Young Star looks to have bright future

A pair of intense dark eyes follows the round orange orb as it flies from one player to another during a Spokane Stars basketball practice as the team prepares to play in the Oregon City Elite End of the Trail Tournament this weekend.

The eyes dart back and forth. Opponent. Ball. Opponent. Ball.

Their owner identifies an opportunity. Even with her brown eyes on the ball, Jordan Loera senses that her opponent behind her is getting ready to make her move to catch the incoming pass.

At the instant the ball is released, Loera launches herself upward and forward, reaching out with her left arm and swatting away the ball before her onrushing opponent can get around her compact but muscled frame.

Loera is only 14, having just completed eighth grade.

But she can clearly hold her own against the big girls on the Spokane Stars’ roster, which includes many top high school players, several of whom will go on to play Division I basketball.

The Stars are a national elite summer team that has boasted the likes of University High standout Angie Bjorklund, a Tennessee recruit, and a foursome who played for Arizona State last season. In his 28 years at the helm, head coach Ron Adams has nurtured more than 200 stars who went on to have college careers. But even he said that Loera is something special.

Loera, who will attend Moses Lake High School this fall, is so adept with a basketball that she has always played with girls two grades above her. Her mother, Lori Loera, first took Jordan to a Stars basketball camp as a seventh-grader last year because the girls on her old AAU team had all moved on to high school and she needed a new challenge.

Loera quickly impressed Adams and his coaching staff.

“She scrimmaged with our older players and she looked better than just good,” Adams said at a practice Wednesday. “She didn’t look like any seventh-grader I’d ever seen before.”

Concerned that Loera was too young to play against the highest level of prep talent in the state, Adams consulted with his captains – Bjorklund and Katelan Redmon, who will soon play for Washington – before agreeing to take on Loera.

The two convinced Adams that the modest Loera was not only physically and technically on par with the rest of the team, but that she had the maturity to fit in with the older girls.

Years of playing with and against girls two years her senior, and summers spent training with the Moses Lake basketball team from the time she was in sixth grade, meant that Loera had become used to being around older girls.

She never has trouble fitting in once her older teammates realize that she can play.

“Jordan’s amazing,” said Carly Noyes, the Stars’ starting post who will be a junior on the Moses Lake varsity team this fall and played AAU basketball with Loera. “She’s quick and she’s been playing forever so she knows the game really well and she plays really smart.”

Loera started on the Stars’ Level 2 Red team last year, but was promoted to the Level 1 Blue team after it lost a point guard to injury. The only middle school kid on the roster played 50 games last season, averaging just less than 17 minutes per game and gaining valuable experience.

This year, Loera has earned the starting point guard position and has continued to impress coaches with her maturity.

“She keeps her composure better than any young kid I’ve ever seen,” Adams said. “Every kid she plays against will be a major Division I player, but she hangs right in there with them, and sometimes she’ll outperform them.

“And then you see the other coaches yelling to their players, ‘You’re going to college and you can’t even guard an eighth-grader?’ “

Assistant coach Steve Ranniger said Loera is one of the team’s leaders, and that her self-assuredness stems from how she makes few mistakes. Despite her relative youth, Loera possesses an on-court presence beyond her years and moves with an athletic gait, dark eyes constantly scanning the floor, her body relaxed but loaded with an inherent tension, ready to pounce at a moment’s notice.

The fleet-footed point guard with long, rangy arms has added 3 inches to her 5-foot-7-inch frame in the last year, but genetics indicate that Jordan has some growing left in her.

“Both my grandpas were 6-foot-6, and my brothers are 6-foot-3 and 6-foot-4, so we have the potential for some height,” said Lori Loera, who was a forward for Oregon in the early ‘80s.

Lori thinks her oldest daughter’s affinity for basketball is a product of exposure to the sport from a young age. Lori and her husband, Javier, play city league basketball, and they used to take baby Jordan to their games.

“Jordan was in a car seat going to those games with us,” Lori said. “And as soon as she started walking, the first thing in her hands was a basketball.”

With the Stars heading into the main stretch of their season this weekend, and Loera entering the fishbowl that is high school sports this fall, Lori realizes that she will soon fall under intense scrutiny from college coaches.

But she’s not at all worried about how Jordan will handle the pressure.

“We’re just taking it day by day,” Lori said. “Jordan’s received contact from some pretty big colleges, but she’s so academically driven, I think the basketball will just fall into place eventually. She’s such a humble kid. It’s a rough road, but I think she has the determination and work ethic to make it.”