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Paige Bueckers is the Gatorade Female High School Athlete of the Year

At one of her basketball games last winter, Paige Bueckers’s extended family made small talk with the people seated next to them. Where are you from? North Carolina. And what brought you here to Minnesota?

Paige, they said. The North Carolina family had flown to Minneapolis just to come to this high school gym and watch the 18-year-old phenom: Their young daughter was obsessed with her.

That seemed unbelievable, recalls Paige’s mother, Amy. But perhaps it shouldn’t have. Bueckers had recently been named USA Basketball Female Athlete of the Year. She’d just graced her first solo national magazine cover.