said. “We’re always doing stupid stuff.”

Off the court they’re known as the pranksters of the team. On one day the two enjoyed leaving their shortest player dangling from the rim.

“She thinks she is taller than she is,” they laugh before they let her down.

On the next, they’ll set up a Justin Bieber cutout in the aisle of the team bus with the face of one of their teammates’ boyfriends plastered on it.

In Schofield’s final district game, she found herself without her close friend (due to injury) for the first time in four years and facing the Florence squad that had stomped them by 15 points weeks before.

“Everything fell on (Schofield’s) shoulders,” coach Brian Brown said.

Up two with seconds remaining, Brown had to ask Schofield to do something he’d never had to ask.

“I yelled to her to miss long. I knew if she made it, it would be the only thing that could sink us,” Brown said. “So I thought she heard me and then it went long and she turned to me and said, ‘you told me to miss long, right?’”

Schofield’s 16 points and 3-for-4 performance from the line gave Manitou the 28-26 win.

“That was a great thing for me as a coach to experience.”

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