Yelle plays leading role in Geneva's rise to top

Semeka Randall, who picked up a degree in speech communications while becoming an All-American point guard, national champion and one of the all-time greats at the University of Tennessee, has a gift for gab.

Now the coach of the women's basketball team at Ohio University, one topic Randall likes talking about is an incoming point guard to her program, Geneva's own Kat Yelle.

Since Yelle committed to Ohio University early in her junior year, Randall and the Vikings' senior have gotten to know each other better through phone calls and from Randall coming to see several Geneva games.

Randall can't say enough about the impression Yelle has made — and this is before she gets to any of Yelle's on-court talents.

“We were talking and she says ‘Coach I have your playing card from when you were playing in the WNBA,” Randall, a 4-year WNBA player, recalled of a recent conversation.

“How cool is that? Just the awareness, that's rare in the game of basketball. You find a lot of girls who just play the game. They don't really understand why they play it. They are blessed with a gift. But she has been blessed and she understands the game. This is a special treat for us. A lot of people were probably surprised and shocked we had an opportunity to get her as a player.”

Yelle did turn down interest from bigger schools that came around after her early verbal commitment. She made her Ohio decision official in November on signing day, then went out and capped her four unforgettable seasons at Geneva with her best year yet.

Yelle averaged a career-high 17.1 points a game. She was the driving force behind the Vikings' continued winning ways with another conference, regional and sectional title and 25-7 record. She won MVP of the Upstate Eight Conference River Division and was named IBCA first team All-State.

Among the highlights was a brilliant 38-point game against Pickerington North at the McDonald's Shootout and two thrilling wins in the Jacobs sectional when the Vikings twice came from behind in the fourth quarter. In a 55-53 win over Cary-Grove for the sectional title, Yelle scored the tying basket with 40 seconds to go after the Trojans had rallied from 14 points down for the lead.

Yelle finishes with 1,421 career points, 337 assists, 314 seals — believed to be second in Geneva history in scoring and tops in assists and steals.

It's her 53 percent career shooting percentage that stood out as much as any to Geneva coach Gina Nolan, though Nolan knows as much as anyone that it's Yelle's ballhandling, passing, relentless defense and will to win that will be remembered much more than any statistic.

“Kat has left her mark on the Geneva girls basketball program,” said Nolan, whose teams won almost 87 percent of its games in Yelle's four years (109-17).

“Each senior class has carried on the tradition set by the previous groups. But Kat is part of a special group of players that can say they won three regional and sectional championships and made a trip to the Final Four during her career. There aren't many players in the state that can say that.”

Opposing coaches know how good Yelle was in her senior year, like Streamwood's George Rosner after the Vikings beat his Sabres to win the first UEC River title.

“Kat Yelle is the best guard that we play against all year,” Rosner said. “She does things that other guards can't do. She's a phenomenal player. She's the difference.”

Yelle, the winner of her second straight Daily Herald All-Area captain award, is looking forward to seeing what she can accomplish at the collegiate level. One of the main reasons she selected Ohio University is how much she liked Randall.

And that feeling is mutual. Just the other day Yelle and Randall were talking and Yelle started to tell her future coach about a game she had seen on TV and asking questions about point guards she will play against next year.

“I love kids who eat, sleep and drink the game of basketball,” Randall said. “It (what Yelle observed on TV) was something we talked to our players back in Ohio and for her to pick it up and mention it, as a coach you get excited because you know you don't have to spend as much time teaching. The people who will be in the league when she gets here she kind of has a heads-up of her learning curve on what is going on in our league because she thinks the game of basketball.

“That's a lost art today. No disrespect to a lot of young ladies playing basketball, they just play it they don't understand the purpose behind it. They don't know the history of it.”

Since growing up in Oklahoma the youngest of John and DeLaine Yelle's seven children, Kat has been a sports nut. She remembers playing pickup football games with her older siblings and easily could have been a college-level athlete in other sports.

But playing for her father's travel basketball team, Yelle started turning heads at a young age. While taking her AAU team to nationals in seventh grade, Yelle had the Missouri coach already coming to watch her practice. When John retired from the Air Force and moved to Geneva before Kat's eighth-grade year, what was Oklahoma's loss became the Vikings' gain. Tim Pease, whose daughter Kelsey played on Kat's eighth-grade team, reported back to Nolan that she wouldn't have to worry about being pressed for four years when Yelle got to high school. Nolan remembers meeting Yelle's parents and them telling her that they had an eighth-grade daughter who was a “gym rat.”

Now four years later, Pease's prediction couldn't have been more accurate.

“She is irreplaceable,” Nolan said after Yelle's final game, a loss to Zion-Benton in the Barrington supersectional.

“We haven't been pressed for four years because Kat has been handling the ball. Just what she does with her tenacity on the court and her drives to the basket, she's playing Division I basketball for a reason. She's going to make a huge impact at the Division I level at Ohio. I think she set a really good example and role model for the younger guards to follow for the future.”

Junior Ashley Santos is one of those younger guards, a future Division I player herself who couldn't say enough about playing with Yelle.

“Kat is a very special player and I'm going to miss her next year when she goes off to college but I'll be watching her on TV,” Santos said. “Our team will really miss her. She's done an excellent job. She has carried us for so long being our point guard and lifting us up and taking control when we needed her too. She has done a lot for us.”

When asked for a favorite memory from her Geneva career, Yelle named one for each of her four years. It started beating Batavia in the playoffs her freshman year after the Bulldogs had defeated the Vikings three times during the season.

“I just had a feeling that we were going to pretty good the next few years,” Yelle said.

That they were. Yelle said her best memory came when Geneva won the sectional for the first time her sophomore year, then also beat New Trier in the supersectional to make it to state. As a junior Yelle picked the last-second regional win over St. Charles North, then this year's team coming together and winning a sectional title that few expected.

A four-year varsity player, Yelle averaged 9.3 points a game as a sophomore and played her best basketball when Geneva needed it the most. She scored 45 points in a pair of sectional wins as the Vikings finished 32-2 and made it to state for the first time in school history.

It was the summer after that season that Ohio University first took a strong interest in Yelle while watching her play AAU basketball.

Randall's assistants Ryan Bragdon and Skyler Young couldn't report back a more glowing report to Randall.

“When my assistants spotted her I received a phone call and they said ‘I'm going to sit on top of this kid the whole summer. She's a special kid, I believe she can help our team' and obviously I gave my blessing and said get it done,” Randall said. “We watched her play the whole summer.

“You saw a kid that loved the game of basketball, competed, played hard. In their words, this is the type of kid who you absolutely love to coach. Being relentless on the floor, loves to play defense, she pushes the ball really hard. I was ecstatic to know we could find someone like that and get her on campus and try to sway her as much as we could and show her what we had to offer and our vision of building this program and hopefully her coming in and playing a very important role.”

Yelle picked up her scoring to 14.1 as a junior while leading Geneva to a 31-1 record, the only loss coming to Hersey in the supersectional.

Increasing her scoring average again this year came as no surprise to Randall.

“Every time I go and watch her she shows me something new every time,” Randall said. “I know she puts a lot of work in when no one is watching and you see that when you watch her play games.”

Yelle, who is going to major in sports broadcasting, heads to an Ohio program that has gone 13-18, 8-22 and 9-22 in Randall's three years. She's part of a six-player class that includes the Miss Basketball from West Virginia, a shooting guard, and former Young star Porsha Harris, who had 14 points and 17 rebounds against Geneva in the 2009 state semifinals and comes to Ohio from junior college.

“That's what I want more than anything — getting them turned around, to the top of the conference and make the NCAA tournament,” Yelle said. “I want to do what we did at Geneva.”

Randall said Yelle has a chance to make an immediate impact.

“Like Kat knows and any kid I recruit I never believe in promising anything,” Randall said. “It will be hard to keep her off the court as a coach because of some of the things she does. I don't want to take anything away from the players we have her but she does some really amazing things really well.”

Don't all of us who have had so much fun watching Yelle the last four years know it.

And won't we all miss it.