While there are countless ways to judge a basketball team, there's a concept among hardcore hoop heads known as "The Airport Test." It's fairly self-explanatory: If you happened to see a basketball team in an airport — just lounging around in casualwear waiting for their flight — would your first instinct when sizing them up be Dang, that's basketball team looks intimidating as hell? Or would it be, Well those nice-looking folks are all wearing team gear — they must be a team... maybe basketball?
This year's Gonzaga women's hoops team wouldn't exactly ace the Airport Test. No one on the team tops 6-foot-3, with the vast majority of the squad sporting relatively thin frames. But that split-second first impression belies the dominance the 2023-24 Zags have displayed on the court.
These Bulldogs have been one of the best teams in Gonzaga history — men's or women's — amassing a 30-3 record heading into the NCAA Tournament. The squad is filthy with skilled shooters: starting guards Brynna Maxwell, Kaylynne Truong and Kayleigh Truong all shoot over 40% from behind the 3-point arc. The Zags are top 10 in the country in pretty much every major offensive category and as part of the team's 24-game win streak, they didn't win a single game by less than 11 points from Dec. 11 until March 12.
But the main reason these Zags put the Airport Test to shame is their somewhat unassuming 6-foot-1-inch killer in the post: Yvonne Ejim.
"She's kind of the heart and soul that makes the team go right now," says Maxwell.
Ejim, a senior from Calgary, Canada, has been the forceful, physical anchor of Gonzaga the past two seasons. While she's listed as a forward, it only takes a minute of watching Ejim play to realize she's actually a slightly undersized center who uses her athleticism, touch, drive and footwork to make her opponents look helpless. She's top 25 in the country in scoring (19.8 ppg), and ninth in the nation in field goal percentage (61.3%) while shooting over 100 more attempts than the majority of the women above her. What Ejim may lack in traditional dominating height, she makes up for with her own personal favorite aspect of her game — her speed. She's also unselfish for an elite big, which helps the sweet shooting Zags get even better looks.
"She's a very good passer out of the post. She's very smart. It's a two-way thing: assists our way and assist Vonnie's way," says Kayleigh Truong. "Vonnie's not like a traditional post, she's able to outrun the majority of the people on the floor. So that makes it easy as a point guard, because now transition is one of the biggest things that we pride ourselves on in this program."
After only seeing the court about six minutes per game as a freshman in the 2020-21 season, Ejim won WCC Sixth Woman of the Year during her sophomore campaign. The leap wasn't a surprise to the coaches.
"She had a really great recipe of things coming in: very intelligent player, extremely hardworking, and then very open to coaching. And then as she received more opportunities, as she continued to improve herself, I think she saw the strides that she was making, and then really kind of doubled down in her efforts to continue to try to be the best player and best teammate that she can be," says assistant coach Craig Fortier.
"I think the consistency in her game is certainly the most impressive thing," he adds. "She's shooting a tremendous percentage from the field, her assists, the way she's defending without fouling. All those things are a combination of not just the experience, but also really leaning into all the little details. Offensively, her footwork is something that's gone from OK to average to really phenomenal — to the level where we [have] other players watch how she does what she does."
Ejim's full skill set was on full display on Dec. 3 in the Kennel, when these Zags notched the biggest regular season win in program history. On that Sunday afternoon, Gonzaga blew out No. 3 Stanford by a score of 97-78. Not only was it a smackdown of one of the favorites to win the national title (the Cardinal are a 2 seed and have the fourth best odds to win it all), but Ejim went off. She dominated her matchup with the best center in the country, soon-to-be 3-time All-American Cameron Brink, with Ejim putting up 27 points and 12 rebounds to Brink's 10 and 6.
If Ejim wasn't on the national radar as an All-American caliber player before the Stanford game, she and her fellow Zags certainly were after that beatdown.
Growing up in Calgary, Ejim dreamt from an early age of dominating on the court — just not the basketball one.
"I actually started out in tennis. I wanted to be the next Serena Williams," Ejim says. "But my older brothers played basketball, and my dad and my mom played a little bit too. So that got me into it at first. And then I went to a Steve Nash camp when I was super young."
Basketball got its proverbial hooks into her thanks to her family, which makes a lot of sense when one zooms out and looks at the Ejim clan. Perhaps it helped that the Ejim kids could theoretically play a 5-on-5 basketball team... with a sub. Yvonne has 10 siblings: four older brothers, three younger brothers and three younger sisters. And she credits that age dispersion somewhat with motivating her to become the player she is.
"I think being able to look up to my older brothers has definitely helped me be the player. Just kind of wanting to be like them, and do the amazing things that they were able to do," Ejim says. "And then also being an older sister to my younger siblings who play basketball, I feel like that also inspired me to want to do better in order to inspire them. I feel like I was getting the best of both worlds."
It helped that as Ejim was growing up, basketball in Canada was also growing. Part of her aggressiveness on the court grew out of her time playing for Canadian youth national teams.
"A lot the physicality that I play with comes from playing internationally," Ejim says. "A lot of my experience in FIBA has been very physical players and very tall post players from all around the world. So I feel like I've adapted a little bit of that from playing against all that competition. I like playing physical. I like being down low and getting into it with other post players."
But while she may be an intimidating force on the court, Ejim's off-court personality is far more casual. While she self identifies as a little "crazy in a fun way," she has both an extrovert's goofiness and a touch of introvert bashfulness to her. This GU team is incredibly close-knit, but Ejim even jokes that "I'm definitely around my teammates a lot more than I should be." That time includes watching movies, hitting up restaurants with the Truongs, or getting into thrifting to up her style game. (On a style note for the many who may be curious — it took Ejim 25 hours to braid her trademark blonde mane of synthetic hair.)
While Ejim has a chance to cement herself as one of the best players in Gonzaga history in the upcoming NCAA Tournament, it won't be the end of her journey in Spokane. Despite being a senior, she's taking advantage of the NCAA's COVID eligibility extension to come back and lead next year's team. With the other four starters on this team being super seniors who used their extra year of eligibility this season, Ejim should be the rock to help the Zags retool instead of fully rebuilding.
"It's just an honor to have players who want to stick around," says head coach Lisa Fortier. "And I think that says a lot to their position coaches, I think it says a lot to their teammates, to the university and to our fans. We try to make it a place where they want to stay as long as they can and when they leave here they want to keep playing basketball. Vonnie is a remarkable player — obviously, everybody knows that. Vonnie is a terrific player who keeps getting better."
While Ejim has eyes on playing in the WNBA, a big part of returning to Gonzaga is continuing her studies. And her schooling won't end there: Because she wants to become a doctor, Ejim's still got years in the classroom ahead of her.
"When I was younger, I definitely just loved the sciences and the maths and stuff like that," Ejim says. "Just thinking about professionally what I wanted to do, I believe that the medical field has helped me and my family a lot, and I wanted to give back to that. And also give back to people who don't get as much accessibility to medical care as they need. Doctors are always in need, and I'd love to be like a presence that helps people."
That said, Ejim's additional year in Spokane is sure to make at least one group feel very unwell.
"There's probably a WCC coaches group chat and they're probably spamming like, 'UGH! We gotta deal with her another year!'" jokes Maxwell.
But before anyone starts focusing on next year's squad, this Gonzaga team has designs on a deep NCAA Tournament run. And it looked like all systems were go as the team was hardly challenged during its 24-game win streak. Then came the WCC Tournament Championship Game.
Down in Vegas, the Zags suffered their first loss in ages, a crushing 67-66 loss to Portland. It's a tougher pill to swallow because not only had Portland upset GU in the prior year's WCC title game, but the Bulldogs had just beaten the same Portland squad by 50 points two weeks earlier.
But perhaps that stumble could be the wake-up call these Zags needed heading into an NCAA Tournament where they have a legitimate shot at making the program's first Final Four. Despite the loss, Gonzaga earned a 4-seed, the highest in program history, which means that GU gets to host the opening rounds of the NCAA Tournament here in Spokane at the McCarthey Athletic Center. They'll open up against 13-seed UC Irvine on Saturday, and then would potentially play the winner of the matchup between 5-seed Utah and 12-seed South Dakota State.
And any sort of magical March run is likely to see Ejim carrying the load. While she might not tower over everyone at the airport, she's a towering figure on the court.
"We don't step off the plane looking like the Monstars," says Craig Fortier. "But that being said, the Monstars didn't win in the end." ♦
