Story written by Stephen Garcia | Lubbock Avalanche-Journal
Sonny Chavez just wanted his daughter to stop asking.
Day after day, a young and determined Aaliyah Chavez posed the same question: Will you sign me up for basketball?
The persistent noes weren’t enough to deter her. What would it take for Aaliyah to give it a rest?
Sonny hatched a plan.
“We’re going probably two weeks straight she’s begging me to sign her up,” Sonny said. “And I kept telling her no. I really wanted her to quit asking me. So I kind of put her through a little workout: wall-sits and defensive slides, sprints. We didn’t even have a basketball at the time. I was really trying to get her to just quit asking me, quit bugging me for the $125.”
There’s no way a second-grade Aaliyah would make it through the grueling training, let alone want to continue pursuing basketball afterward.
Right?
“She did it, and she did it every day for like the next two or three weeks,” Sonny said. “So I told her if she could handle the workouts I would sign her up. She did it, never complained. Obviously she cried because some of the workouts were kind of tough, but she kept working.
“That’s where it started for us.”
That was the launch pad, and the trajectory continues to climb for Aaliyah Chavez. The Lubbock Monterey junior has used the same no-quit mentality to reach national prominence. And the No. 1-rated recruit has no plans of slowing down.
Even if the number is dwindling, she’s still got doubters to silence.
“If I see someone that doubts me, then I’m gonna go harder,” Aaliyah said. “That’s just my mindset. Someone doesn’t believe in me, I’m going to prove to them that I can do something, whatever it is. … I think they kind of learned, like, she actually can do all this that we said she couldn’t do.”
Like the naysayers, the aspects of Chavez’s game that require improvement are shrinking. But don’t tell her that. Despite her mesmerizing ball-handling, basketball smarts and scoring prowess, Aaliyah is training almost 365 days a year to refine her skills.
“I work on everything,” Aaliyah said, “just because anybody can get better. You can’t be perfect at anything.”
Most of that work comes with her dad, a Muleshoe native who admittedly didn’t put much effort into basketball growing up. Sonny never expected to be a trainer either, despite his high school coaches prophesizing he had a knack to follow in their footsteps.