Harris leads KF on the floor

The King’s Fork High School girls’ basketball team is 13-0, the only elite girls’ squad in the area that is still undefeated this season.

While the Lady Bulldogs have some upperclassmen leaders helping fuel their success, many of the biggest in-game responsibilities fall on the shoulders of sophomore point guard Camary Harris.

Her personal success has helped make the team work the way it should and has led to her being the Duke Automotive-Suffolk News-Herald Player of the Week.

“She brings a lot of tenacity to the team,” King’s Fork coach Maurice Fofana said. “When I think of her, I just think of our on-the-floor leader.”

She handles the ball on offense, plays great defense, and “she puts up with me yelling at her all night long,” Fofana said.

Harris knows how to interpret that yelling.

“He just wants me to be a better player,” she said. “I don’t feel offended about it. I don’t mind it at all. It makes me play better.”

She was nominated for Player of the Week based on her performance in the 2015 Boo Williams/Ronald Curry Christmas Classic. The Lady Bulldogs went 3-0 in the Silver Division of the event, and Harris was named the tournament MVP after averaging 10.7 points, 6.3 assists, 5.3 rebounds and 4.7 steals.

“She did everything that we asked of her,” Fofana said. “She played hard at both ends, defending also with running the team. She just had a well-balanced outing in the Christmas tournament.”

“I think I did really good,” Harris said, noting her performance included “just involving everybody, getting everybody pumped up, just being a point guard, (doing) what point guards do.”

When asked what she feels like she is able to bring to the Lady Bulldogs, she said a lot of things, including energy, an ability to get everybody involved in the game and the leadership of a floor general.

Fofana is already confident in her potential at the next level.

“If I had to put her on the scale right now, she would definitely be a Division I guard,” he said.

An anterior cruciate ligament injury in the spring of 2014 caused her to miss a portion of her freshman season. Because of that, as good as she is now, some of the on-court lessons she would have learned as a freshman she is just now learning in her sophomore campaign.

“She’s not 100 percent to the point where we know that she could be, but she’s getting better and better each day,” Fofana said. “I’m just interested to see how great she’s going to look by the end of the season.”

Inspired in part by her brother, Rar-kesh Harris, who was a member of King’s Fork’s 2008-09 Group AAA state championship team, Camary Harris has played basketball since she was 4 years old.

She described basketball as her life and demonstrates a work ethic that not only got her to where she is but also will help her fulfill her potential. She said shooting is the most challenging thing about the sport, and she deals with that challenge “by being in the gym every night, every morning.”