Swanson: On Mother’s Day, Sparks’ Dearica Hamby deserves a bouquet

TORRANCE — This Mother’s Day, let’s give Dearica Hamby her flowers.

Dearica, Mama, you are appreciated.

This woman didn’t just give us an all-time sports moment: Her steal and one-legged, 38-foot buzzer-beater-type heave 7.6 seconds before the buzzer in a Las Vegas Aces’ 2019 elimination game. Delirium. Oh, how things will work out unexpectedly.

She also stood up for herself – and, by proxy, for working moms more broadly, any of us who has had our livelihood affected by having kids, who has sacrificed or been passed over, demoted, sidelined, underestimated or traded – when she publicly protested how she was being treated by her former team.

Maybe you recall the circumstances last year when the Las Vegas Aces dealt Hamby to the Sparks? How Las Vegas traded the two-time All-Star and two-time WNBA Sixth Woman of the Year, the 6-foot-3 forward they call “Big Guard” because of her proficiency as a connector and creator? How the Aces even threw in a first-round draft pick – and for what? A backup center and a second-rounder.

The lopsidedness of the deal didn’t register as a coincidence to Hamby, who was pregnant at the time with her second child, son Legend. On Instagram, she told us all what she’d been told: “That I was ‘a question mark’ and that … there was a concern for my level of commitment to the team.”

So much for the Pregnancy Discrimination Act that’s supposed to prevent unfavorable treatment in any aspect of employment, including job assignments.

The Aces – whom the WNBA would dock a 2025 first-round pick and suspend Coach Becky Hammon two games without pay – shrugged and shipped off a stalwart who had spent her entire eight-year career with their organization. (In October, Hamby filed a gender discrimination complaint with the Nevada Equal Rights Commission against the Aces and the WNBA.)

Hamby, by the way, was at training camp about six weeks after Legend’s birth in mid-March, and who wound up being the only Sparks player – and one of only 35 women league-wide – to play all 40 games last season.

The W has incredible individual stories each season, but I would love to shout-out @dearicamarie! Dearica played in ALL 40-regular season games shortly after giving birth to her second child. She is a true inspiration to our entire league and all working mothers. #Inspiring

— Curt Miller (@CurtMillerWBB) September 11, 2023

Hamby had something to show the Aces, sure, she said. But more importantly, she had something to show herself. She averaged nearly nine points, six rebounds and one steal per game in 2023, and she tried to give herself grace but wasn’t satisfied.

So she has big plans to show out this season, one serious mother, one seriously important piece for the Sparks – whose Layshia Clarendon also is a parent, with a 3-year-old at home.

“People will probably think I’m crazy,” Hamby, 30, said as something of a preface last week after practice at El Camino College, where she joined me on the bleachers and talked about having written down a season’s worth of goals on a basketball at home, sharing just this one:

“I want an MVP vote,” she said. “And I very much think I’m capable.”

I’d say: Underestimate Amaya and Legend’s mom at your own peril.

Amid all the taxing, literally bruising, year-round rigors of a pro women’s basketball career, Dearica is raising happy kids – with regular assists from her mom, Carla.

Amaya, 7, is a tennis-loving Swiftie who is keen to pick up new languages and new friends on her travels with her globe-trotting mom. Little Legend is a natural-born charmer, a constantly smiling 1-year-old who, yeah, Dearica halfway jokes, “is gonna be a problem.”

Like her mom did, Dearica is pouring herself into these little people, doing everything in her power to set them up for success.

Dearica, see, comes from a line of hard-working working moms who, in their own challenging situations, did the best they could by their children.

Carla told me this past week how hard her mom, Rose Hamby, worked to support her and her brothers while they were growing up poor in the Atlanta projects. Carla remembers how little they’d see of their mom sometimes, she was working so many hours trying to make end’s meet. How they learned to contribute as little kids, coming along to sell programs at Georgia Tech football games.

And then, after she got pregnant with Dearica at 17, how committed Carla was to graduating and finding a good job, to creating a positive pathway for her young daughter, keeping her in the same good school even as they bounced between residences: “Just trying to push and provide better from what I had growing up, a better education, a better life.”

And my kids… thank you to my kidssssssss pic.twitter.com/COaMVDJTQy

— Dearica Marie Hamby (@dearicamarie) September 11, 2023

The hard-won result: Her eldest became the first member of her family to attend and graduate from college, Carla said. Dearica played basketball at Wake Forest and went sixth overall in the 2015 WNBA Draft. And now Carla’s grandkids are growing up seeing their mom on stage – in gyms and arenas around the world, on TV or in person – knowing she’s among the best in the world at her job.

Carla was good at hers too, working for 25 years at Premium Distributors, learning all the ins and outs of the ice cream distribution company owned by the Bloomer family, who she said always treated her like family.

“I used to take the kids to work, and if the kids were sick, I didn’t have to worry about not having a job, that was a big blessing,” said Carla, who remembers being so worn out from work when her kids were young that she’d often fall asleep before them.

Dearica would understand. Last year, after being traded, welcoming her baby boy, learning a new WNBA team, a Jordan Brand athlete partnering with Willow breast pumps, she played that full, 40-game season and then played more in Turkey (kids in tow). She hit a buzzer-beater at the actual buzzer to lead the United States to a gold medal and claim MVP honors at the FIBA 3×3 AmeriCup in Puerto Rico. And then she spent the last three weeks of the year playing in China – without Amaya and Legend.

She’d talk to them every morning, she said, and then she’d hoop and eat and sleep. And sleep. And sleep.

“I didn’t realize how exhausted I was,” she said. “I was sleeping like 15 hours a night … I just recharged, it was like a mental reset. And I came back home and I felt just refreshed, mentally a different person, locked in.

“And I started talking to (Sparks general manager) Raegan Pebley and all of them, and I told them, ‘The person they saw at camp this year wasn’t gonna be the person that anybody saw last year.’”

No ma’am. In Friday’s exhibition victory, Hamby notched 21 points and seven rebounds in 23 minutes, the Sparks outscoring the Phoenix Mercury by 20 when she was on the floor. Before that, Carla and the kids were among the crowd of 16,655 at Rogers Place in Edmonton to see the Sparks beat the Seattle Storm and Mama put up 17 points in 16 minutes on 7-for-9 shooting, a team-high along with her nine rebounds and five assists – after which, there’d been a tearful goodbye. Hands down the hardest part, Dearica said, is anytime she and her children are apart, including this Mother’s Day for the first time.

Carla took the kids back to Las Vegas for a couple of weeks so Amaya can finish her school year before they reunite again soon after the regular season starts Wednesday, Dearica determined to put a Sparks team that has missed the playoffs for an unprecedented three straight seasons on a better path: “We’re not going to be a lottery team again.”

Now imagine your mom saying it. Knowing she isn’t going to say it twice, and also that she’s going to be there to pick you up all along the way.

Dearica has developed a way of leading that’s not unlike what her kids experience at home, she thinks.

“I would just say the love that I have, you know?” she said, when I asked her how motherhood has affected her work. “I pour into my teammates, I’m super positive, I’m always touching, I’m always reassuring.

“I’m trying to just be an extension of why my kids love me to my teammates.”

And, child, that’s a superpower I wouldn’t trade for anything in the world.

The woman of the hour @dearicamarie hits the gold winner in her first-ever 3×3 competition!

#3x3AmeriCup pic.twitter.com/iRf6LYWxJH

— USA Basketball 3×3 (@usab3x3) December 4, 2023

Not Amaya airing @dearicamarie out about her room

For Mother’s Day we wanted to see how well Amaya knows her mommy, we’d say she got a perfect score pic.twitter.com/2AHBGPLxSW

— WNBA (@WNBA) May 14, 2023

Mamas doin’ it all! #3x3AmeriCup x @usab3x3 pic.twitter.com/3pV9x3MGBh

— FIBA3x3 (@FIBA3x3) December 4, 2023