It turns out basketball hasn’t always come easy to Arizona Wildcat Cate Reese, who is in her fifth and final year at the school. In fact, the sport was a bit of a struggle when she was looking for something to occupy her during the winter and her parents signed her up.
Reese laughs, “I started playing basketball, but I was not good. I was the last person that always played and was traveling all the time.” Luckily for her and Wildcats fans alike, fate stepped in. In fifth grade, Reese and her family connected with an AAU team that allowed her more playing time and the ability to come to practice early to work out.
“My mom would take me early to practice and I would work out with the coach. I started to get better, and in middle school, I really started to like it, and just blossomed from there.”
From that point on, Reese was hooked. She made varsity her freshman year of high school and went to state with her team; as she puts it, “After that, I really didn’t look back.”
However, basketball wasn’t the only thing on Reese’s mind in high school. In 2016, she was diagnosed with Type 1 Diabetes, the same diagnosis her older sister had received years earlier. Reese explains, “I was diagnosed in my sophomore year of high school. At that point, I was really upset — my sister was diagnosed in fifth grade … I just knew all the stuff she has to go through being diagnosed with Type 1 diabetes.”
As she says, one of the more frustrating aspects of having diabetes is that she’s had to educate people over and over again. She explains, “A lot of people aren’t really aware of what diabetes is and how there’s a difference between Type 1 and Type 2. I try to teach people as much as I can, especially my teammates.”
By the time she was diagnosed, Reese had already been dealing with a lot of symptoms. She shares, “I was actually at an AAU tournament and I had just lost so much weight, I was looking really pale, sick … I had to go to the bathroom all the time. I would sit at the bench, drink a whole Gatorade, and still be thirsty. We were driving home from San Antonio and my mom said, ‘Ali can just test you.’” Her sister checked Reese’s blood sugar, which was “so high that the meter couldn’t read it.”
After an adjustment period, Reese was back in the game. These days, her diagnosis doesn’t get in her way. In fact, hardly anything does.
Reese, who is from Cypress, Texas, was recruited by Arizona in 2018, an offer…
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