Punahou grad giving basketball another shot

By Dennis Anderson
Advertiser Staff Writer

Her hippie phase behind her, Ki'i Spencer-Vasconcellos is having fun playing basketball again.

Ki'i Spencer-Vasconcellos, who left the UH program three years ago, is now at Menlo College. Menlo College Sports Information

Then Vasconcellos' career appeared to go down the tubes as painful leg fractures destroyed her confidence and motivation. She quit the game.

"I did the whole hippie thing," Vasconcellos says. "I stayed with friends in California, traveled and spent two years finding myself. I became kind of a vagabond."

Finally, she decided, "I have to be a good person. I needed to go back to school."

She took some classes at UH and dropped by the Kalakaua Basketball Clinic one Sunday and asked Dennis Agena if she could help coach. "He is the coolest guy," Vasconcellos says.

In January, Vasconcellos started getting phone calls from coach Caitlin Collier at Menlo College in California, a Division III school where the NCAA's 5-year "clock" doesn't apply.

Collier had learned about Vasconcellos from Shannon Riley (Maryknoll '02), a part-time starting guard at Menlo.

"Caitlin kept calling me off the hook," Vasconcellos said. "It took a bunch of convincing. I wasn't in shape, wasn't sure, didn't know."

Collier finally got Vasconcellos to enroll at Menlo for the spring semester "at the last allowable second" and "she immediately made an impact," the coach said.

"She is very complete in the way that she plays the game, and hopefully our young ones will learn just by watching the little things that she does every day," Collier said.

Vasconcellos played in 11 games and helped Menlo reach the California Pacific Conference playoffs. She averaged 13.6 points per game, had 23 steals — including seven in one game — and made 46 percent of her field-goal attempts in her longest season in six years.

"My left leg is still swollen when I play and I still play in pain, but it is not as bad (as at UH)," Vasconcellos said.

"There is a huge difference (in skills) between Division I and III," Vasconcellos said, "but when you have players who love basketball and are passionate about the sport, the games are always competitive."

Vasconcellos has rods in the tibia of both legs, the first because of a stress fracture suffered in 1998, and the second because of overcompensating for the first injury.

By the 1999-2000 season at UH, "it hurt to play, in more places than my legs," she said. "It really wasn't me. It was just a basketball bouncing in my hands. I was miserable and it was pointless to keep playing. I wasn't any help to the team and I was emotionally drained, too."

So she left the team, the university and Hawai'i.

Three years later, Vasconcellos says, "It was hard getting back to being at a college. When I first saw my dorm room, I started crying. I'm 23 and I wasn't used to dorm life any more. I like my privacy.

"But I have a single room and I've decorated the cement walls."

The intensity level of the basketball program is many degrees lower at Menlo.

"We don't spend more than 18 hours a week on basketball here," Vasconcellos said. "There is no required weightlifting during the season. You go out and play and do your thing.

"There is more freedom to pass the ball with one hand or dribble through your legs. We hardly ever watch tape."

She says the intensity of the Division I program at Hawai'I, where "it's basketball all the time ... taught me discipline and time management."

Menlo, Vasconcellos concludes, "is a good place for me at this time. I enjoy the game again."

"This has put some structure in my vagabond life.

"I'm a better person now."