There are a few tells that indicate Amalie Molvaer is much more than someone who decided to pick up basketball for the first time in November and try out for Mountain View’s girls team, but one stands out to Dave McIntosh.
The team was in the weight room one day, when the Mountain View head coach tossed Molvaer a medicine ball.
“And she just hucked it (back) to me,” McIntosh said, mimicking an overhead throwing motion. “She’s seriously got an arm.”
Molvaer, a yearlong exchange student from Norway, has leaned on her extensive background in competitive team handball back home as she continues to grow as a contributor on Mountain View’s junior varsity basketball team, just three months after she began to play the sport.
Team handball is a high-scoring, fast-paced and physical Olympic sport that it played on a basketball-like court with soccer-like goals that uses a smaller, more adhesive ball. It’s as widely popular in her home country as basketball is in the United States, she said.
In basketball, Molvaer saw a sport that’s fast and physical, like team handball. She missed the physicality when she played volleyball in the fall. That was the biggest adjustment to the sport, she said.
Her instincts tell her to wrap her arms around players, push and check people to the ground on defense, but she’s been forced to unlearn much of that, which is much easier said than done.
“That was the most frustrating thing,” she said.
Plus, she leaped at the challenge of mastering something new.
“I want to be as good at basketball,” Molvaer said.
Molvaer stands at 5-foot-9, which immediately made her the tallest girl in the program. She has practiced with the varsity team when they’ve needed an extra player.
To McIntosh, it’s Molvaer’s work ethic and personal expectations that set her apart.
Before the second day of basketball tryouts, she approached McIntosh with her practice jersey in hand. Not 24 hours had passed since the start of her basketball career and she was prepared to quit out of frustration.
After all, she’d only tried out because a friend convinced her, and she was frustrated. She didn’t want to make the C-team.
But what she perceived as her clumsiness and a lack of skill, the McIntosh and his staff saw the tools of an athlete who could contribute.
“What we saw was, ‘oh my gosh, a taller, athletic kid,’ so we were getting excited,” McIntosh said.
McIntosh convinced her to give it another whirl, and Molvaer obliged.
Two months later, the senior — who coincidentally lives with varsity player McKenna Stephens and her family — is glad she did. Perhaps equally, if not more elated is McIntosh, who has witnessed Molvaer’s work ethic on and drive on the JV team serve as an example for the rest of the program.
“I’m used to a lot of pressure and always having people who want me to do as good as possible and expect a lot from me,” Molvaer said. “I expect a lot from myself.”
In December, McIntosh awarded her as the program’s athlete of the month. He credits Molvaer’s improvement to that impenetrable desire to improve.
“We wanted to reward her for being here every single day and telling us that we need to push her more,” McIntosh said. “She’ll say, ‘no, you need to push me more. I need to get better.’ We love that.”
When Molvaer goes back to Norway in June, she doesn’t expect to play much basketball. Even when she send photos and videos of her playing basketball to family members, they are amused, she said.
She’s still deciding on whether she’ll rejoin her club handball team, or solely focus on her final year of school in Norway before heading off to university, where she hopes to pursue a law degree.
McIntosh tells her she will get her shot with the varsity team. It’s not a matter of if, rather “when.”
In the meantime, Molvaer has no plans to stop working at getting better. It’s her top priority in the remaining months of the season.
“(To) learn it and be as great as I can possibly be,” she said. “I have a lot to catch up with and I just want to grow as fast as possible. I wish I would do it faster, but it’s fine.”
