I have known this girl since she was 12 yrs old
<CENTER>Former Rainbow Wahine Basketball Player Makes WNBA Squad</CENTER>
Release Date: 05/18/07
<CENTER>Former Rainbow Wahine Basketball Player Makes WNBA Squad</CENTER>
Release Date: 05/18/07
Former University of Hawai`i Rainbow Wahine basketball player Amy Sanders is on the opening day roster for the WNBA's Detroit Shock. Sanders is the just the second Rainbow Wahine ever to make an WNBA squad and the first since Judy Mosley suited up for the Sacramento Monarchs and Los Angeles Sparks in the league's inaugural season in 1997.
Sanders is set to sign a one-year rookie contract on Friday, the deadline for the final roster cut-down and one day before the season begins. Sanders had previously signed a training camp contract on April 27 and appeared in all three of the Shock's preseason contests, averaging 5.0 minutes per game.
The defending champion Shock open the season Saturday, May 19, versus the Sacramento Monarchs at 3:30 p.m. EST in a contest that will be televised nationally on ABC.
While at UH (2002-06) she was an all-WAC performer, leading the team in scoring during both her junior and senior seasons. The native of Huntington Beach, Calif., concluded her UH career in 2006 and played professionally in Sweden last year. Christen Roper was the last Rainbow Wahine to try out for a WNBA team after participating in the training camp for the Sacramento Monarchs in 2003. Former UH All-American Nani Cockett also was a member of the Los Angeles Sparks reserve squad in 2000.
Sanders is set to sign a one-year rookie contract on Friday, the deadline for the final roster cut-down and one day before the season begins. Sanders had previously signed a training camp contract on April 27 and appeared in all three of the Shock's preseason contests, averaging 5.0 minutes per game.
The defending champion Shock open the season Saturday, May 19, versus the Sacramento Monarchs at 3:30 p.m. EST in a contest that will be televised nationally on ABC.
While at UH (2002-06) she was an all-WAC performer, leading the team in scoring during both her junior and senior seasons. The native of Huntington Beach, Calif., concluded her UH career in 2006 and played professionally in Sweden last year. Christen Roper was the last Rainbow Wahine to try out for a WNBA team after participating in the training camp for the Sacramento Monarchs in 2003. Former UH All-American Nani Cockett also was a member of the Los Angeles Sparks reserve squad in 2000.
Sanders siblings star in their own ways
While Huntington Beach's Matt Sanders is the front man of metal band Avenged Sevenfold, sister Amy, an ex-WNBAer, is carving her own path.
JEFF MILLER
Register columnist
jmiller@ocregister.com
The place looks so normal, an average house on just another street in just another neighborhood.
Upstairs. Downstairs. Two-car garage. Basketball hoop out front. Patio in back. Seen a million of these.
But it's uncommonly familiar, too. You've been here before. Seven years ago, in this exact living room, talking to this same Mom and Dad, about this same son.
That tells you one thing: This house can't be so normal.
You remember that original story, about the kid who painted much of his body in tattoos and pierced whatever parts were left over; who, around age 12, started converting his allowance into alcohol; and who rebelled and formed a heavy metal band and was arrested repeatedly and slept with a can of mace and a baseball bat, just in case those gang members returned.
You also remember his little sister, who, like her brother, was a basketball player, a good one, one of the best in the county. But it was too early for her back then. That story was just beginning.
In the spring of 2000, it was all about him, a tale of hoops and hopes, told by parents so happy that their only son had rejoined the team at Huntington Beach High, a sign he might actually make it to graduation, make it through graduation, and maybe even do something in life.
And you just learned that, two weeks after the story appeared on these pages, Dad was summoned to the police station, where he found his son bloodied and handcuffed to a post. Arrested again.
But boy, has a lot happened since. Just look over there, on the family piano, an MTV award. And on the wall, a gold record framed, hanging right next to the photo of the tall, athletic blonde in action with the defending WNBA champions.
Today, Matt Sanders is the front man of Avenged Sevenfold, one of the most popular metal bands going, and his sister is a scrappy guard so beloved during a recent season in Sweden that the newspapers there began referring to her by first name only: Amy.
That's a lot of achievement coming from the same home and same parents, a lot of success sprouting from, in the words of Dad — Gary Sanders — “two nerds like us.”
No, this house here is anything but normal.
They've been called delinquents and most dangerous, this group that has been likened to Guns N' Roses and Motley Crue. Avenged Sevenfold has a thing for bats, many of which are shown on fire, and creepy skeletons, many of which are depicted wielding knives.
The band is Matt and four of his buddies who also attended Huntington Beach. He's known as M. Shadows, and his performances are aggressive, angry and, quite often, four-lettered. To appreciate how violent Matt can be as a vocalist, realize that he already has required surgery on the same throat he has trained at a cost of $300 an hour.
But there's an edgy image to uphold, one painted continually in the glossy fan magazines, where the sometimes bawdy details are such that Matt's mom, Kim, says, “I just look at the pictures. I don't read the stories.”
Images, though, they're a lot like Matt's 15-plus tattoos; they can be made to say anything, the message not necessarily the truth. And here's the beauty of being the hometown newspaper: access. You're allowed to get a little closer, go deeper than the body ink.
So M. Shadows stars in music videos with strippers, is portrayed as a hard partier on the Internet sites and even keeps a functioning Jagermeister machine in the studio where he writes his songs.
But Matt Sanders? He can't control his own grandmother. Mary Lou Burrows was something of a star herself that night Avenged Sevenfold played the House of Blues. When people discovered who she was, they began pressing closer.
“She's running around at our shows, telling people she's my grandmother and signing autographs,” Matt, 26, says. “It's a little silly. I'm like, ‘Come on, Grandma, you can't be doing that.'”
The reality is there's a lot of family in a story some might wrap in that brown packaging used to conceal bottles of booze. Matt has taken his grandfather, all 73 years of Herb Burrows, on tour. He also took gramps to Ozzfest in Utah.
While there, the band went trout fishing at a place Matt and his father try to visit every year A cooler was brought along, one Matt had stocked with bologna sandwiches and grape soda, Grandpa's favorites.
Do these sound like the actions of a metal madman? What's more, do these sound like the madman's words?
“When people meet me, they don't get the person they think they're going to get. They get me. They see us as jerks, with tattoos and no shirts. But off stage, when I meet someone, I try to be as nice as I can be.”
Matt just got engaged, to a girl he has known since sixth grade and dated since high school. He sees his parents almost every week, has dinner with them most Sundays. To be accurate, when he's in town, M. Shadows still lives with his folks, still sleeps in his boyhood bedroom!
Do other metal maniacs even have moms and dads? Or were they just hatched straight from hell?
So Amy's cell phone vibrated one day early in this WNBA season. She was with the Detroit Shock then, a free agent who unexpectedly survived training camp mostly because of her willingness to leave sweat and skin on the floor.
See, this is where she's different from her brother. Matt always has been out front, always certain he would succeed, even when Avenged Sevenfold was living in a van and playing in front of 50 people, and Matt would return from the road having lost 20 pounds because there was no money for food.
That was at a time when his mother finally couldn't take it anymore. Kim went out and bought Matt and his friends memberships to a national fitness club chain. Not so they could work out, but so they'd have somewhere to take showers.
“Meanwhile, our friends had kids going to places like the Naval Academy,” Gary says. “But anyone who has as much commitment and passion as Matt has, you have confidence in. We were always quietly confident it would work out.”
Says Kim, “People thought we were kooks.”
Yet, there was progress for Matt, always, another song written, another small record deal, another reason to believe. Amy's story dead-ended more than once. From Mater Dei to Huntington Beach High to Mater Dei again to the University of Hawaii to Europe to a failed free-agent camp to an empty tryout with the Sparks.
She wanted the WNBA; the league just didn't seem to want her. Then Rick Mahorn called the house one day and the Detroit assistant coach asked, “How soon can Amy get here?”
She made the team but not the team's rotation. Amy barely was playing. A minute at New York, four minutes against Indiana, two more at Seattle. That cell phone vibrated. She looked down. A text message, from Matt:
“Don't worry. Kobe didn't play much his rookie year, either.”
When the Shock, because of injuries, decided to get bigger before the playoffs, Amy, 24, was released. The first person she called was her brother. It was 6 a.m.
“I've made a conscious effort to connect with her,” Matt says. “She's so caring. I was kind of selfish, doing my own thing when I was younger. Family is the most important thing now. You just sort of figure that out eventually. I was an immature jerk, basically.”
Their roads to today have been different, but no more so than their personalities always have been. Matt is the lead singer of a band that has sold more than 1 million albums, won a 2006 MTV award for best new artist in a video and just began a world tour playing before tens of thousands in Indonesia.
And Amy didn't want to speak for the purposes of this story. She'll talk, she says, when she achieves something.
OK, sure.
“She has worked so hard to get everything she's had so far,” Gary says. “I mean, she just never stops working. To me, what she has accomplished is at least as impressive as what Matt has done.”
Amy has returned to Hawaii to finish her degree. In January, she'll probably go back to Europe to play.
Matt has a new album due out in October, the latest advancement for an artist who began singing in the St. Bonaventure Church choir in the first grade but quit two years later rather than perform a Christmas solo.
So the house, it's quiet these days. The garage studio sits silent for now, not like other times, when Dad might wake up at 3 a.m. and hear his son down there, searching for something on an unplugged electric guitar.
You figure this must be as normal as it gets around here. No phone messages from Metallica or Korn. No calls from former NBA players looking for guard help. Just two parents, watching their kids grow.
“To get where they are took a lot of luck,” Gary says. “But they both have a lot of emotional intelligence, too. They know not to take rejection personal. They have a real passion for what they do. That's the common thread, that passion.”
Brother and sister. A singer and a winger. Not bad, Mom and Dad. Even the other nerds would be proud.
<SCRIPT type=text/javascript><!-- if(typeof(jgallery)=="object")jgallery.fill("journalentry","itemtitle"); //--></SCRIPT>
While Huntington Beach's Matt Sanders is the front man of metal band Avenged Sevenfold, sister Amy, an ex-WNBAer, is carving her own path.
Register columnist
jmiller@ocregister.com
The place looks so normal, an average house on just another street in just another neighborhood.
Upstairs. Downstairs. Two-car garage. Basketball hoop out front. Patio in back. Seen a million of these.
But it's uncommonly familiar, too. You've been here before. Seven years ago, in this exact living room, talking to this same Mom and Dad, about this same son.
That tells you one thing: This house can't be so normal.
You remember that original story, about the kid who painted much of his body in tattoos and pierced whatever parts were left over; who, around age 12, started converting his allowance into alcohol; and who rebelled and formed a heavy metal band and was arrested repeatedly and slept with a can of mace and a baseball bat, just in case those gang members returned.
You also remember his little sister, who, like her brother, was a basketball player, a good one, one of the best in the county. But it was too early for her back then. That story was just beginning.
In the spring of 2000, it was all about him, a tale of hoops and hopes, told by parents so happy that their only son had rejoined the team at Huntington Beach High, a sign he might actually make it to graduation, make it through graduation, and maybe even do something in life.
And you just learned that, two weeks after the story appeared on these pages, Dad was summoned to the police station, where he found his son bloodied and handcuffed to a post. Arrested again.
But boy, has a lot happened since. Just look over there, on the family piano, an MTV award. And on the wall, a gold record framed, hanging right next to the photo of the tall, athletic blonde in action with the defending WNBA champions.
Today, Matt Sanders is the front man of Avenged Sevenfold, one of the most popular metal bands going, and his sister is a scrappy guard so beloved during a recent season in Sweden that the newspapers there began referring to her by first name only: Amy.
That's a lot of achievement coming from the same home and same parents, a lot of success sprouting from, in the words of Dad — Gary Sanders — “two nerds like us.”
No, this house here is anything but normal.
•••
They've been called delinquents and most dangerous, this group that has been likened to Guns N' Roses and Motley Crue. Avenged Sevenfold has a thing for bats, many of which are shown on fire, and creepy skeletons, many of which are depicted wielding knives.
The band is Matt and four of his buddies who also attended Huntington Beach. He's known as M. Shadows, and his performances are aggressive, angry and, quite often, four-lettered. To appreciate how violent Matt can be as a vocalist, realize that he already has required surgery on the same throat he has trained at a cost of $300 an hour.
But there's an edgy image to uphold, one painted continually in the glossy fan magazines, where the sometimes bawdy details are such that Matt's mom, Kim, says, “I just look at the pictures. I don't read the stories.”
Images, though, they're a lot like Matt's 15-plus tattoos; they can be made to say anything, the message not necessarily the truth. And here's the beauty of being the hometown newspaper: access. You're allowed to get a little closer, go deeper than the body ink.
So M. Shadows stars in music videos with strippers, is portrayed as a hard partier on the Internet sites and even keeps a functioning Jagermeister machine in the studio where he writes his songs.
But Matt Sanders? He can't control his own grandmother. Mary Lou Burrows was something of a star herself that night Avenged Sevenfold played the House of Blues. When people discovered who she was, they began pressing closer.
“She's running around at our shows, telling people she's my grandmother and signing autographs,” Matt, 26, says. “It's a little silly. I'm like, ‘Come on, Grandma, you can't be doing that.'”
The reality is there's a lot of family in a story some might wrap in that brown packaging used to conceal bottles of booze. Matt has taken his grandfather, all 73 years of Herb Burrows, on tour. He also took gramps to Ozzfest in Utah.
While there, the band went trout fishing at a place Matt and his father try to visit every year A cooler was brought along, one Matt had stocked with bologna sandwiches and grape soda, Grandpa's favorites.
Do these sound like the actions of a metal madman? What's more, do these sound like the madman's words?
“When people meet me, they don't get the person they think they're going to get. They get me. They see us as jerks, with tattoos and no shirts. But off stage, when I meet someone, I try to be as nice as I can be.”
Matt just got engaged, to a girl he has known since sixth grade and dated since high school. He sees his parents almost every week, has dinner with them most Sundays. To be accurate, when he's in town, M. Shadows still lives with his folks, still sleeps in his boyhood bedroom!
Do other metal maniacs even have moms and dads? Or were they just hatched straight from hell?
So Amy's cell phone vibrated one day early in this WNBA season. She was with the Detroit Shock then, a free agent who unexpectedly survived training camp mostly because of her willingness to leave sweat and skin on the floor.
See, this is where she's different from her brother. Matt always has been out front, always certain he would succeed, even when Avenged Sevenfold was living in a van and playing in front of 50 people, and Matt would return from the road having lost 20 pounds because there was no money for food.
That was at a time when his mother finally couldn't take it anymore. Kim went out and bought Matt and his friends memberships to a national fitness club chain. Not so they could work out, but so they'd have somewhere to take showers.
“Meanwhile, our friends had kids going to places like the Naval Academy,” Gary says. “But anyone who has as much commitment and passion as Matt has, you have confidence in. We were always quietly confident it would work out.”
Says Kim, “People thought we were kooks.”
Yet, there was progress for Matt, always, another song written, another small record deal, another reason to believe. Amy's story dead-ended more than once. From Mater Dei to Huntington Beach High to Mater Dei again to the University of Hawaii to Europe to a failed free-agent camp to an empty tryout with the Sparks.
She wanted the WNBA; the league just didn't seem to want her. Then Rick Mahorn called the house one day and the Detroit assistant coach asked, “How soon can Amy get here?”
She made the team but not the team's rotation. Amy barely was playing. A minute at New York, four minutes against Indiana, two more at Seattle. That cell phone vibrated. She looked down. A text message, from Matt:
“Don't worry. Kobe didn't play much his rookie year, either.”
When the Shock, because of injuries, decided to get bigger before the playoffs, Amy, 24, was released. The first person she called was her brother. It was 6 a.m.
“I've made a conscious effort to connect with her,” Matt says. “She's so caring. I was kind of selfish, doing my own thing when I was younger. Family is the most important thing now. You just sort of figure that out eventually. I was an immature jerk, basically.”
Their roads to today have been different, but no more so than their personalities always have been. Matt is the lead singer of a band that has sold more than 1 million albums, won a 2006 MTV award for best new artist in a video and just began a world tour playing before tens of thousands in Indonesia.
And Amy didn't want to speak for the purposes of this story. She'll talk, she says, when she achieves something.
OK, sure.
“She has worked so hard to get everything she's had so far,” Gary says. “I mean, she just never stops working. To me, what she has accomplished is at least as impressive as what Matt has done.”
Amy has returned to Hawaii to finish her degree. In January, she'll probably go back to Europe to play.
Matt has a new album due out in October, the latest advancement for an artist who began singing in the St. Bonaventure Church choir in the first grade but quit two years later rather than perform a Christmas solo.
So the house, it's quiet these days. The garage studio sits silent for now, not like other times, when Dad might wake up at 3 a.m. and hear his son down there, searching for something on an unplugged electric guitar.
You figure this must be as normal as it gets around here. No phone messages from Metallica or Korn. No calls from former NBA players looking for guard help. Just two parents, watching their kids grow.
“To get where they are took a lot of luck,” Gary says. “But they both have a lot of emotional intelligence, too. They know not to take rejection personal. They have a real passion for what they do. That's the common thread, that passion.”
Brother and sister. A singer and a winger. Not bad, Mom and Dad. Even the other nerds would be proud.
<SCRIPT type=text/javascript><!-- if(typeof(jgallery)=="object")jgallery.fill("journalentry","itemtitle"); //--></SCRIPT>
I met a girl who was a star at New Mexico in 2002 on a dating site. This was back in 2001 or 2002. Her name was Jordan adams. She played in wnba for Minnesota Lynx. As soon as she found out i was a heavy gambler she wanted no more contact. I talked too much about the lines and she didn't have a clue what i was talking about. It was good stuff back in the day! lol
