When Chase Coley was in eighth grade, her father, Tylor, was hired to coach girls' basketball at Minneapolis Washburn. He begged his wife, Kelli Jo, to let Chase open enroll into the Washburn district from their home in Eagan.
The reasons were plentiful: The Coleys had lived in south Minneapolis and still had extensive ties there. Tylor, a self-proclaimed basketball fanatic who played at Grace University in Indiana, always wanted the chance to coach his children. And with Chase already pushing 6 feet, he saw the potential to turn Washburn around.
"Kelli said 'Nooooo. She's going to finish here and we'll talk about high school after that,' " Tylor said. "She didn't want her to make that change in middle school."
Chase enrolled at Washburn a year later. "I remember sitting down at the table and doing a pros and cons list," she said. "There were more pros."
In the four years hence, she's proven her father to be spot-on in his assessment of his daughter. She has sprouted to a legitimate 6-3, with arms longer than most teammates' legs while possessing a sprinter's speed and a point guard's agility.
What Chase has done with those attributes — lead the Minneapolis Conference scoring, rebounding, blocked shots, assists and steals, and spark the Millers to back-to-back state tournament appearances — is why she was selected the Star Tribune 2014 Metro Player of the Year.
The journey to this point has been far from smooth. In 2010, Kelli Jo, a former University of Minnesota basketball player, died unexpectedly at the age of 46. Tylor moved his girls, Chase and Kendall, now a fifth-grader, to more familiar surroundings in Minneapolis.
After dividing her time equally between volleyball and basketball with her mother, Chase followed her father's lead and focused her energies on basketball.
