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PROVO — Amari Whiting has made the play hundreds of times, maybe even thousands, when everything went horribly wrong.
The 5-foot-10 guard going into her senior year at Timpview High was on her official recruiting visit at BYU, where her mother, Amber, had recently accepted the head coaching job with the women's basketball program, when she decided to play a casual pick-up game with some members of the team and a few other recruits.
The four-star guard who had previously committed to BYU after she had flipped from Oregon jumped into a passing lane, grabbed a steal, and sprinted down court for an easy layup in transition. That's when she landed on another player's foot and heard a "pop" emanate from her knee.
Collapsing in a heap, Whiting didn't know what to think. She just screamed.
"I've never had a serious injury before, so in my head I was just trying to get back up," Whiting recalled. "But it really hurt, and I was screaming because I was so scared of it."
Standing a few feet away, her teammates — both past and future — felt their stomachs drop.
"Once I saw it happen, I knew," said Ali'a Matavao, the star forward at Las Vegas' Liberty High who played on the same AAU team as Whiting and is also committed as part of the Cougars' recruiting class of 2023. "I tore my ACL, too, and as soon as I heard the scream, I knew the scream.
"Amari is the type where when she gets hurt, she just pops right up. When she didn't, I just knew. It was the worst."
BYU women's basketball opens the Amber Whiting era Thursday with an exhibition game against Division II Westminster. Tipoff is at 6 p.m. MT in the Marriott Center, and admission is free. Amari Whiting will be there, watching her mother's debut. But for the next year, she'll be sidelined while she waits to make her Big 12 debut as a freshman in 2023-24.
After her father Trent and BYU's athletic trainer Jeff Hurst helped her off the court, doctors confirmed via MRI and other tests the worst of the official diagnosis: a torn anterior cruciate ligament, meaning the senior's season was over before it even began.
Whiting was crushed. Heartbroken. She feared telling her Thunderbird teammates and her coach, former BYU guard Haley Steed, the devastating news. A few months after the Whitings uprooted their Idaho state championship-winning lives in Burley, Idaho, and moved to Provo, the four-star guard rated No. 33 nationally by ESPN wanted nothing more than to lead a very good Timpview team to the 5A state title.
Now, that leading will come from behind the bench.
"When I first moved to Utah and to Timpview, I didn't know a lot of people and I became really close with the basketball girls," Whiting said. "I didn't know how I could tell coach Steed or my girls. But they were very supportive about it, coming to visit all the time. Coach has been through this before, and she was giving me a lot of advice. But what pained me the most was how hard it was to move down here for my senior year, then switch college (commitments), and just when I was getting excited, this happened.
"It rocked my world."
Fortunately for Whiting, the daughter of two former BYU basketball players (with an older brother Jace who will be a freshman at Boise State after serving a two-year church mission) didn't have long to feel sorry for herself. Her parents specifically gave her about 15 minutes to feel sorry when they got home, then she had to set it aside and move forward.
The family quickly set up an appointment with Dr. Travis Maak, the head orthopedic surgeon for the Utah Jazz who specializes in hip and knee sports injuries.
Whiting began her nine-month road to recovery with surgery, and barely a month later, she was already riding an electric bike in short spurts. Even her parents and the physical therapist she sees a couple times a week were surprised.
Not her teammates, though.
"I think she knows that she can overcome, and she's mentally tough," said Matavao, describing Whiting as "a positive, happy person." "It's never going to be easy. But she knows that she can come back.
"You always have questions, and there's never a good time to get hurt, but this was as close to a good time for it. She can recover fully, and be ready for her freshman season."
Her faith helped, too. Right after the injury, Whiting's father Trent and Hurst offered to give her a priesthood blessing. Moments after the worst pain she's ever felt, the 5-foot-10 guard who averaged 26.9 points, 10.5 rebounds and 5.7 steals per game en route to a 25-1 record, a 4A state title and Gatorade Idaho Player of the Year honors felt a sense of peace and calm. It didn't change the diagnosis, but it did change how she felt about attacking her recovery.
So, too, did something her father said to her on the day of her surgery. Several months earlier before the state championship game, Trent Whiting gave his daughter a kiss and said, "I'm with you every step of the way."
When the younger Whiting went in for surgery, he did the same thing.
"At first, I thought it was my dad just being cute, but as I was praying one night, I realized that was my heavenly father talking to me," said Whiting, who posted on Instagram that night with a four-word caption: grateful for his love. "This has been super hard, but I was so grateful that he had such a helping hand in my life.
"I know that everything happens for a reason; I don't know mine yet, but I'm pretty sure I'll find out soon."
Whiting plans to sit on the bench for Timpview's whole season, supporting a group that sent her get-well TikToks and messages while she was in surgery. The injury robbed her of playing out her senior season, but she doesn't want it to rob her of being there for her team.
She also wants to move forward.
Whiting plans to enroll at BYU in January, taking a handful of freshman-level courses and taking advantage of the Cougars' sports medicine staff under Hurst's direction to aid in her recovery.
She'll also have her full complement of eligibility to play with the Cougars once they join the Big 12 in July 2023. Whiting hadn't planned to flip from Oregon after her mom accepted her first collegiate coaching job at BYU, but after the family's move, she realized she couldn't let Amber Whiting go into the Big 12 alone.
A decommittment from Oregon coach Kelly Graves was one of the hardest things Amari Whiting had done. That is, of course, until the unfortunate injury she suffered in a pick-up game on her official visit to BYU.
Now she knows she can overcome tough challenges — both on and off the court.
"At first, I didn't know who I was without basketball," Whiting said. "When I wasn't playing basketball, I didn't feel important, I didn't feel like myself. But by not playing, I learned that I can do other things; I'm still me, and I'm still important.
"I learned to be fearless."
