Burton-Oliver follows her heart, joins Lady Griz

The same heart that guided her to the sport in the first place so many years ago, the one that set itself on playing college basketball someday, is the one that would keep her from realizing her dream.

It would have dawned a routine day in the late spring two years ago in the Seattle area, where she was raised, but each sunrise brought just a little bit more excitement, a little more anticipation into her life as she counted down the days.

It meant she was 24 hours closer to moving away from home for the first time, to Tempe, from the Pacific Northwest to the desert, to join the team at Arizona State.

That heart? It powered her 6-foot-2 frame and a back-to-the-basket skillset and a knack for rebounding that had her name on the big board at schools in every Power 5 conference in the country and Keeli Burton-Oliver on every top-100 recruiting list out there.

Also that heart? It was soft and sensitive and abhorred stress, and what is more pressure-filled and anxiety-ridden than being the center of recruiting attention, than talking on the phone with another voice from another school and just trying to get through it so she could breathe again?

So she put an end to it as quickly as she could, committing to Charli Turner Thorne's program at Arizona State as a sophomore and never looking back. She released the tension and fully embraced the game again, returned to a life that had revolved around basketball since the third grade.

As a junior in 2018-19, alongside current Lady Griz Haley Huard, she earned tournament MVP honors after leading Eastlake High to its first state championship. As a senior she averaged 20.2 points and 14.9 rebounds. After both seasons she was named the Washington Class 4A Player of the Year.

For her prep career: 1,886 points and 1,351 rebounds, 17.6 points and 12.6 rebounds per game, more than 70 times posting a double-double, four times earning first-team All-KingCo honors.

And then that was complete and her focus turned to the Sun Devils, and it was a routine day in the late spring two years ago in the Seattle area when her life changed forever.

She was scheduled to have minor surgery prior to leaving for Arizona, a procedure that would include anesthesia. As part of the pre-op routine, she underwent an electrocardiogram.

Hmmm, that's odd, someone thought while reading the results.

They walked in and unknowingly gave her the first small push toward what would become a downward spiral that would take the game away from her, the experience of being a college athlete, her identity, the fulfillment of everything she'd worked toward.

We don't know if you know this but there's a little abnormality with your heart. It doesn't look super concerning. We see different things with athletes all the time because of how much they do.

Where else was her mind going to go than to Sam Roos, her childhood friend and neighbor who had passed away quietly in his sleep just two months earlier, just shy of his 18th birthday, the result of an arrhythmia in an undiagnosed enlarged heart?

She underwent an echocardiogram, a stress test, another test, then another until she had completed the battery. Then the foundation of the entire world she had built, the one based around basketball and competing, collapsed in a matter of minutes.

It was a blur: ejection fraction … normal is 50-75 percent … yours is 40 … you'll never play sports again … probably need a new heart by the time you're 40 … don't plan on ever having children … everything in your life is going to have to change.

Everything became both chaotic and occurred within a fog. She moved to Tempe, met with Arizona State's contracted cardiologist, who looked at her charts and information and said, no way, I'm not going to sign off on this and put the school at risk. And his word was final.

Cindi Oliver, her mom, who played at Ventura College, then UTEP, then Seattle Pacific, wasn't going to sit back and watch everything get taken away from her daughter, not without a fight. She respected the diagnosis, but wanted more opinions, more hands on deck.

They went to the cardiologist contracted for the Arizona State football team. The doctor agreed with the family. There is something there but nothing that should keep her from playing basketball. An appeal was made. The appeal was denied.

A cardiologist from Harvard got involved, the head cardiologist for the NBA in New York. They asked for more tests, more MRIs, more echocardiograms. They asked her to wear a monitor for hours, which became 100, then 200, then more than 700 hours, the picture becoming more and more complete.

Google "best cardiologists in the U.S." and it's likely they know her case. They all agreed. Yes, it's a heart condition and it needs to be monitored but there are no red flags here, nothing that should keep her from playing basketball. More appeals, eight in all, eight denials.

There was only one person whose medical opinion would be taken as gospel, and he wasn't budging. "He was like, even though nothing suggests something could go wrong, I just don't feel like we should take the risk," says Burton-Oliver.

The family offered to sign a waiver, written with as much fine print as Arizona State felt it needed to add to protect itself. Denied.

She was living with Jaddan Simmons, who that season would become the first Arizona State freshman in nearly 20 years to average more than 10 points per game while racking up assist after assist by joining her roommate at her latest appointment.

Burton-Oliver started the season sitting on the bench for home games before it became too much. She couldn't handle watching people play out the same dream she still held. She went to practices but only to watch, part of the team but not truly part of the team.

Because she was still going through heart tests, she couldn't even take out her frustrations through exercise or playing basketball on her own, a limitation that only added to her mental-health challenges.

Turner Thorne and her staff were as disappointed as anyone, but their hands were tied. They weren't the ones who could sign off on her playing, so they did the next best thing. They gave Burton-Oliver their blessing to seek out different options.

"I hadn't done all this to not ever play college basketball, so I went into the transfer portal," says Burton-Oliver, who finished out the 2020-21 academic year at Arizona State.

Cindi Oliver is the owner of Pacific Courts in Newcastle, southeast of Seattle. One of the groups that uses the facility as its home base is Tree of Hope Basketball Club, a Nike-affiliated AAU program operated by Maurice Hines, who spent five seasons coaching at Washington State.

He stepped in and played intermediary, connecting one with the other, player with program, one willing to extend a lifeline not just to someone who needed it but to someone the Cougars had been recruiting before she decided on Arizona State. It was win-win.

"I sent them all my medical stuff. I said, send this to your doctors. If they are not going to clear me, there is no point in going through this all over again," Burton-Oliver says. "They said everything was fine."

She had been mostly sedentary for more than a year when she arrived in Pullman and joined a program on the rise, one coming off its first NCAA tournament appearance in more than 30 years.

The Cougars were on the move, cruising in the fast lane of Division I women's basketball with new expectations, new pressures. But Burton-Oliver needed time, to get her body back in basketball shape, to get her mind right, to ease back into it.

Day 1: three workouts, something Burton-Oliver hadn't done in more than a year. "I'm really struggling. I'm tired. I'm getting light-headed and blurry vision. I felt like I was going in way too fast."

She was told by a team doctor to take a week, get settled academically, maybe work out on her own, then come back. Two days later she received an email informing her that her aid had been canceled.

Eventually, another appeal. One side said the player had stopped coming to workouts on her own accord. She said she had been advised to step back. The final verdict: if you can't do this, you have to go.

The downward spiral was complete, rock bottom had been reached. She was done, living on her own in a new city, basketball taken away for good. The days, even the sunny ones, started and remained dark.

"Okay, I'm done with basketball," Burton-Oliver told herself. "It's not in the cards for me anymore. That second step was a hard one to get over. Once you give yourself the courage to try again, that was pretty disheartening. I felt very by myself."

Hines, the Tree of Hope coach who had helped get her to Pullman, broke into college coaching when he was hired in 2007 by first-year Washington State coach June Daugherty. He would be on her staff for five seasons, five years when he coached side by side with another Cougar assistant, Brian Holsinger.

Those ties would come into play as the Burton-Oliver story unfolded last fall.

"There is trust built in this profession, and sometimes you know somebody who knows somebody," says Holsinger, who knew of Burton-Oliver from his days recruiting at Oregon State, where he landed after eight seasons at Washington State.

She committed to Arizona State early, so he never got a chance to know the person. "I have a lot of connections to her more than anything."

He knew Sammy Fatkin too, from his time at Oregon State. He recruited her, then watched as she left Arizona after one season, then stepped away from the Montana program after a season and a half. He had no skin in the game but his heart still ached for her.

He's the embodiment of the "Tale of the Starfish," of the young girl walking along the beach where thousands of starfish had washed ashore in a storm, picking up one at a time and setting it back in the water, saving it.

Onlookers scoffed at the young girl's futile attempts, as if helping a handful of starfish out of thousands was going to make any difference at all. She looked at them after liberating another and said, "Well, I made a difference for that one."

Fatkin played on Holsinger's first team at Montana last season, averaged more than 12 points per game after being given a chance to complete her college career on a better note than would have been the case had she just stayed away.

What did it mean to her? Her tear-filled speech at Thursday night's postseason banquet said it all.

"I keep it really simple," says Holsinger, who has three kids, two girls. "How would I want my daughters to be treated? I would want someone to be fair, to be kind and to love them but help them be better, push them at the same time.

"It goes back to the basis of why I coach. Sammy deserved an opportunity to play and to be treated well."

Well, I made a difference for that one.

It's why Burton-Oliver is here, because of relationships, because she is still a really good basketball player, because Holsinger couldn't just sit by and watch someone not live out her dream or see what she could become if just given the chance, the opportunity.

Mom reached out to coach, which started the process, then player did the rest.

Burton-Oliver reached out to Huard, with whom she had played both high school and AAU ball. She was told, this is the most fun basketball has ever been. But she had been burned, badly, once and then again. What if she took one more leap of faith, only for her to hit rock bottom for a third time?

"Coming from Haley, that gave me the push to try it," says Burton-Oliver.

She arrived in January and has been around the team ever since. She found a program that is allowing her to take it slowly, to rebuild herself from inside out. She found a program she wasn't expecting.

"It's very rare when you have a group of girls and you don't have a problem with anyone. I genuinely like all the girls. They've all been great and super supportive," says Burton-Oliver. "I feel like everyone cares and genuinely wants the best for me.

"I'm really excited for my future here. The course of my life, just coming here, has completely taken a new route. I'm excited to see where that goes."

She started lifting. Toward the end of the season she joined the team for warmups and some light drills. Now with postseason workouts starting, she's more immersed than ever, battling with Carmen Gfeller in the post, joining Huard on the 3-point line.

She's not changing her game these days as much as she's adding to it. Once a true post who was at her best within a few feet of the basket, she's now expanding her repertoire. She's doing ball-handling drills, she's working on her perimeter skills and becoming more and more comfortable facing the basket.

"Brian has been teaching me how to play basketball all over again," says Burton-Oliver. "I'm becoming a different player than I used to be. I think it will be fun to figure out what kind of player I am now. I'm excited to see what Brian and all the assistants teach me."

She'll have three years to play, a fourth if both sides agree to apply the COVID exception to her eligibility status.

She'll be monitored and may still have some restrictions, but she's been cleared by Montana's doctors. She's used her experiences to team up with the American Heart Association, for whom she is now an ambassador in its "Life is Why" campaign. She wants all young athletes to have their hearts tested.

When this road has reached its end point, she'll be off to medical school. Would you believe she wants to be a cardiologist?

"We're excited to have her. She's a great kid," said Holsinger. "We're going to help her have the best experience possible. That's what we do in this program."

The Lady Griz also win, which they did back on Feb. 3 against Weber State, on a buzzer-beater by Sophia Stiles that came right in front of the Lady Griz bench. A celebration erupted at midcourt.

In one of the highlights from just the right angle, Burton-Oliver can be spotted at the end of the bench. She leaps with everyone else when the shot goes in. When the rest of the players rush the court, she hesitates for a fraction of a second, as if she's wondering if she should join, if she's truly one of them.

It was a telling moment for someone who still hadn't practiced with the team, who was still figuring out where she fit in and to what degree.

Then she took off for center court to join the joyous mob, all in with all of her heart.

University of Montana Athletics

Players Mentioned

Sammy Fatkin

Carmen Gfeller

Haley Huard

Sophia Stiles

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