Amazing Story of MU Women’s Basketball Player from Latvia

The Columbia Missourian‘s Amy Backes wrote a profile of Liene Priede, an MU women’s basketball program from Latvia who attended a sports academy as a child and dreamed of coming to the U.S.

"For Priede, basketball was a simple choice because she wanted to follow in the footsteps of her mother, who used to play, and one of her older brothers, who had just started playing.“When I was younger, I just wanted to do everything he was doing,” Priede said. “So I asked my mom to take me to practices, and she did.”At her sports school in Riga, Latvia, students as young as 8 years old would choose a sport to concentrate on. So, at the age of 8, she decided she would concentrate solely on basketball. She practiced every day after school and had games twice a week against teams from sports schools in other cities. As she got older, practice was later in the day, and games were more frequent. At tournaments, her team would play teams from other cities and sometimes other countries.When she reached ninth grade, she had a concrete plan set in her mind to play basketball in the U.S."

Big-time college athletics can sometimes be the most corrupt and filthy institution in the country. There are numerous flaws throughout the entire system, but Priede’s story is a reminder of the ideal of college sports: an opportunity for someone to use sports to fulfill a dream.