Brookville hoops standout enjoys new life

Courtney Boyd scored 26 points in Brookville’s 77-36 victory over National Trail on Wednesday, Feb. 17. She also hit five of her seven 3-point attempts.

Staff photo by Lisa Powell Courtney Boyd scored 26 points in Brookville’s 77-36 victory over National Trail on Wednesday, Feb. 17. She also hit five of her seven 3-point attempts.

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Jayme Boston, head coach of the Brookville High School girls basketball team, talks with Courtney Boyd during their game against National Trail on Wednesday, Feb. 17, 2010.

Staff photo by Lisa Powell Jayme Boston, head coach of the Brookville High School girls basketball team, talks with Courtney Boyd during their game against National Trail on Wednesday, Feb. 17, 2010.

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Courtney Boyd (second from left), a senior at Brookville High School, is one of the top basketball players in the area and is headed to Wright State University.

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Brookville teachers Amy and Brad Boyd, along with their 8-year-old daughter Emma, watch their adopted daughter, Courtney, during a tournament game last week. Courtney, a senior at Brookville High School, had a troubled childhood in Illinois but is now one of the top basketball players in the area and has a scholarship to attend Wright State.

Staff photo by Lisa Powell Brookville teachers Amy and Brad Boyd, along with their 8-year-old daughter Emma, watch their adopted daughter, Courtney, during a tournament game last week. Courtney, a senior at Brookville High School, had a troubled childhood in Illinois but is now one of the top basketball players in the area and has a scholarship to attend Wright State.

By Tom Archdeacon, Staff Writer Updated 12:34 AM Sunday, February 21, 2010

BROOKVILLE — She was just 13, but old enough to know she’d had enough.

Her name then was Courtney Weeden and she lived in State Park Place — a tough, mostly white and Hispanic “ghetto,” she called it — on the edge of Collinsville, Ill., next to equally decayed East St. Louis.

The area — where close to 95 percent of the students at her old grade school live beneath the poverty line — is plagued by drugs, gangs, burglaries, arson and despair.

Her own situation was a microcosm of the neighborhood. She said her parents — whom she still loves — had gotten heavily into alcohol and drugs: “I guess you could say they were addicts.”

She ended up taking on much of the burden of raising her youngest sister and brother, often changing their diapers, giving them their baby bottles and putting them to bed at night.

Eventually — as she visited the homes of some of her AAU basketball teammates — she saw a different way of living and made a decision.

It was not an easy one.

She had good friends. She had Lori Billy — her second-grade teacher at Kreitner Elementary School and the hoops coach not just of her grade school, but also the assistant varsity coach at Collinsville High — who had become her guardian angel.

And, of course, there was that budding basketball career that had people talking about the way she embraced the game, a dedication, she now explains, born partly out of need.

“I’d play outside all day long — in the snow, the rain, the heat — just to get out of the house,” Courtney said. “It was an escape for me. Out there, I had more control of my situation.”

Inside her house she said that situation was “getting worse and worse with my mom and dad arguing, fighting, all that crazy stuff.”

After one big fight, she finally picked up the phone and called an aunt who lived in Englewood:

“I asked her to please ... please ... come get me.”

A new life

The students at Brookville High know very little of this story.

“She’s pretty private,” said Rachel Drinnon, the senior point guard of the Blue Devils team. “She doesn’t talk a lot about the past.”

Even if she did, few of her fellow students would fathom it. The urban decay of State Park is a world away from small-town Ohio.

“It’s different back there,” Courtney said. “A lot of stop signs are painted black, packs of wild dogs are running around and there’s trash everywhere. Guys on the street stop you and try to borrow a dollar to buy beer, and it seems like every other trailer has been burned down.”

What the Brookville kids do know is that Courtney came to their school as a ninth-grader. And after an extraordinary chain of events, she was adopted last October by a pair of Brookville teachers, Amy Boyd and her husband Brad, who also is the varsity wrestling coach.

While she’s Courtney Boyd now, she said kids still call her by her old nickname — Weed. Yet on the court this season, she’s become a roundball rose in full bloom.

The star of the 18-3 Blue Devils who play Northridge in the second round of the Division III sectional Tuesday night, Feb. 23, at Tippecanoe, the 5-foot-10 Boyd leads all area boys and girls in scoring, averaging 29.2 points per game.

“Courtney is the most explosive offensive player in the area,” said local girls hoops guru Jim Dabbelt, editor of The Dabbelt Report.

She has recorded double-doubles in 18 of Brookville’s 21 games — often while playing just three quarters. She’s topped 40 points three times, had 18 rebounds in one game and 13 steals in another.

“She has WNBA range,” said Brookville assistant coach Geary Jenkins.

That was evident Wednesday night as Brookville overwhelmed National Trail 77-36 in their tournament opener at Tipp. On a night in which she’d score 26 points and play stifling defense inside, she hit five of her seven 3-point attempts, the last one so deep that the entire crowd went “woooooh!”

She holds several Brookville girls basketball records, including career points (1,527), and over the summer she made her mark with the nationally acclaimed Dayton Lady HoopStars AAU team.

“Every night for a while we had someone in our gym — Kansas, Bowling Green, Butler, Toledo, Ball State — recruiting her,” said Brookville coach Jayme Boston.

Yet in the end Boyd chose Wright State for a couple of reasons quite unlike those of any other Raiders recruit.

That’s the ticket

An image many back at Kreitner Elementary remember is that of the thin, dark-haired girl riding her Mongoose bike to school with one hand on her handlebars and one hugging a basketball on her hip.

“When Courtney was here, we had nine elementaries in the system and we’d have fifth- and sixth-grade tournaments,” Billy said. “Courtney was just in fourth grade, but I put her on the fifth-grade team and we won the district. The next year she was a fifth-grader and we won again. The same thing in sixth grade.”

Along the way, Billy admitted: “I fell in love with her. I just adore that kid. With her home life — with the neighborhood she lived in — it would have been so easy for her to go down the wrong way.”

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