Choosing basketball pays off for Aussie Georgia Amoore of Virginia … – Roanoke Times

“Every sport. I played every sport,” the ACC tournament most valuable player said in a recent interview at Tech.

That’s because Kelly Amoore assumed her short daughter would not have a future in basketball.

“I was sort of trying to direct her into other sports because of her height,” Kelly Amoore recalled in a January interview while in Blacksburg for a visit. “I sort of thought, ‘Well, she’s probably not going to be a basketballer.’”

So why not Australian Rules Football?

“My husband was a fairly good footballer. He was small like Georgia,” Kelly Amoore said.

Georgia loved playing Australian Rules Football, which features plenty of tackling. She was on a boys team as well as a girls team.

“If I didn’t play basketball [for Tech], I would be playing that. If I stayed home and did [basketball], I would be playing footy, too, on the side,” the 5-foot-6 Amoore said. “[But] football got to the point where I was a bit too aggressive. I got a concussion and I missed out on basketball for a week and Mom was like, ‘If you want to be dead serious about basketball, you probably have to give it up.’

“I really, really loved footy.”

She also took on boys in taekwondo.

“I liked it because I have built-up aggression,” she said.

She played cricket against the boys, too.

“I pretty much did it because Dad played it,” she said. “It’s actually very boring unless you’re up to bat.”

She also played netball, which is similar to basketball but without dribbling.

She played the soccer-like sport of futsal, too. She also did track and field. And swimming.

“I hated swimming because it got my hair wet,” she said.

When she was about 17 years old, she decided to focus on her favorite sport — basketball.

“She was mad on basketball,” her mother said.

Amoore is from Ballarat, Australia. When she was a teenager, the family moved to a horse farm because her mother is a horse trainer. The farm had a sand track, so after the horses galloped on it, Amoore would run on it.

Amoore has played basketball since she was 5 years old. She and her mother were watching Amoore’s cousin, current University of Portland women’s basketball player Keeley Frawley, play for a club team. When players began fouling out, the coach turned to Amoore, even though she was wearing flip-flops.

Amoore eventually began dreaming of playing college basketball in America. Her cousin Chelsea Frawley was a rower for Syracuse, so Amoore wanted to play for the Orange.

“She would go to college and come back and tell stories about what they would do, the trouble they would get in. I was like, ‘Wow, college seems so much fun!'” Amoore said. “Especially the free gear. … I would get so many hand-me-downs. I have so many Syracuse T-shirts that I need to get rid of.”

Amoore has gotten so good at shooting 3-pointers that she made 14 in three games in the recent ACC tournament, breaking the tournament record.

But she was not a 3-point ace while growing up.

“I wasn’t allowed to shoot. I wasn’t consistent,” she said.

But she was such a good passer that she began playing for her country. Hokies coach Kenny Brooks saw film of her and thought she was “athletic for her size.” They began talking to each other.

Brooks went to Belarus in July 2018 to eye Amoore and some other international prospects in the Under-17 World Cup. Amoore was only her team’s third-string point guard, but Brooks liked her quickness and playmaking ability.

Amoore texted an Australian she knew — former Hokies guard Vanessa Panousis. Panousis endorsed Brooks to Amoore.

Brooks saw Amoore again when she played in an NBA Academy prospects camp during the 2019 women’s Final Four in Florida. He decided she was the point guard he wanted.

Amoore was offered scholarships by both Tech and her cousin Keeley’s team, Portland. In September 2019, she visited both schools.

Portland offered the comfort of playing not only with her cousin but also with some of her pals on the Australian national team. But the challenge of playing for a bigger school where she did not know anyone appealed to her. She verbally committed to the Hokies on her visit.

Because she graduated from high school in Australia in the fall of 2019, she decided to get a head start at Tech and enrolled in January 2020.

She missed home, and she did not like the “freezing” Blacksburg weather. But she got to practice with the Hokies for the final few months of that season, even though she would not be making her Tech playing debut until the 2020-21 campaign.

When Tech shut down in March 2020 because of the coronavirus pandemic, Amoore’s mother wanted her to come home. But Amoore decided not to, unsure of when she would be allowed back into America if she left.

So she went home with one of her new teammates.

Virginia Tech center Elizabeth Kitley became good friends with Amoore when Amoore stayed with the Kitley family in Summerfield, North Carolina.

“I have COVID to thank for that,” Kitley said. “There’s one good thing that came from COVID, when she had to come stay with me for three months. … My family just kind of adopted her. From then on, we’ve just been extremely close.”

The two are best friends and roommates. They even host a podcast together.

“I love her so much,” said Kitley, a two-time ACC player of the year. “It helps on the basketball court a bit — we have good chemistry. We can get mad at each other, and we can turn the page.”

Amoore figures Kitley’s relationship with Kitley’s autistic sister, Raven, is what makes Kitley a sensitive friend.

“She’s been such a carer for Raven her whole life, I feel she has that instinctual, caretaking, unselfish value,” Amoore said.

Kitley said she and Amoore have similar morals and the same work ethic. But Kitley said they are also “extremely different.”

“Our different personalities balance each other out really well,” Kitley said. “She can be a little bit more extroverted, and I can be a little bit more introverted. We just have a good time together.”

“I am the chaos and Liz is the calm,” Amoore said.

Because of the pandemic, Amoore did not see her parents and two siblings again until they came for a visit in December 2021.

Amoore got to go home last summer.

Her mother returned to Blacksburg last Christmas for another visit. She stayed until mid-January.

“I just love sort of spoiling Georgia and just being there for her,” Kelly Amoore said.

Kelly Amoore also got to see some Tech games in person, rather than tuning in to Tech radio broadcasts online. She sometimes gets up at 4 a.m. to do so.

Amoore has started for the Hokies since she was a freshman, although it took her months that season to adjust to the speed and rules of the American game.

She averaged 11.8 points and 4.6 assists and made 57 3-pointers as a freshman, earning a spot on the ACC all-freshman team. She averaged 11.2 points and 4.4 assists and made 70 3-pointers as a sophomore, earning All-ACC honorable mention.

“I love being a point guard,” she said. “It’s just a whole ‘nother level of responsibility and focus and engagement. You have to know how every single person responds to you and how you have to approach them, and you have to know how the coach is thinking and you have to be on the same page with him. And you have to romanticize the referees to make them make calls.”

With Aisha Sheppard having moved on to the WNBA after last season, Amoore has become the second-leading scorer for the fourth-ranked Hokies (27-4) this season. The junior is averaging 15.3 points and 5.3 assists and has drained 94 3-pointers. She made the 10-woman All-ACC first team.

“Coach Brooks has helped my game so much. I am a genuine scoring option [this year],” Amoore said. “I’ve been bred to be such a traditional, pass-first point guard back at home. I had to get desensitized from that and be like, ‘OK, I can be aggressive.’”

In last December’s win over Nebraska, she had the first triple-double in program history (24 points, 10 rebounds and 11 assists).

She scored a total of 65 points in the team’s three recent ACC tournament wins, earning tournament MVP honors Sunday as Tech won that tournament for the first time.

“Her confidence is just oozing right now,” Brooks said. “Her maturity and growth has meant everything to our program and it’s the reason why we are where we are.”

Brooks said that while Kitley is the best player in the league, Amoore is the Hokies’ most important player.

“She provides the spunk, the leadership,” said Brooks, a former point guard himself. “She’s the engine. She starts everything.

“Without Georgia, none of this happens. … I jokingly call her my mini-me.”

It’s a good thing she eventually decided to focus on basketball back home.

“I always had challenges from basketball [in] getting picked for teams or being too short,” she said. “I just don’t like when people say stuff like that because then I’m going to prove, ‘Why not?’”