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By Jay Spivey

For the Clemmons Courier

Isabel Gil, or Isa, as she prefers, didn’t grow up in a basketball family.

But now as a junior at West Forsyth, that’s all changed for her.

“I started playing basketball in the fifth grade,” she said. “I lived in Florida, and I went to a private school. And it was like the first sport that you could play in fifth grade. I was like, ‘Oh, I have to try it.’ And no one in my family has ever played basketball really, so I was excited to kind of start my own thing.”

Playing basketball also changed how she lived her life at such a young age while playing basketball and going to school at Villa Madonna Catholic School in Tampa, Florida.

“It was kind of like a start to me being independent and trying new things with friends and stuff,” Gil said.

Gil has moved around quite a bit because of the job her father, Michael, has with R.J. Reynolds Tobacco.

“I loved Tampa,” she said. “Tampa is amazing like as a big city, and there’s so much like different culture, especially like in Florida in general, but I just love Tampa. It was great.”

She went to Villa Madonna from first through fifth grade. In sixth grade, she moved to West Palm Beach, Florida, all the while playing travel basketball.

“Well for me it was pretty easy (to move to West Palm Beach) because all my family lived in West Palm,” she said. “So, it wasn’t too bad, but it was a really big culture shock moving from Florida to North Carolina because it was just completely different and it was way slower. And at first, I was definitely not a fan, but it’s definitely grown on me the past couple years and I love it here now.”

Gil didn’t even have a chance to get a taste of North Carolina before she and her parents moved here. She stayed in school in Florida while her parents scouted the area.

“It was during COVID, so I thought it was so boring,” Gil said of moving here. “I had never been anywhere like it, and this is not for me.”

In Florida, there were very few COVID-19 restrictions, but here, it was much more restricted. Moving here in the seventh grade, she started at Jefferson Middle School in Winston-Salem. Most of her schooling at Jefferson was virtual during COVID-19.

“I met most of my friends playing basketball at CP3,” Gil said. “And that year, they didn’t really have a girls AAU team, so it was like training sessions and stuff. So, that was still like fun for me because I got a chance to get out of the house and interact with like people.”

By then, Gil had clearly picked up a love for basketball, but the first sport she competed in was track and field.

“I always liked to run and it was just, it was pretty easy like, you’ve got to run,” she said. “It wasn’t really a skill to it. But once I started playing basketball, I just became obsessed and I was putting a lot of energy into it. I just wanted to get better.”

Part of his quick ascension through basketball despite her diminutive build at 5-foot-6 is that she considers herself a good athlete.

“I think I’m a pretty fast runner, and I feel like, as an athlete, I just feel think I’m a big big hard worker,” Gil said. “And I feel like I’m always just motivated intrinsically. And I feel like I’m always pushing myself to be the best. And I feel like I’m just a natural competitor, and I’ve always been that way.”

It wasn’t always in the cards that Gil was going to go to West Forsyth. She lived in the Mount Tabor district. However, Gil and her parents moved back to Florida during her eighth-grade year before moving back to NC and Clemmons, just before her freshman year at West Forsyth.

“I actually took a tour a Bishop McGuinness (in Kernersville), and my parents loved Bishop,” she said. “Like I didn’t think there was anything else I was going to be able to do to get their eyes off that. But for me, I wanted to go to a bigger school. I was like I wanted to get out and stuff and, after COVID and stuff, I wanted to go where there was a lot of people and a lot of different programs.

“And I think like for West, what stuck out for me, I felt there was a lot of different routes I could take, whether it be like Career Center, dual enrollment. So, that was something I really wanted.”

Gil knew that she was going to play basketball at West Forsyth as a freshman, but she didn’t know Catrina Green, the girls varsity coach at the time. Gil, however, was friends with Campbell McClain, who played on the girls basketball team. They went to team workouts together. But McClain, now a senior, chose not to play this season.

“I had never experienced being at such a big school,” Gil said. “And at first, the transition was super-hard for me, but now, I absolutely love it and I’m so happy.”

Playing on the varsity her freshman year, West Forsyth finished 16-12 overall and 7-7 in the Central Piedmont 4-A with Green as coach. However, West Forsyth defeated Reagan to win the conference tournament, but lost in the first round of the NCHSAA Class 4-A playoffs at Asheville. According to MaxPreps.com, Gil averaged 0.5 points her freshman season.

“I was super-happy to win conference, and I was obviously happy to be a freshman on varsity,” Gil said. “But it was definitely hard, like I had never had a coach like Coach Green before (because Green was so serious about basketball). So, it was definitely a little bit different for me at first…My freshman year was my first year where I did not have fun playing basketball. Basketball was definitely more of a job than fun.”

Gil said summer workouts were fun that year. And last season, the Titans finished 13-11 overall, and lost to Mount Tabor in the conference-tournament semifinals, ending the season. According to MaxPreps.com, Gil averaged 1.8 points last season.

Gil stopped playing AAU basketball for CP3, coached by Green, and stopped overall, last summer.

“I stopped playing the summer after 10th grade because I went on a study abroad through West,” she said. “So, I wasn’t able to do both because I was to be gone too long. I went to Italy, London, and Paris. Oh, that was so fun because I got to go with my school and to experience stuff outside of my parents. It was just awesome.”

After returning home last summer, she was a volunteer for a month at Atrium Health Wake Forest Baptist Hospital. Now a junior at 16 years old, Gil has a 4.52 ERA. Although she still has a full senior year to go Gil wants to go to North Carolina after she graduates to become an anesthesiologist.

In the midst of Gil had done last summer with her study abroad and her volunteer work at the hospital, she still did team workouts and team camp with her West Forsyth teammates and Green. Late in the summer, it was announced that Green had left West Forsyth to take an assistant-coaching job at Georgia College & State University.

After Green left, Johnathan Gainey was hired to replace her late last summer.

“When he was hired, you know, me and the team had to do our research online,” Gil said. “But we didn’t know anything about him. We just saw that he coached over at (Winston-Salem) Prep for a while and he coached at Reynolds. We recognized him from my freshman year, he was coaching at Glenn with the guys.”

Gil has flourished this season under Gainey, and according to MaxPreps.com, Gil has averaged 9.9 points per game.

“When I first saw her, I liked her defensive intensity,” Gainey said. “She’s probably our best on-ball defender, and she goes hard. She’s another individual where you have to talk about effort with her.”

As of Monday night, West Forsyth is 11-11 overall and 5-7 in the conference with a home game scheduled Tuesday night against East Forsyth and a game at Mount Tabor to finish the regular season.

“She’s very coachable,” Gainey said of Gil. “She well-mannered…She’s just another joy to coach.”

Gil, who is a co-captain for the Titans, is part of the mutual-admiration society about how she feels about Gainey.

“I always want to be a players coach,” Gainey said. “You know, you want to coach them hard, but you want to respect them as well. And I just want them to know that respect goes both ways.”

That respect can go both ways.

“She’s been a voice, a stern voice,” Gainey said. “But also, she’s very encouraging, as well. That’s just part of being a leader and that’s what she is.”

Gil scored 14 points last Tuesday in a loss at Davie County, three points last Friday at Reynolds, and finished with eight points last Saturday at home in a loss against Bishop McGuinness. In addition to games this week against East Forsyth and Mount Tabor, the conference tournament begins next Monday.

“I’m definitely hoping that we just really are able to dial it in, the conference is the most important thing for us right now,” Gil said. “Now, I think that is kind of like the goal for us is just go as far as we can and make it to the postseason.

“That was Coach Gainey’s goal coming into West, and he’s always been pretty clear about that, that we didn’t make state last year. And that’s been his biggest goal this year.”