Senior Achieves Basketball Landmark and Personal Best
Senior Kate Hinds achieved two basketball milestones this past week—scoring her 1,000th career point and achieving a personal best of 26 points during a game.
In last Thursday’s game against Crossroads College Preparatory, which the Panthers won by a wide margin, Kate scored 16 points in the first four minutes to earn the 1,000-point honor. During the weekend immediately following, she captained a shorthanded team to victory in the Affton Winter Classic tournament, where her 26 points in the final game helped defeat Brentwood, 58–49.
When she began her varsity basketball career, it wasn’t exactly a foregone conclusion that Kate would one day join the ranks of Principia’s top scorers. “But she made herself one of them—she just kept showing up every day, striving to get better,” says Coach Shad Nichols (C’98). Kate has been an effective two-year captain of the basketball team, Nichols says, noting that her “strengths include leading by example and consistently being a joyful presence and inclusive of all her teammates.”
As a triple-varsity-sport athlete all four years at the Upper School (in tennis, basketball, and soccer), Kate says she has learned that it’s important to “work your hardest while you can” during every short season. Her consistent ability to shoot three-pointers has earned her the affectionate nickname of “Katie Buckets,” and her 67 three-pointers this season have put her in the lead in St. Louis—and in second place for the most three-pointers ever made in a season by a Principia girls’ varsity player.
“Over the summer and during the off-season,” Kate says, “I worked on my shooting almost every day and set a goal to make a certain number of shots before the season began. My main mental goal was to work on being a good team captain to help our team become more successful. ”She has succeeded on both counts!
Kate is the sixth Upper School girl to have scored 1,000 points. She follows Sarah (Corbitt) Banning who reached the milestone in 2009, Liz Gilman and Kara Johnson (2012), Alli Ball (2014), and Caitlyn Demaree (2016).
(Read more about how the team persevered to overcome adversity during the Affton tournament.)