Alyssa Nelson '21 Recruiting Profile

Being the granddaughter of a high school boys varsity basketball coach, I have literally grown up on the court. I have seen hundreds of games, but when I took an interest in playing the game, I fell in love with the game. I have always been the tallest amongst my peers, so I knew I had an advantage over others, but I knew I had to work on my fundamentals if I was going to reach my goal and play at the next level. The past 4 years, I have put my social life on hold and concentrated solely on school and basketball. I have played on rec and club teams, I've worked with a track & field coach to learn how to run properly, I've trained with a strength and conditioning specialist and I've had private workouts with different coaches who worked with me on things like footwork, balance, positioning, and ball-handling. I know nothing is going to be handed to me, therefore if I am going to play in college I know it's up to me to stay focused and work hard. 

I suffered a traumatic brain injury in 2014 and sustained brain damage to my frontal lobe. As a result, I struggled with simple tasks as tying my shoes and simple conflict resolution. I really never comprehended how amazing our brains really are until part of mine was injured. I went from the top of my sixth-grade math class to having to re-teach myself second-grade math from my old math workbooks. Again, I knew nothing was going to be handed to me and that if I wanted to reclaim my seat at the top, I had to put in the work. A year later, at the end of seventh-grade, I was hand-picked to take an exclusive ninth grade integrated math class that was offered to only 8 eighth graders at my school. This was my biggest accomplishment to date. I became fascinated with the brain; how it functions and how we rely on it for every single task we do. It was at this time I realized my childhood dream of being a scientist was old news and my future would be one in the field of neuroscience.