March 3, 2010
by Neil Amato, TarHeelBlue.com
It was a chance meeting, really, when Waltiea Rolle crossed paths with Frank Rutherford on a Nassau street corner four-and-a-half years ago.
Rutherford was back in his homeland of the Bahamas, back to see friends and business associates in the summer of 2005. Rutherford has set up a foundation for young Bahamians, giving them the chance to get a head start on school and sports, if they exhibit scholarship potential.
Rutherford knew at first glance that Rolle had virtually limitless potential.
"The minute I turned the corner in my car, I saw this long and tall young lady, I was like, `Who was this child?'" Rutherford recalled.
Rutherford was further flabbergasted when he got out and realized that he - a 6-foot-4 former triple jumper - was looking up at a girl who was 14 years old.
Rutherford's foundation has mainly helped boys from the Bahamas, setting them up with host families in Houston, with the intention of getting them a college education on scholarship. But he took an interest in Rolle, now a 6-6 freshman for Coach Sylvia Hatchell's Tar Heels.
He asked Rolle to have her parents call him. They did, and not long after, the girl who looked like a basketball player but who didn't play basketball was off to Texas.
"They recruited people from the Bahamas to play, but I was the only one who really didn't know how to play," Rolle says. "I really didn't know anything at all."
Hatchell saw similar potential when she first set eyes on Rolle several springs ago, and now Rolle is an important contributor as a freshman, even though the game remains new to her.
Rolle watched basketball; she even had basketball role models, though she didn't think of Lisa Leslie and Sylvia Fowles that way at the time. When she did occasionally try her hand at the game, it was not in a structured environment. "Back home, it's like freestyle," she says.
Back home, in the largest city in the island country of about 330,000 people, Rolle knew she could do better. She knew when she had the chance, she should break away from her comfort zone, from the laid-back vibe of the islands.
That's the masked sadness of the Bahamas, the tropical setting hiding its profound lack of hope. There are resorts and fish huts and snorkeling tours and little else in the tourism-dependent paradise. For the locals, chances for upward mobility are slim. You live near the beach; it's easy to act as though you're on permanent vacation.
Rolle didn't want to be on vacation. She wanted to be something in life. She is planning to be the first in her family to graduate from college. She wants to play professional basketball and use her people skills and planned course of study to become a nurse.
Rutherford said that though the Bahamas has a high literacy rate, few families put emphasis on education. Part of it is financial, part cultural.
"The great majority of the population, they can't afford to go (to college)," Rutherford says. "Most American families plan for the kids to go to college. That is not the mindset of the average Bahamian family. It's day to day, a tourist destination."
Rolle attended high school at Houston's Westbury Christian, living with a host family but also bonding with Phyllis Dallas, her coach in AAU basketball.
Dallas said Rolle applied herself in school and basketball, developing confidence even as she was still learning the game.
"She started to kind of realize around her sophomore year, `I can do this basketball thing,'" Dallas says. "She didn't think she was good enough. But she started learning and getting better and better. She kind of started believing for herself."
The college coaches believed, sending letters that soon filled shoeboxes. The coaches came to watch in person, and Dallas says Rolle had almost 50 scholarship offers - not bad for someone whose first organized game was in the ninth grade.
"She was all over the place at first," Dallas says. "But she was a good athlete."
That's what Hatchell saw - a smooth post player who might not have known the finer points of negotiating a post-to-post screen but who was willing to learn. As the Tar Heels prepare to face Maryland in Thursday's ACC Tournament opening round, Hatchell is certain that Rolle is eager to grow her basketball knowledge, one question at a time.
"Some players, they won't speak up when they don't understand," Hatchell says. "Waltiea asks a lot of questions, and she is like a sponge."
Rolle has shown flashes of dominance as a freshman: four blocked shots in 17 minutes in her first ACC game; 12 points, eight rebounds and seven blocks in 20 minutes off the bench in a win at N.C. State; 20 points and 13 rebounds at Miami, when many in her family made the trip over from Nassau; 12 points, seven rebounds and six blocks in 24 minutes last weekend against Duke.
Hatchell was stunned that Rolle was left off the ACC's five-player all-freshman team. She leads the league in blocked shots at 2.8 a game; perhaps no other player in recent memory has led a conference statistical category while playing less than half a game (Rolle's average: 17.3 minutes).
Rutherford said he got goose bumps when he heard that Rolle led the ACC in blocks.
"It's mind-boggling. This is a young lady who a couple years ago knew nothing about basketball," he says. "It's God's work."
While in Chapel Hill, Rolle intends to study nursing - "She'll be great at that because she likes people and she likes kids," Dallas says - but she's also taking a course in dunking.
She has a good instructor - UNC assistant Charlotte Smith, who in December 1994 became just the second documented women's player to dunk in a game.
Rolle doesn't have far to go to dunk - Hatchell says the player teammates call Wally already can reach 10 feet, 5 inches from a flat-footed vertical jump. Though Rolle knows she has far more to learn than how to stuff the ball through the basket, she would like to be able to dunk. She is often compared with former AAU opponent Brittney Griner, a freshman at Baylor who dunks regularly.
"Everybody's always coming up to me, `Oh, Brittney Griner can dunk and she can do this, and can you do that?' Everybody has their skills, something they're good at. ... I try sometimes. I'm very interested in trying to dunk. I will get it eventually."
Whether she dunks or not, Rolle intends to get her degree from UNC. That is why, even though the Tar Heels have struggled somewhat this season, even though Rolle has seen an especially cold winter, she feels fortunate to be in Chapel Hill.
"I'm really lucky to be here, really," she says. "All those people back home that want to be here in my position, I'm really lucky. I think God just had it planned out for me."
