Eighteen-year-old Natalie Chou's unorthodox all-American basketball journey, which has carried her to the pinnacle, begins four decades ago on the other side of the Pacific with a young girl in China.
For Natalie, there would have been no world travel with top U.S. national teams, no McDonald's All-America selection, no high school dominance at Plano West in Plano, Texas, no courtships with storied college programs, no scholarship to Baylor, without the odyssey undertaken by Quanli Li, the girl from Beijing who grew up to become her doting mother and demanding coach.
"That's for sure," Natalie said the other day, waiting patiently with phone in hand to take her turn on the practice court of Plano's QD Academy under Quanli's watchful eye.
While most of the students scurrying through the halls at QD, a Chinese after-school, have come to hone academic skills, Natalie will be the lone Chinese teenager sharpening skills on the basketball court. Table tennis is the athletic program that QD's website boasts.
No matter. QD has helped produce a basketball player any gym would be proud to call its own.
"My star," is how Quanli, her mother/coach, often refers to the daughter whose path she has guided from the cradle.
Approaching her own teenage years in a Beijing still reeling from Mao Zedong's politically turbulent Cultural Revolution, Quanli stood head and shoulders above her classmates, girls and boys. At about 5-foot-7, she was lean, long-legged and oozed evidence of superior athletic prowess.
Quanli's parents earned relatively good livings. Her mother was a factory worker while her father was employed as an administrator at a physics institute. To supplement the family income, her father also dabbled in the art of Chinese massage, kneading clients' bodies in the communal home that he, his wife and their children shared with several other families.
One day a client, a member of the Chinese women's basketball team, caught a glimpse of the sinewy girl in the hallway, asked a few questions and offered a life-altering prescription.
"Basketball," the patient told Quanli's father. "Your daughter should play basketball."
The patient wasn't referring to shooting hoops recreationally. She meant the serious kind where an athlete would have to dedicate every last fiber to making good in a state-sponsored program.
Arrangements were made. Tryouts secured. Authorities dissected Quanli's every movement on the court, tapped her every bone, and in the political climate of the day, parsed the background of a girl whose father had come from a family of landlords, a disgraced class of the era.
Finally when she was 13, it was decided Quanli would be assigned to Beijing's top girls basketball club, where she would also have a chance to train with the Chinese national youth teams.
And so, Quanli's transformation from daughter to cog was set in motion. She was taken out of school, moved away from her family and immersed in a basketball life. The game's fundamentals and skills were drilled with mechanical precision. Moving without the ball, court awareness, unselfishness and mental toughness were stressed as much as any skill that showed up in a box score. Schoolwork was a sanctioned afterthought.
When Quanli was 18, she graduated to a "professional" team that paid even more. Eventually, however, she hit her wall. At 22, she was allowed to leave to attend a Beijing university. She thought photography might be her passion. Instead, she became a wife when she married Joseph Chou, who planned to be an industrial engineer.
In 1994, they had their first daughter, Tingting. When Joseph had an opportunity to study abroad at Lamar University in Texas, Quanli accompanied him.
Three years later, Natalie was born.
When Joseph earned his master's degree, the family moved from Beaumont, Texas to Plano for work. Quanli felt it necessary to help make ends meet.
"It's not easy when you come from nowhere," Quanli said. "We had little. I didn't have work permission, but I had to survive here."
Her path to "survive," a word Quanli uses often, came through basketball.
"It was something I knew," she said. "I could teach it. I could show skills."
It was then that Quanli began transitioning into "Coach Li," as she has become known in the North Texas basketball community.
As their parents' marriage disintegrated, Tingting and Natalie often tagged along when their mother went to work.
Tingting was old enough to train. Natalie was old enough to want to do everything her big sister did.
"I didn't take her seriously," Quanli said of her second-born. "She was too young."
It was Natalie who eventually proved a natural on the court while Tingting drifted off into the world of her father's academia. Quanli recognized Natalie's talents. She took to drilling her daughter in earnest, never cutting Natalie the least bit of the slack as she sometimes afforded others. Natalie remembers the crying sessions that sometimes followed basketball sessions.
Quanli said she might have been harder on her daughter than her own no-nonsense coaches had been back in Beijing because America presented a different landscape.
"I always tell her nothing comes easy. Nothing comes free. We have to really work hard," Quanli said. "Especially because you are Chinese. You are at a disadvantage physically. You are not stronger. You are not faster. You have to be smarter. You have to be smarter in skills."
As her good fortune would have it, Natalie, working alone one day to hone those skills, caught the discerning eye of a parent coaching his daughter's team on a nearby court at the cavernous Plano Sports Authority.
As he watched Natalie go through her progressions, Jason "Jet" Terry wondered just how old the lean, long-legged girl that oozed evidence of superior athletic prowess might be.
Terry judged that her skills made her high school age. He never anticipated her answer when he wandered over to ask.
"When she said she was in sixth grade, it blew me away," Terry, then a guard on the Dallas Mavericks, recalled in a telephone interview.
As his good fortune would have it, Terry's team, the Lady Jets, could make a place for a player of Natalie's skills.
"I immediately invited her to join a travel team I was putting together," said Terry, now in his 17th NBA season as a member of the Houston Rockets.
Natalie was giddy at the possibility of being coached by a celebrity. Quanli was not as enamored, Terry recalled. She had questions and demanded answers. She wanted to be sure Terry could provide the proper playing situation for her daughter.
Terry said that never could have been an obstacle.
"Whatever I had to do to get a talent like that on my team," he said, "I was willing to do."
It wasn't long after Natalie joined Terry's Lady Jets travel team, which would gain national recognition, that Quanli had an epiphany.
"I watched her play against kids from the whole country and I realized she could play with any of them," the mother said. "She was good."
Terry wasn't the only professional struck by young Natalie's grace and skill on the court. By the time she was finishing seventh grade, she was already receiving letters from a "who's who" of big-time college coaches.
Mostly they marveled at Natalie's advanced movements choreographed primarily by her mother.
"We worked on footwork," Quanli said. "We worked on shooting form. Faking. I wanted her to be able to play anywhere on the court _ inside, outside, shooting guard, point guard. To do that, you have to be in the gym. You work in the gym."
Natalie was almost 6-feet tall when she entered the ninth grade in 2012. She was the lone freshman on the Plano West Senior High team.
It didn't take long, however, until she morphed into a key contributor on a team that would win 36 of 40 games. Rival coaches recognized her as the district's Newcomer of the Year.
As a sophomore, Natalie helped Plano West reach the championship game in the state's highest competitive classification. For her contributions, she was named All-State. She continued to grow her game as a junior when she averaged 22 points and 4.8 rebounds a game.
This season, Natalie, now 6-1 and the tallest girl on the Lady Wolves roster, was averaging 24 points and 7 rebounds for a team that was 24-3 through last week. Her spin moves to the basket and her NBA-distance 3-point baskets routinely earn choruses of "oohs" and "ahs" from the stands. It all looks so natural, so effortless.
At Plano West, the girls practice before school starts. Prior to the start of each season, they dutifully report to basketball and conditioning daily at 6:30 a.m.
That means Quanli's training sessions at QD, tucked behind the Chinese-American Cathay Bank in the back of a strip shopping mall, are scheduled for evenings.
Quanli said that once upon a time she had to push Natalie to attend these skill sessions.
"But even when she didn't love it, she followed me," the mother said. "She came."
The seminal moment for Natalie may have come after ninth grade. She tried out for the USA Basketball National under-16 team in the summer of 2013 with hundreds of other elite players. She lasted until the final cut but failed to make the 12-player team.
Soon after her first great basketball disappointment, Natalie approached her mother with an unusual request.
"She asked me if we could go to train," Quanli said. "Not one time. It was all the time. She started pushing me to push her."
The next summer, Natalie earned a place on the USA Basketball team that won FIBA's U-17 World Championship in the Czech Republic. Last summer, she was a member of USA Basketball's 3-on-3 U-18 team that captured the silver medal at the World Championships in Hungary. When that was over, she led a Texas Elite select team to an Adidas National Championship.
"She knows how to make every player around her, all excellent to begin with, even better," said Joey Simmons, the Texas Elite coach who has four decades of experience on the high school level. "It's a gift."
While quality of competition varies in high school and along the summer select circuit, two constants have accompanied Natalie through the years.
"I'm pretty much known as 'the Asian Girl' in every gym I play in," she said.
She is happy that some of the media back in China have taken notice. Chinese newspapers and websites have chronicled the story of the player they refer to as "the female Jeremy Lin." He is the son of Taiwanese parents who became the first Chinese-American to play in the NBA.
Still, Natalie said she always hears her mother and usually responds in a more international language _ thumbs up or thumbs down.
So it is likely to continue at Baylor.
Kim Mulkey, the Lady Bears coach, believes Natalie can play either of the two guard positions or a wing in college. As she was in high school, Mulkey believes Natalie can be an immediate contributor for a perennial national power that has won two national championships since 2005.
During the recruiting process, Quanli asked Mulkey if she would be able to continue to work with Natalie if her daughter chose to go to school in Waco.
"Absolutely," Mulkey told the mother. "That's what got her where she is."
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