When people play sports, they aren’t just playing to learn the skills of that specific sport. Through athletics, student-athletes are able to learn life lessons, ones that they can look back on to trace their progress and maturation in life
This saying rings true to the single senior forward on the women’s basketball team from Cabrini Renee Oliver, who is a part of the 2017 class. While her last game for Cabrini might’ve ended in a 67-49 lost to Gwynedd Mercy in the Colonial States Athletic Conference championship game, The Scotch Plains, NJ native is still able to hold her head high because of all she’s learned from the time she first picked up a ball.
“I didn’t really start doing sports, or anything until I was like 8, or 9, so before then it was like Nickelodeon every day, and hanging out with my cousins when they came over and stuff,” Oliver said. “Once I started getting into sports then that kind of took over. I did cheerleading, softball, I tried track for a little bit, I kind of went into a little bit of everything before I decided on basketball full time.”
When it comes to basketball, the apple didn’t fall too far from the tree for Oliver, whose mother was a point guard for their Scotch Plains, NJ high school, as well as in college.
“My mom played it in high school and in college, and then she kind of instilled it amongst myself and my siblings,” Oliver said. “She taught me everything that I knew fundamentally coming up and I always hear stories about how good she was, she was the first female to score 1000 points at our high school in Scotch Plains, but as a child their house had a fire, so all her trophies, all her newspaper clippings, she lost like everything.
“We always joke with her that technically, we’ve never seen her play, she doesn’t have anything to show for it, other than her banner hanging up in the gym and just all of her friends and the people that we talk to, they always talk about how good she was so that was kind of like inspiring,” Oliver said. “Like if she was that good, I should try to play and try to live up to what half of what she can be, I know it’ll make her proud to know that her daughter plays basketball too.”
Oliver’s journey to playing basketball at Cabrini University began when she transferred to Roselle Catholic High School in NJ.
“I looked at it this way, if I was gonna go to college, I wanted to go to play basketball. If I wasn’t gonna play basketball, then honestly, I probably wouldn’t have come to college. I really wanted to have that experience, and I had already come from a good program in high school, I transferred to Roselle Catholic, where I graduated from. Both Roselle Catholic and Cabrini’s women’s basketball program are both very similar in how they’re structured, the togetherness, the tradition, and the legacy, so I think that making that transfer was probably the best decision I ever made, because it really prepared me for what I endured here for four years.”
It didn’t take much for Oliver to be convinced that Cabrini was the place for her. Wanting to go out-of-state for school, once she visited Cabrini it was the only school she kept coming back to and applied to.
Joining the team as a freshman in 2013, Oliver had to earn the respect of her teammates. It was a constant grind for her to improve, and earn her stripes on a team that ended up winning three CSAC championships in a row between 2013-2016. Every year that Oliver was on the team, her scoring and rebounding averages increased. She went from averaging 1.3 points and 0.5 rebounds as a freshman, to 8.6 points and 9.8 rebounds as a senior.
“If you ask like anybody from freshman year, it’s probably like a 180. I used to have little attitude problems here and there, most freshman think they’re gonna come on and play right away, but that wasn’t the case,” Oliver said.
“I learned you have to wait your turn, pay your dues, respect the ones that came before you because they set the tone, they set the legacy, and then when it is your time to get in there, and you’re in those shoes, you just cherish it so much more and you just want to continue to prolong it,” Oliver said.
“Instead of being a follower, you really turn into a leader, and it really turned me into a leader as a player, as a woman, it taught me perseverance, how to battle through adversity, you’re gonna have bad days, but you just have to suck it up and get through it because there are going to be so many better days that come.”
Even though her last year at Cabrini didn’t end how she would’ve liked, the memories and lessons learned are something she can take with her forever.
“I’ll miss having fun with my teammates, both on and off the court because I have so many stories I could probably write a book about on and off the court, but it was just a lot of fun, I had fun. I’m just gonna miss that with my teammates,” Oliver said.
