Basketball
Favorite athlete: Jeremy Lin
Favorite team: Kansas Men’s Basketball Team
Favorite memory competing in sports: Winning the District One 4A Championship game as a freshman
Most embarrassing/funniest thing that has happened while competing in sports: My one teammate has the worst farts in the existence of earth so it’s very distinct. During a game once this disgusting smell of something like a mix of rotten eggs, putrid flesh, and skunk started stinking up the gym while we were playing defense. Only the team knew who the culprit was. She had to let the gas bomb out, it’s her secret weapon.
Music on iPod: Hip Hop and R&B
Future plans: Medical school to become a doctor
Word to live by:“Just trying to make my today a little better than yesterday and my tomorrow a little better than today.”
One goal before turning 30: Graduate from college and learn to cook
One thing people don’t know about me: I can juggle any three things
By Mary Jane Souder
There’s an old family photo of Irisa Ye bouncing a beach ball as a toddler.
The North Penn senior has always had basketball in her blood, and she credits the sport for shaping her into the person she is today.
And who Ye has become is the quintessential student-athlete. A first team All-SOL Continental selection, she is ranked 29th in a senior class of 1,066. An impressive combination, but there’s more to the senior tri-captain than just smarts and basketball talent.
“She’s a good teammate,” coach Maggie deMarteleire said. “If the younger kids don’t know plays, she’ll spend time before practice going over stuff with them. She’ll work with them on ball handling. If someone is having trouble with their foul shots or just with shooting in general, she would help any kid with that, and she would be the one to initiate it with the younger kids.
“She’s really, really bright, but she’s very, very thoughtful. When you ask her a question, she’ll listen to you thoroughly and then you can see her think about what she’s going to say before answering you.”
The self-assured senior bears little resemblance to the timid player that earned a spot on the varsity as a freshman.
“She was so quiet, painfully quiet,” deMarteleire recalls. “You just didn’t really know how she was going to progress.”
“I was very shy,” Ye said. “Oh my gosh, freshman year was so different towards how I am now.
“It was kind of intimidating. It was a new world to me. I had never been in contact with jocks and the way the basketball team acted. All my friends were really academic and focused on academics. The seniors on that team had the greatest impact. They were very different from whoever I’d come into contact with.”
Initially, it represented a daunting challenge.
“As a freshman, I was so scared to get out of my comfort zone, and I would always play it safe because the seniors were so out there,” Ye said. “They didn’t care what people thought.
“It opened my eyes a little bit - to not be uncomfortable, to try things and have fun. I feel as though my freshman year was really pivotal.”
Ye and fellow seniors Sam Carangi and Jess Huber played key roles in the Knights’ District One 4A championship in 2014 as well as the program’s three conference championships in the past four years. They were part of 101 wins during their four-year varsity careers, but there have been setbacks as well. The Knights’ season-ending loss to Cardinal O’Hara in the state quarterfinals last week was especially heartbreaking since it marked the end of an era for the senior trio.
“I think the biggest thing I learned from high school basketball is to keep pushing and move on from those setbacks,” she said. “Just being resilient is one of the most important things.
“In life in general, it’s not going to be a smooth road to success. You’re always going to have these pitfalls and bumps, and you’re going to have to learn to get around it somehow. I think basketball is a huge factor in teaching me that. Just the little things – if during a game, you make a huge mistake or you miss a shot, it’s like – whatever, it’s in the past. You’ve got to move on to the next play, and that stuff’s got to happen in milliseconds. I feel like that’s a huge lesson that basketball has taught me.”
The other sport
While basketball is Ye’s passion, a vastly different sport – table tennis – was a close second when she was a youngster.
“Both my parents played ping pong when they were in China,” she said. “It’s a national sport over there, and practically everyone knows how to play. My dad saw that I had it in me for athletics and that I really liked doing sports.
“We had a ping pong table at home. He taught me himself.”
Just as she began playing basketball almost as soon as she could walk, it was the same thing with ping pong.
“When I got to a level where my dad couldn’t teach me anymore from his own expertise, I used to go to New Jersey every weekend to a better coach to train to get better,” she said.
When she was in first grade, Ye traveled to China for ping pong training camp.
“My whole family is over there, so I was with all my relatives,” she said. “Ping pong is at a really high level over there, and I was playing kids that were maybe two years younger than me who had been training every single day since they were young. It was hard training too.
“Actually, I got the easy part because they knew I was from America so they went easy on me. On all the other students, they were super hard. I remember some of the punishments were pretty bad. It was just non-stop all day, and you only get a break for lunch. It’s intense training. There’s a standard you have to reach. For me, there wasn’t, but for the other students, it was very high.”
Ye estimates she took at least four trips to China.
“It was to get better (at ping pong), but also, I think my parents just wanted me to experience it because the coaches over there are a lot better than over here,” she said. “They just wanted the opportunity for me to have access to better training.”
Ye competed in several local tournaments in Philadelphia and traveled to Baltimore for a team competition, but by seventh grade, basketball was her sport of choice.
The journey begins
Ye joined the AAU circuit when she was in sixth grade, but in seventh grade, she suffered a partial tear of the meniscus in her right knee. She underwent surgery, and the interruption to her basketball career was longer than expected. She was sidelined her entire eighth grade year.
“It was me being young and dumb,” Ye said. “I could have gone back to basketball after six months at the most, but I got too impatient.
“My knee felt fine in physical therapy after three months. I felt fine running and jumping, and I didn’t listen to the doctor and played in like four games in a tournament, which was a terrible idea. It was definitely not good for my knee in the long run. It swelled up to three times the size. The doctor was like, ‘You just took one step forward and two steps backwards.’ He advised me to take some time off. This time I definitely listened to him. I took a whole year off and was just strengthening my knee. That’s how I got into lifting. I didn’t play any organized basketball.”
The summer prior to her freshman year, Ye was back on the court.
“I was out of shape, that’s for sure,” she said. “Being a freshman is hard enough, and just the court feel you lose when you stop playing.
“Court feel is something you can’t train. You have to play scrimmages and actually play in games to develop that.”
One thing that never left was Ye’s aggressiveness and hustle, and it was an easy call for deMarteleire to keep Ye on the varsity as a freshman.
“When I saw Irisa play in seventh grade – she and Sam (Carangi) played at Pennbrook together, and they just dominated every game,” the Knights’ coach said. “I knew she was something special.”
A tenacious defender, Ye was a contributor off the bench as a freshman but stepped into the starting lineup as a sophomore and never left.
“Because the seniors left, we three sophomores had a larger role than a normal sophomores would have because there was only one senior who was a transfer,” she said. “We had to take on leadership roles, but just having great role models from the seniors my freshman year – they taught us how leaders would help the younger kids. The way they helped us as freshmen - I just wanted to do the same thing for incoming freshman each year.
“Especially this year. The freshmen looked up to us a lot, and they expressed how much they appreciated it. They were great girls.”
Ye elevated her game each year and finished just 47 points shy of the 1,000-point milestone.
“She really did come out of her shell during her four years, and she just got better and better every year,” deMarteleire said. “She was always good on defense, and she really did diversify her offensive game.
“Her freshman year was pretty much attacking the basket, but then she added a pull-up jumper and then the three-point shot.”
The Knights’ coach went on to recall North Penn’s opening round state win over Cedar Crest that saw Ye explode for 21 points – 12 in the third quarter to blow the game wide open.
“In our win over Boyertown, she ended up getting three steals after they got defensive rebounds and made layups and really broke the game open for us,” deMarteleire said. “I feel like she felt more comfortable being in the spotlight this year. I just think she played with more confidence.”
A member of the National Honor Society, Ye was part of the Key Club and is still a member of the Ping Pong Club, the Chinese Cultural Club, and the Future Health Occupations Club.
She has ‘lightened’ her course load and is taking just three AP classes after taking four last year.
“It was a terrible idea, and everyone told me that, but that motivated me to actually try it because I was like, ‘I’m going to prove you all wrong,’ but nope, they were definitely right,” she said.
Ye has signed a letter of intent to play basketball at the Division II level at the University of the Sciences where she will be a pre-med major with the goal of one day becoming a doctor.
“Originally, I wanted to be a physical therapist just from my experience rehabbing all the time,” said Ye, who also had surgery on her left knee after her freshman season. “I knew in my future I wanted to help people, and I also had a huge interest in sports medicine, injuries and joints.
“Before I didn’t want to become a doctor because of all the extra schooling, but then I thought about it more – if you go through all that work, you’re going to be your own boss. Just the amount of knowledge you’d have is priceless and you’d be helping more people. The money too – you can’t complain about that.”
