She would FaceTime with the Bryants before games, gave Gigi her Chicago Sky uniforms, even practiced with Gigi and her teammates and was blown away by how hard she had to play against them. Williams was floored when Gigi told her she was her favorite player. “From what I saw,” Williams said Monday, “she was going to be heaps better than me.” Many of Gigi’s favorite players had UConn ties, like Katie Lou Samuelson - she had played for Davis, which led to the initial connection between he and Bryant - and Gabby Williams. But she came to me about a year and a half ago and said, ‘Can you teach me the game?’ I said, ‘Sure.’ We started working a little bit and the next thing you know it became a true passion of hers. “She started out playing soccer, which I love. UConn Women’s Basketball January 26, 2020 Mamba Mentality will live on forever, but they are deeply missed. Kobe and Gianna meant a lot to our program. Bryant wore a UConn shirt - just like Gigi was - and told SNY television during an in-game interview that he was thrilled that one of his daughters wanted to follow in his sneakers and take up the family basketball business. “Gigi getting better every day,” her dad wrote.īryant and Gigi went to a UConn home game against Houston last March. Gigi getting better every day #teammamba #mambacita #fadeĪ post shared by Kobe Bryant on at 2:47pm PST The sequence: dribble-drive, pass to the corner, post up, wait for the ball to come back, catch, footwork, shoot the fadeaway. “They just listened to him.”Įarlier this month, Bryant posted a short video clip of Gigi in a game. “He never yelled or anything,” Davis said. Bryant had pre-teen girls figuring it out. Grown men, professionals, the best players in the world, struggled with the triangle. They ran the triangle offense, the one where Bryant had so much success with during his career. So, too, was the five- or six- or seven-times-a-week workouts that Bryant would host for Gigi and her teammates on the team he coached. “I try to watch as much film as I can,” Gigi said in an interview with Las Vegas CBS affiliate KLAS in 2019, when she and her dad attended the Las Vegas Aces’ WNBA opener. Few things in life made Bryant happier than that realization. She was going to carry on the Bryant name in basketball. Kobe and Vanessa Bryant had four daughters. All nine - including two of her teammates - died, officials said. She was one of the nine people, her father also among them, on the helicopter that crashed Sunday morning into a hillside in Calabasas, California, as the group made its way to a basketball tournament where she was supposed to be playing. “It’s hard to predict her future, but with the way she was improving and the way she understood the game, she was going to have a bright one.” “Gigi was really turning into a special player,” said Russ Davis, the women’s basketball coach at Vanguard University in Southern California and someone who became close with Bryant in recent years. Over the years, the world watched her grow from a babe in her father’s arms, to a small child trying to hold his Finals MVP trophy to his companion at WNBA, college and NBA games around the country, listening to her father break down play and watching every detail on the court, just as he always did. She was going to play at Connecticut and head to the WNBA. He was Mamba, of course, and she was going to be basketball’s female version of him. Her dad, Kobe Bryant, called her Mambacita. The world, now and forever, knows her as Gigi.
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