In Oregon prep girls hoop circles, Love Lei is best

Tualatin sophomore Love Lei Best is considered the top girls high school player in the state (courtesy Demarcus Best)

For Love Lei Best, Friday was the best of times, it was the worst of times.

Early in the day, Tualatin’s 5-6 sophomore point guard learned she had been selected as the Gatorade Player of the Year for Oregon girls basketball.

On Friday night, Best and the top-ranked Timberwolves suffered an excruciatingly painful 56-55 defeat to South Medford in the 6A state semifinals at Chiles Center.

Best had sunk two free throws with 5.3 seconds left to give Tualatin a 55-54 lead. After a timeout, South Medford inbounded the ball in backcourt. The Timberwolves were blanketing Panther center Mayan Akpan — who already had 24 points and 12 rebounds — with double coverage. As she crossed midcourt with the ball, Dyllyn Howell threw what amounted to a hail-Mary pass to Akpan. The ball cleared Tualatin defenders into the hands of the 6-3 Akpan, who caught it and, as she was falling to the floor, flipped the ball backward off the backboard and through the net as time expired.

“The way that ended was, well, unbelievable,” Tualatin coach Wes Pappas said afterward. “When has that happened before? (Howell) just shucked it up — almost blindly threw it — and I am thinking, ‘Game over.’ ”

Then came the Mayan Miracle.

“She got (the shot) off in time, but it had to be .1 (left on the clock),” Pappas said.

It was a cruel blow to the defending champion Wolves, going without starting center Alex Padilla, who was lost for the season to a torn ACL on Feb. 3. They jumped to a 12-3 start and led through most of three quarters before South Medford, behind the San Diego State-bound Akpan, came roaring back. The Panthers built a six-point lead with 2 1/2 minutes left when Best, who had struggled through much of the game, led a rally that got the Wolves back on top and in position to move into Saturday’s finals.

“Things don’t always go your way,” Pappas said. “This was great for girls basketball. It was a great game, a great ending. Everybody will remember where they were when Mayan Akpan made that shot — one of the most incredible buzzer-beaters ever.”

It was not Love Lei’s best performance. She scored a team-high 18 points playing all 32 minutes, but made just 6 of 16 shots from the field, including 1 of 4 on 3-point attempts. Best was 5 for 6 from the foul line and had six assists and six steals, but also five turnovers, which I would guess was a season high. She came up big at the end, though, with a steal, a great assist, a couple of baskets and the clutch foul shots in the closing minutes.

Last season, Tualatin rallied from a 19-point second-half deficit to defeat Jazzy Davidson-led Clackamas 63-58 in the state finals. Pappas noted that the Wolves have been involved in “maybe the two most memorable games in Oregon girls basketball history at Chiles Center. The Clackamas game was probably No. 1, because it was a championship game.”

The Tualatin players were crushed after Friday’s loss. They sat first with themselves in the loneliness of the losers’ locker room following the game, and were eventually joined by their coaches.    After a good deal of time the players slowly began to trickle out of the room, a few sobbing, many with tears in their eyes. Among the last to depart was Love Lei, her eyes moist and reddened.

The game’s ending, she allowed, was shocking. “It was insane,” she said softly.

I congratulated her for winning the Gatorade Award.

“It is a big accomplishment,” Best said. “I am thankful for all the people who advocated for me to get it. It is a really cool award.”

Love Lei plays basketball year-round — for Tualatin during the high school season and with the Maurice Lucas Foundation’s ML20 team on the AAU circuit during the spring and summer. The latter team is coached by her mother and father, Joy and Demarcus Best. I asked which team she prefers.

“I like them both,” Love Lei said. “They are very different. With AAU, we travel, and you spend so much time with the girls. And I am coached by my parents, so that is fun. There are so many more practices and it is more structured in high school. But I really do like them both.”

What does she love most about playing basketball?

“I love the people and the opportunities it has given me,” she said. “I have met my best friends through basketball. But I also keep meeting new best friends.”

The Timberwolves seemed to play with a hangover in Saturday’s third-place game, falling 65-55 to Benson to finish the season with a 26-3 record. Best scored 28 points — more than half her team’s total — but didn’t get much help.

“Love has had an amazing season and is so deserving of the (Gatorade) award,” Pappas told me. “To win that as a sophomore is just huge. She is a great point guard, a great leader on this team, a clutch player. She plays big in the big moments. I am so proud of her.”

Entering the tournament, Love Lei had made no secret of her goal to win four state championships. Friday night changed everything.

“Now it’s three,” she said.

Love Lei, shown with parents Demarcus and Joy Best, plays her AAU ball with the ML20 Enforcers. Joy and Demarcus are her coaches (courtesy Demarcus Best)

Love Lei is the youngest of three children of Demarcus and Joy, who met when they were playing point guard for the men’s and women’s teams at Treasure Valley CC in Ontario. By the time they moved on for their final two seasons at Warner Pacific, they were married and their oldest, Andre, had been born. Andre, now 24, played three years at Clackamas CC. His brother Dion, 20, played at Oregon City High.

Demarcus works as a vice president/private banker with U.S. Bank Private Wealth Management in Portland. Joy is a teacher at Alliance Charter Academy in Oregon City, where the family lives. Together, they coached both of their sons through youth basketball. Now they coach their daughter with the ML20 Enforcers.

“I am the assistant coach,” Demarcus says. “I sit at the end of the bench and we strategize and do things together.”

Love Lei’s name was mainly the brainchild of her mother.

“We are a Christian family, and she wanted a fruit spirit (for a potential first name),” Demarcus says. “She mentioned ‘Love,’ and I was like, ‘How about having her middle name be Love?’ She said, ‘Nope. Her first name is going to be Love, and her middle name Lei.’ ”

Most people, including her parents, call her Love Lei (as in “lovely”) now. Part of it is that a teammate with the Enforcers is Love Forde.

“To differ from (Forde), we call her Love Lei,” Demarcus says. “It stuck.”

From the time she was knee-high to a grasshopper, Love Lei was around basketball, her parents coaching, her brothers playing.

“Love Lei grew up in the gym,” Demarcus says. “She has been in the gym, watching us coach and her brothers and others play.”

Friday was the first time I have seen Best play in person, but I can tell she has been well-coached. She has textbook form on her jump shot — good body balance, nice backspin, a high arc on the shot. She dribbles well with both hands, has a nifty spin move and good change of direction on her move to the basket.

“Love Lei has had the fundamentals down from a young age,” says David Lucas, who operates the Maurice Lucas Foundation. “Her parents got all the credit for that.”

“Joy and I got taught well,” Demarcus says. “We had good coaches when we played. Love Lei has gotten guidance from a lot of other people, too, along the way. And she has some natural stuff (innate abilities) and understanding of the game and the moment.”

Lucas — the former Oregon State standout who is son of the late Maurice Lucas — has known Love Lei since she was five, when she was hanging out while watching Andre play for David’s first ML20 team. Demarcus was the team’s head coach. Lucas has sponsored Love Lei’s ML20 teams since she was in seventh grade, with Joy as the head coach.

“We knew the girls were going to start traveling, and the whole thing gets expensive,” Demarcus says. “David is generous and kind, and we had a good relationship with him. Joy called him and said, ‘Do you have a heart for girls?’ He met the girls, and he has been with us since.”

Lucas doesn’t just cover expenses for the girls. He travels with them on many of their various sojourns to play in national tournaments and has worked with them individually in camps and clinics. Love Lei is the centerpiece of the group.

“She is incredibly gifted and talented, works very hard,” Lucas says. “Her (basketball) IQ is through the roof. Her ability to score, to handle the rock — she is one of those players you don’t have to worry about her losing the ball or getting stripped. The way she can move at that size and get to the paint … it’s like she has eyes in the back of her head. She sees the floor very well. It allows teammates to get the ball in scoring position.

“The amount of hours she puts in the gym, training, working on her body, dribbling, shooting — she does it all.”

So far, the parent/daughter and coach/player relationship with Love Lei has gone smoothly.

“It has worked out well,” Joy says. “Our three kids came along four years apart, which has allowed us to focus on coaching one kid at a time. We had eight years of experience doing it before Love Lei started. You learn something coaching one, and then you adjust with the next one.There are things you learn along the way that help that process.”

During Love Lei’s first two years playing team basketball, her parents attended one game each year. They were busy coaching Dion’s team.

The Dean of Portland Sports is now on BlueSky.

“And that bothered her,” Demarcus says. “She would come home after a game and say, ‘Dad, I scored 20 points, and you weren’t there.’ I would say, ‘Don’t worry, we’ll be there. Your time will come.’

“We learned a lot from coaching Andre,” Demarcus adds. “We were very open in saying we didn’t do it quite the right way with him. We found that confidence is so key when it comes to basketball. We knew too much about basketball, and we would over-coach at times. We tell our (players’) parents, ‘Let us coach, and you just tell them to work hard and that they are doing great.’

“By the time we got to (coaching) Love, we had streamlined things. It is a great relationship in that sense. After a game, I might give her a tip or two — little stuff — but we talk very little about the game itself.”

Joy has been the head coach through her time with the Enforcers.

“We had to develop a relationship where, yes, I am your mom, but right now I am your coach,” she says. “I am going to talk to you as a player and you talk to me as a coach. It is about respecting those boundaries. There are ways you talk at home, but you have to change that on the basketball court. There are certain things we leave at home.”

The Best children attended Alliance Charter Academy from kindergarten through eighth grade. Joy homeschooled them in math and made sure they got a varied, quality education.

“I got them with good teachers in other subjects,” she says. “It was an individualized base of learning. I wanted experts who loved what they were doing. Love Lei played the ukulele, the guitar, the piano for a period of time. The kids were able to do robotics and (work at) solving problems. We were able to incorporate things so they were excelling not just athletically but in different avenues, like musically and academically, as well.”

Love Lei has had a certain degree of independence from the time she was in kindergarten. Rather than have her taught by a single teacher, Joy, who was teaching there, had her going from class to class through a school day.

“Every day was different,” Joy says. “There were no repeats, and no teacher or parent guiding her around the school. She had to get herself from class to class. She had a Hello Kitty (pull cart) and a folder. She had to navigate herself around. She didn’t always get to the right spot, but there were people helping her if necessary.”

Today, Love Lei is 16, has her driver’s license and a car, and makes plenty of her own decisions, especially when it comes to basketball and her training.

“This is her thing,” Joy says. “She totally loves basketball, but she loves it because she wants to do it. A trainer called me about weightlifting. I told him, ‘You talk to Love. I am not the one setting this up. She is the one who will lift the weights. You guys figure it out.’ She is fully capable. She has been doing this since kindergarten.”

Love Lei has done some personal training, but of her own choosing.

“We are letting her handle that these days,” Demarcus says. “I felt like we burned out Andre. With Love Lei, it is like, ‘Let her be a kid.’ She has a car, so now it is easy for her to go train. Most of the time, I don’t know when she is training. She’s doing her own thing.”

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Sometimes relationships between a premier player’s AAU and high school coaches are a delicate balance. Not so with the Bests and Pappas, both agree.

“Wes is great,” Demarcus says. “Joy and Wes talk a lot, doing whatever they can to be in union. It is all about the girls.”

“Her parents — especially her mom — have been coaching her forever, and Love is truly a coach’s kid,” Pappas says. “She lives basketball. She has been around the game so much, and Joy and Demarcus are basketball people, so it is in the family.”

Pappas has coached high school basketball 24 years, the last seven as Tualatin’s head coach.

“Love is the best point guard I have ever had,” he says. “From Day One, during our first summer practices before her freshman year, she picked up stuff with a speed I have never seen in my 24 years. The thing that is most impressive is her processing speed. She is a step ahead of everybody mentally in terms of how she processes information.

“When you talk about processing speed like that, you are talking about genetics. It is like with a (child prodigy) who before he had any lessons, he sat down at the piano at five years old and could play. Some things you can’t even teach. It is hand-of-God kind of stuff.”

Love carries a 3.8 grade-point-average. She is a savvy-for-her-age teenager whose deportment seems beyond reproach.

“She is the sweetest, kindest soul,” Lucas says. “Off the court, she is a gem.”

“Love is a great person,” Pappas says. “She is the best kid we have with helping the kids on our youth teams. Love is a celebrity to those young girls. They just love her. They wait for her after the games. They get autographs and want to take pictures with her.

“She gets in there and encourages the young kids coming up. She loves the game of basketball and is into inspiring others. She was inspired by kids older than her, and she is very aware and inspiring to the younger generation.”

Best has fostered some other relationships through basketball. She has become friends with Trail Blazers guard Scoot Henderson, who gifted her a set of Pumas. Henderson and Blazers assistant coach Pooh Jeter attended Tualatin’s quarterfinals victory over West Salem Thursday at Chiles.

“Scoot’s agent has gotten involved and helped get Love Lei’s name out there,” Demarcus says. “That is how she ended up at the Chris Brickley Invitational in Chicago last year.”

Best’s accolades are piling up. As a freshman, she was first-team 6A All-State and first-team All-State Tournament, with Davidson the only unanimous selections. Love Lei repeated those honors this season. Last summer, she was named Most Valuable Player of the Made Hoops West Coast circuit as the Enforcers went 13-0 and won the tournament championships. Love Lei was among the 52 players who competed at the USA U16 national girls team trials in Colorado Springs.

“The day before the cuts were made, the head coach winked at her and said, ‘See you tomorrow,’ ” Demarcus says. “And then she got cut. It was still a fantastic experience for her.”

PrepGirlsHoop has Love Lei ranked as the state’s No. 1 recruit in the class of ’28. There are already 28 Division-I scholarship offers on the table, and most of the major programs in the country have at least expressed interest. She has taken plenty of unofficial recruiting visits. On her Instagram page are photos of her in uniforms of such schools as Michigan, Ohio State, Baylor, Utah, Georgia, Texas A&M, Purdue, Oregon and Oregon State. Her father says she probably won’t commit to a school until the summer after her junior year.

Love Lei Best, already with scholarship offers from 28 Division-I programs, has “hand-of-God” type of basketball skills, says Tualatin coach Wes Pappas (courtesy Demarcus Best)

Best has no NIL deals yet, but her parents have been approached by a number of agents, “talking about building a brand,” her father says. “There have been companies that want to partner with Love Lei.”

For now, it is mostly about letting her have a fun time playing basketball. She has enjoyed playing with her teammates, both at Tualatin and with the Enforcers.

“We could put her on any AAU team,” Demarcus says. “There are plenty (of coaches) who call with interest. She understands that it is more fun when you are able to do it with a group of girls you enjoy and in a community that is so supportive. We are all rising together. That is one of the things we talk about a lot to our parents.”

Do Love Lei’s parents worry about all the attention she is receiving?

“You always worry about it,” Demarcus says. “We check in with her a lot. She is really mature for her age. If there is anything weird going on, she lets us know.”

At least for now, Love Lei is handling her celebrity well.

“A lot of kids who have that kind of attention at an early age …    I see them on other teams, and a lot of it goes to their head,” Pappas says. “Love doesn’t have a big ego. You don’t hear her talking about it. She is a high school kid who has gotten to go to USA Trials and is traveling around the country and has the biggest schools in the nation offering her. Yet she is a good kid who cares about her teammates.”

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