“I spent probably six hours with her family,” Box said. “We walked the streets of Barcelona. We had like the dinner before the dinner…then we had the traditional late-night dinner.
“During that visit, I felt so connected to her mother.
“She was so grateful her daughter was at Miami. She went on and on how Miami was the most beautiful place in the world.
“She loved Miami so much. She couldn’t stop talking about how beautiful it was.”
Carmen, it turns out, had never been to the United States in her life, much less Oxford, Ohio.
Her picture of the place came from what she saw and read on social media and, more importantly, from what she saw blossom in her daughter.
Last Saturday afternoon — if you were looking for the beauty in the beauty — the place for that on the picturesque campus was on the basketball court at Millett Hall.
That’s where Nuria Jurjo honored her late mother with one of the most beautiful games of her 71-game college career.
Making three of her four three-point attempts, the 5-foot-10 Spaniard finished with 13 points and added a game-high five steals and four rebounds to help lead Miami to a 63-56 victory over visiting Toledo.
A few months after Box visited — on this past Nov. 15 — Carmen Jurjo died from brain cancer.
Nuria said her mom had been diagnosed 13 months earlier, in October of 2024, though she thinks she had it for a while before that.
Carmen was 59 and the loss hit her only daughter very hard.
After Saturday’s game, Nuria sat with me in a secluded spot in Millett and talked publicly for the first time about her mom’s death and coping with the loss since.
She broke down sobbing several times during the conversation, but she also beamed with love and delight as she made her mom come to life with her recollections and reflections.
When she first came to Oxford 2 ½ years ago, Nuria said she didn’t have good command of English and had trouble expressing her thoughts fully:
“I used to speak very slowly — even slower than now — I wanted it to be right.”
She’s mastered that now, better than she thinks.
“My mom was...I don’t know if this is a word…but she was joyful,” she said.
Told her vocabulary was just fine, she managed a faint smile though her eyes brimmed with tears:
“She was happy all the time…and very strong.”
Box saw that, too: “When I met with her in Barcelona, I didn’t know she was sick. She never said anything.
“As we talked, I could see her daughter in her. Nuria is like a clone of her mother. They look identical and their personalities are the same.”
While the mother-daughter bond was strong, Nadia admitted: “I wasn’t always good about calling, about staying in touch. But she was my mom and she always was there for me when I needed her.”
That innate connection was there right to the end.
As Carmen’s condition worsened in early November, Nuria took a leave from the team and went home for a little over week and a half and missed three games.
“My mom looked very different when I got home — the disease changed her a lot — but it was still amazing to be with her. To spend my last time with my mom, to say things and feel things, it was beautiful.”
A week after her mother died, Nuria was back in Oxford.
She practiced one day and then started against Purdue. She played 37 minutes, a career high, and finished with 10 points, two blocked shots, four rebounds and a pair of steals.
“I think basketball is her safe space now,” Box said. “It’s her comfort zone.”
‘Look at her now’
Nuria said she first committed to UNC Greensboro in North Carolina, but after the assistant who recruited her left, she felt less wanted.
She decommitted and hoped to find a school that still had an opening.
Meanwhile — after seven seasons as an assistant at Indiana University, four of them as the associate head coach — Box took over a Miami program burdened by sudden scandal and annual failure.
The well-liked previous coach had been forced to resign after an inappropriate relationship with a player came to light after the season.
In the void seven RedHawks players — including the team’s top five scorers and top five rebounders — all transferred elsewhere.
Although the roster was nearly empty and the team had had enough of a losing record in each of the four previous seasons that it had missed even qualifying for the conference tournament, Miami convinced Box to take the job.
It was already May and finding players was a challenge.
He was connected to Jurjo and offered her a scholarship without ever seeing her play. She accepted without ever first seeing the campus.
From that shotgun marriage has come a three-year union that has survived ups and downs and has strengthened during this now phoenix-like rise of RedHawks basketball.
Miami is 10-4 going into tonight’s game against UMass at Millett Hall.
Her freshman year, Nuria played in 29 games and started 11. She scored 14 points in a loss to Dayton, grabbed 10 rebounds in a loss to Toledo and scored nine points and pulled down seven rebounds in a loss at Michigan State.
The RedHawks went 9-20 that first season and last year Box upscaled his roster with several new players.
Enjulina Gonzalez transferred in from Mercer and was put in the starting lineup as Nuria was moved out.
Gonzalez averaged 20.9 points per game last season and then just as promptly left Oxford, transferring this season to Georgia, where she no longer starts and averages 4 ppg.
“After last season, we had a mass exodus and I was worried Nuria might go,” Box said candidly. “I had replaced her with Enjulina, and I’m sure she wasn’t happy. She wasn’t playing a lot.”
“In this day and age (with the open transfer portal and the lure of NIL money) kids just leave. Nuria was friends with some of the kids who left and I worried she’d join them.
“But she didn’t run … She stayed and look at her now.”
She has played in 11 games, started nine and is averaging 6.7 ppg. She’s second on the team in three point accuracy (40 percent) and steals, third in blocked shots and fourth in assists.
‘Nuria would have done that for us’
Nuria said when she went home to say goodbyes to her mom, her teammates stayed in touch with her.
She especially feels a kinship with her roommate Clara Gonzalez Planella, a senior guard who transferred in from Jacksonville State this season.
She’s also from Barcelona though the two didn’t know each other there.
“She’s been through some difficult moments in her life, too. And now I feel like she’s there for me. Everyone on the team is there really.”
Box said he and the team has tried to be mindful of Nuria’s needs: “We have tried to give her space, but we know when she’s ready to talk she will.
“And I’ll tell you, when she was gone we developed a new appreciation of her. We realized all she does and what was missing now.
“When she wasn’t here, I can remember times where I’d say, ‘Nuria would have done that for us.’ Her value grew in her absence.”
Saturday, when Toledo went on a 12-point scoring run to take the lead over Miami, it was Nuria who lifted the RedHawks back on top.
She hit her three three-pointers and a lay-up in a 6 minute 20 second span at the end of the second quarter and the start of the third to erase the Rockets advantage,
After the game she was brought to a formal press conference and briefly spoke about the team’s effort:
“In hard times, everyone stays together, Everyone is about the team, not just themselves. We look out for each other.
“That’s why I didn’t feel leaving was going to be better for me. And there’s always the chance it could be worse.
“I know how everything works here. I have friends here, I feel good here. I’ve got everything I need.”
That’s especially been the case the past two months.
Box was right: “Basketball is her safe space.”
And it’s right in the middle of the place her mom thought was “the most beautiful in the world.”
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