Susan (King) Borchardt (2005): The Star who Once gave
Lindsey Whalen Fits
By Sloan Martin – The Athletic
So when the first-year University of
Minnesota women’s basketball head coach was asked who from her past she loved
competing against, she chose the guard who beat her out for the Miss Basketball
award their senior year in 2000.“For sure Susan King,” Whalen said. “She
was awesome. I loved that matchup because she was so good. She was so good in
high school. She was good in college.”
The two have reconnected over the years
since high school because both have found their own successful paths in
basketball. Whalen went on to win the most games in WNBA history and four
championships; Susan King Borchardt is a strength and conditioning coach —
officially a sports performance consultant — who works with multiple elite WNBA
athletes including Sue Bird, who’s playing at a high level at age 38. The point guards battled in the
now-defunct Missota Conference for five years. Borchardt joined the Academy of
Holy Angels varsity team as a
seventh grader. Whalen
played for the Hutchinson Tigers starting in eighth grade. They even competed
on the tennis court, but never directly because Borchardt recalls she played
singles and Whalen doubles.
Basketball started for Borchardt when
she would tag along with her father, Gary King, who played at Nebraska-Kearney,
to open gyms. She started officially playing in third grade and joined a travel
team.
“Really a lot of my basketball playing
came from playing with my brothers and going to their practices,” she said.
“That was a lot of it growing up was playing with the boys and that made me
tough and that made me strong in a way, and I think that really benefitted me
as I moved on.”
Borchardt loved to score — her go-to a
pull-up jump shot — but she cherished defense and was often guarding the
opposing team’s best player. She dedicated herself to the sport, shooting
baskets before school every day since eighth grade. “To this day I think, ‘You’re not going
to outwork me,’” she said.
Borchardt says Whalen missing a chunk of
her senior season with an ankle injury played a role in her winning Miss
Basketball, but Borchardt had a phenomenal high school career: 35 points per
game her senior year, named a 2000 First Team All-American by both the Women’s
Basketball Coaches Association and USA Today, USA Today Minnesota Player of the
Year and the Star Tribune Player of the Year as a senior, and she won
a bronze medal with the 1998 USA Junior National Team at the World Youth Games
in Moscow.
Borchardt also ranks in the top 20 in
Minnesota girls high school basketball history in free-throw percentage (80.5),
points (3,037), steals (626), field-goal percentage (44.0), and she’s one of
three dozen girls all-time to score at least 50 points in a game, which she did
as a senior. It was so apparent what talent she was going to turn out to be,
Stanford head coach Tara VanDerveer started recruiting her as an eighth grader.
Whalen earned quite a few accolades
herself, and certainly drew attention at Hutchinson as her career advanced, but
Borchardt, because of her statistics and playing in the Metro night after
night, had more eyes on her in high school. She knew back then, though, how
special of a player Whalen was.
“People didn’t quite know about her and
I’m not sure exactly why, but I feel like when you’re a player and you like to
defend people, you know who the real challenges are,” Borchardt said.
“She was the one, you always knew when
you played against her that you were really going to have to work hard and get
after it, not to stop her but just try to contain her. I guarded her every game
we played. I was always her defender but it was always a huge challenge, but a
fun one. All the way up you look forward to playing against the players who are
good and who push you. She was definitely that person in that conference.”
Borchardt remembers how gyms were packed
to see them their senior year. “Our last year, all of our games, there
was a bunch of people,” Borchardt said. “I was like, this is really awesome,
not just for us but for the little girls sitting in the front row. How cool to
see this.”
Those matchups helped prepare Borchardt
for continuing her career at Stanford (she graduated fifth in her class at Holy
Angels with a 4.18 GPA) under VanDerveer. She had a cup of coffee in the WNBA,
signing a free-agent contract with the Minnesota Lynx and playing three games
in 2005 before getting waived, but injuries ultimately derailed her playing
career.
Her freshman year she was starting for
the Cardinal and remembers the excitement of playing against Tennessee and head
coach Pat Summitt in December 2000.
“It was going exactly how your dream
freshman year would start, and that’s how it started for me,” she said.Then she tore the ACL in her right knee,
rehabbed for nine months and returned. Just five games after she started playing
again, the cadaver graft of a deceased person’s Achilles that doctors had
inserted into her knee failed.
“It doesn’t take in one out of 100,000
people or something like that but I happened to be that one and, so then I had
to do that all again,” she said. “Basically I went from starting to not playing
basketball for two-plus years.”
Borchardt was able to put together a
solid final two years at Stanford and her 46.9 percent 3-point shooting in her
senior season ranks fourth in Cardinal single-season history. But she ended up
going through nine surgeries on that right knee.
By the time she was wrapping up her
college career in Palo Alto, she married Curtis Borchardt, a fellow Stanford
basketball player and a 7-foot center who was selected No. 18 in the 2002 NBA
draft. At one point they were each playing in the NBA and WNBA simultaneously,
he for the Jazz and her for the Lynx.
For seven years the couple lived
overseas in Spain and France for Curtis’s career. It was there that Borchardt
started getting experience on the training side after getting her Stanford
degree in psychology.
“I started training for the team my
husband was playing for,” she said. “So I got started with men and loved it. It
was a natural fit I think because I grew up around my brothers and my brothers’
teams and I loved it.”
After a stop at her alma mater, Susan
took a job with the WNBA’s Seattle Storm, allowing her to forge relationships
in the league. Meanwhile, Curtis transitioned to his second career, wrapping up
his doctorate in physical therapy last spring. The family of six now lives in
Portland, Oregon.
Both Borchardts dealt with injuries in
their playing careers — “We met in the training room at Stanford, which is very
appropriate,” she says — and have found a way to extend their basketball
careers in a different way.
“The whole sports performance thing,
even as a player that was my niche,” she said. “I’m only 5-foot-6 but I always
felt like ‘I’m going to be in great shape so I can pressure you all game and I
can go longer than you.’ That was my niche. I felt like I had an interest in
that area. I thought, let’s try this. I went back and got my certifications and
got my master’s and … it’s been a really good fit for me.”
Besides Bird, Borchardt’s training
clientele includes WNBA MVPs Nneka Ogwumike and Breanna Stewart. Working as a
consultant instead of for a team helps her balance family life and work.
“The game, I love it, it’s been a part
of my life from early on,” she said. “Even if I’m not playing, it still feels
like I’m a part of some of these elite players’ journeys and that’s a really
cool and special thing.”
Both Borchardt and Whalen, once teen
basketball “rivals” who are following their love of the sport to long,
fulfilling careers, were genuinely excited for the other’s journeys in
interviews. Borchardt doesn’t live in Minnesota anymore, but she remains
appreciative of the roots the women share.
“It’s so cool to see someone take what
they’ve got and run with it and it’s not just the fact that it’s her and the
university she played for, it’s the whole state,” Borchardt said. “It’s
unbelievable that she’s back (at the U of M).
“Bottom line: it’s so cool to see her
doing all these amazing things and I’m so proud of her and excited for the
state.”
