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WSU freshman Demmings turns life around

Jim Witmer Kim Demmings, freshman star of Wright State women's basketball team plays defense during practice on Thursday 01/19/11.

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11:35 PM Thursday, January 19, 2012

Her basketball coach back at Richmond High in Indiana — Casey Pohlenz — was talking about the most impressive performance he’s ever seen from her.

“Kim Demmings is a freak of nature athletically,” he said.

And while that certainly was on display at the end of last season on Senior Night when she scored 33 points against Marion, had 10 steals and in the process finally won the hearts of Wright State coaches who offered her a scholarship after the game, that’s not the effort Pohlenz brought up.

Neither was it when he brought his entire Red Devils team over to the Nutter Center this past November to watch Demmings score 25 points in her college debut against Ball State.

Nor was he referring to any of her other many head-turning outings this season (the 5-foot-7 freshman point guard already has been named the Horizon League player of the week three times), not even the game last Saturday when she scored 38 points to lead her team past Wisconsin-Milwaukee, 75-72 in overtime.

“What she has done off the court, the way she has turned herself around and become this person everyone here is so proud of, that’s the remarkable thing,” Pohlenz said.

It was just a couple of years ago when, as Demmings puts it, “people saw me as nothing but young, bad and thuggish.”

As great of an athlete as she was (she also was one of Indiana’s best high school long jumpers), she did nothing but sell herself short in everything else she did.

“I had always been a star player in basketball, so I began to feel I could do what I wanted when I wanted with no consequences,” said Demmings, who can be unflinchingly candid and honest. “I had that ‘you-can’t-tell-me-nothin’ attitude and it got me in a lot of trouble.”

Although she has a twin sister named Kelly, she said, “We are as different as night and day. Back then, yeah, she was the good twin and I was not.”

Demmings said she hung out with six or seven guys who often were in trouble and pretty soon that was her way of life.

“She had a lot of negative people who wanted to doom her to a certain lifestyle and way of being,” Pohlenz said.

She had enough incidents in her freshman year that she didn’t play basketball at all as a sophomore, he said. And then late in her junior year, even though she was the star of the team, he said he had to kick her off after a couple of transgressions.

“I stole some gum from a store and I don’t know why because I could have paid for it,” she said. “I didn’t get arrested — the manager let me go — but the next day we had a game and I did fantastically well and it made the newspaper. The store manager read it and told my coach what happened.

“I was told if there was one more incident I was off the team, and then one day the principal sees me in school with my pants kind of sagging. It was that whole thug thing, I guess. She told me to pull them up and I didn’t and I was suspended. And that was it. I was off the team.”

Pohlenz said it was one of the toughest things he had to do, but Demmings now says it was “the right thing” to do.

“I was crushed, totally crushed, and that’s when my mom really stepped in and helped me change.

“She told me, ‘Okay, you’ve dug yourself into a ditch but I’m here and while there are consequences, I’m gonna help you out.”

Yolanda Demmings made her daughter attend every game after she was booted from the team. “I had to sit right at her side,” Demmings said. “My sister was still playing and we had to support her and realize it was really about other people, not just me.

“My mom and my sister, Coach Pohlenz and our athletic director, they all helped me through this. A lot of people did. And when I saw that store manager working at the Village Pantry, I finally went up to him. For a while I had been kind of mad at him, but I realized it was the breaking point in my life and he helped me turn it around. I kind of thanked him for setting me straight and helping me get my life together.”

And did she ever, said Pohlenz: “She gives credit to everybody else, but the truth is, it was her. She finally had faith in herself.”

She became the leader of the Richmond team her senior year.

With her averaging 20 points and 10 rebounds a game, she led the Red Devils to their first winning season in nine years and was named the Richmond Palladium-Item’s “Area Player of the Year.”

By then, though, many colleges had turned away from her.

“My old mistakes, those encounters with my bad side, kind of affected my recruiting,” she said.

As Pohlenz watched the transformation, Wright State — especially assistant coach Katrina Merriweather who is from Indiana — watched from afar and was equally impressed.

When head coach Mike Bradbury was convinced of Demmings’ academic turn-around, he and Merriweather were on hand to see her play on Senior Night. Truthfully, their first interest was to see Marion’s Katrina Blackmon, who already had committed to them, but as Pohlenz said, “Kim was the best player on the court that night.”

Soon after, Demmings took a recruiting visit to WSU and, in her words, “fell in love” with the place.

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