Home for Nirra Fields these days is her own room in a five-bedroom suite on the UCLA campus. It is not luxurious: Fields has decorated with basketball and family pictures, and she shares a common space and a single bathroom with four other students. But the space is clean and it is organized and — this is most important — it is all hers.
After the route Fields took to get to it, that is enough.
Any athlete can lay out the arc of her career as a journey, but it would take quite an imagination to conjure one to match Fields’. Two countries. Three high schools. A half-dozen moves, none with a member of her immediate family and the last into the spare bedroom of an NBA head coach’s house.
Each stop has been a building block in her character, and all of them have molded her into what she has become: one of the top guards in the country, a leader on a team with Pac-12 championship hopes and a likely WNBA draft pick.
“I’m very comfortable with change,” Fields said. “In a way, it helps me move forward. I can draw on situations I’ve been in.”
There have been quite a few.
Born in Vancouver, Fields, 22, grew up in Montreal in a loving but vagabond household led by a single mother and filled out by six brothers. The Fields family moved often when Nirra was a girl — at least seven times, she estimated, by the time she was a teenager. (Once, all eight family members squeezed into a two-bedroom apartment, and when times were toughest, Nirra and her brothers learned to stash cookies in secret places, just to make sure there would always be a treat to eat. “There were so many of us,” she said.)
A talented athlete, Fields came to see basketball as a way to something better, something of her own. After watching a friend, Romeo Augustine, make a move to the United States for high school, where he played well enough to earn a scholarship to Providence College, Fields decided that path might work for her as well.
Augustine connected Fields with his Cleveland AAU coach, Mike Duncan, and it was Duncan who would eventually become Fields’ legal guardian when her mother, Faith, agreed to let Nirra move to the United States in 2008.
“I was raised in a foster home, and anything I wanted to do, I was always told, ‘You can’t do this, you can’t do that,’” Faith Fields said. “I didn’t want to hold Nirra back with what she wanted to do. She was very serious and mature and had something she wanted to do.
“If my kids say they want to pursue a dream, I don’t put them down. I tell them, ‘If you want to do it, do it to the full extent.’”
But crossing the border was just the start. Fields would go on to attend three high schools in four years, and to move five more times, living with teammates and assistant coaches and, eventually, Duncan. At each stop, she would unpack her few possessions but keep her emotions locked up.
“When she first came to my house, we didn’t talk that much,” Duncan said. “That was just weird. I would drop her off at school, and she would get a ride home and eat and then go in her room and close the door. That was it. I might say a few words here and there. I let her talk when she felt confident to talk. She grew. She started opening up. I gave her space.”
When Regina High, the all-girls Catholic school Fields was attending in Ohio, closed its doors after her sophomore season, she moved in with Duncan. With his help — and a scholarship — she was soon off to her next temporary home: Oak Hill Academy in Virginia. Unhappy, she said, by then she was sustained only by her basketball dreams.
“I was never thinking long term,” Fields said of developing relationships with friends and teammates. “It was hard to have strong relationships. That takes time. I wasn’t going to have that much time anywhere.”
Through Duncan, Fields came to meet Mike Brown, who at the time was coaching the Cleveland Cavaliers. After getting to know Fields, Brown and his wife at the time, Carolyn, took over her guardianship in 2011, around the time Brown was named the Los Angeles Lakers’ coach. The plan was that when the Browns packed up for Southern California with their sons, Elijah and Cameron, Fields would go along.
“She was used to me, and I know she was probably thinking people were dumping her,” Duncan said. “She took a little while, but she agreed. She said she would give it a try. They did great. They did unbelievable things for her. They got her a tutor. They helped Nirra in more ways than I could help her.”
Fields moved with the Browns into a gated community in Orange County, and joined Elijah and Cameron at Mater Dei High in Santa Ana — her third high school in three years. Driving herself toward a college scholarship, Fields helped Mater Dei to a 34-2 record and a state championship as a senior. The school retired her jersey after the season, but it was off the court where she was adjusting the most, at last lowering the walls she had built to keep others out.
“The thing that jolted us into the reality of Nirra’s situation was that when she moved to LA she had her own room,” Brown said. “Because of where she had lived before, she was so used to locking her door. She never knew who might come through, so she was constantly locking her stuff up.
He added: “It was very emotional for her and for us when we realized how special it was.”
After so many stops, Fields said, she chose UCLA because she felt at home in California. But that new comfort did not mean she was ready to let down her guard completely. UCLA coach Cori Close said it took Fields 2 1/2 years to trust her.
“I want to get into their lives,” Close said of her relationships with her players. “She had to say: ‘Coach, I’m going to need you to give me time. If you stay consistent, I’ll get there.’ I was impressed she could articulate that and set that boundary.”
As she had been in high school, Fields was just as guarded with her teammates.
“It was very difficult the first time we met,” UCLA point guard Jordin Canada said. “We were roommates over the summer. Our first interaction was literally, ‘Hi.’ I asked her how Canada was and she said good. We didn’t talk the rest of the night.”
Jordin Canada said Fields only opened up over a matter of weeks, sharing her interests and beginning to talk about basketball and TV shows they would watch together.
“It’s still hard to open up to Nirra, and for Nirra to open up to us, but she’s gotten a lot better,” Canada said.
Close, Brown and Duncan now marvel at her transformation. As a junior, Fields averaged a team-leading 17 points and guided the Bruins to the WNIT championship.
This year, she is second on the team in scoring at 16.6 points a game.
She also is on track to become the first member of her family to earn a college degree next year, and to hear her name called in the WNBA draft. Maybe then she will be able to replace the weathered black wallet that she says is the only thing that has made every stop on her journey.
“She has shown me exactly the person that she is,” Faith Fields said of her daughter. “The dreams she wanted are right in front of her now.”
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