LOS ANGELES — Four years ago, an astronomy class nearly ended McKenzie Forbes’ career.
Back then, in what should’ve been her sophomore year of college, she was floating, frozen in time, as she watched basketball pass her by. She was in the transfer portal after leaving Cal, fading from the Sacramento Bee’s Player of the Decade to a ghost with no home, fighting against all odds to get into Harvard because her brother Mason was there.
That year, grinding out units in community college, she needed to fill a science elective. She didn’t want to take biochemistry. Obviously. She settled on astronomy. She figured it was related to astrology. It’s probably super easy, she thought.
Instead, she found herself scribbling out complex equations, trying to determine exact points in the sky the sun rose thousands of years ago while staying up until the sun rose. She was back living at home in Folsom, loneliness her best friend, her sheer will bending to the thought that this might not even be worth it.
“This class,” she remembered thinking, “is going to be the death of me.”
Four years later, the Harvard graduate stood at the center of a storm in Vegas, red-and-gold confetti streaming from the rafters as the trumpets of USC’s fight song reverberated through a vortex. Coach Lindsay Gottlieb wrapped an arm around her neck, the two sharing a hug after Forbes’ 26-point performance to lead USC over Stanford, rightly named the Pac-12 Tournament MVP.
In the midst of jubilation, Forbes found her father Sterling.
“I finally won something!” she told him, in glee.
For the years to come, whatever heights the team reaches, the story of this USC women’s basketball program will be impossible to tell without telling Forbes’ story, too. She helped breathe life back into the Galen Center, a truly unique path through college basketball leading to a confidence that Los Angeles fans fell in love with. Freshman JuJu Watkins was their draw, but Forbes so often their conduit, audacious pull-up 3-pointers lighting up crowds and swinging the momentum of nearly every late-season USC win on a run to the Elite Eight.
On that March day in Vegas, Watkins came over and pounded Forbes on the chest, right over the heart that had pounded for this.
“You earned this!” Watkins told her, as Forbes’ face collapsed in a mess of breathless tears.
“It was like, a lot of pent-up anxiety that I had from all the times I’ve failed,” Forbes reflected in USC’s locker room in Portland last weekend.
“I finally got over the hump.”
‘A scary thing’
Standing at a podium at midcourt of the Galen Center in February, Gottlieb choked up when she begin to speak on Forbes at USC’s senior day, the former Cal coach recounting the time she left the program for a job with the Cleveland Cavaliers.
“Part of me going and doing a really scary thing for me, was that someday, someone like Kenzie and all other young women would feel slightly more empowered to do their scary thing. And maybe one day, someone like Kenzie, could be in a head-coaching job as a female, to be a head coach in the NBA or to a GM in the NBA,” Gottlieb announced to raucous cheers.
“Well, sooner than later, she did her scary thing,” Gottlieb continued, as Forbes bowed her head with emotion, “which was leaving Cal – which was also leaving home for her – and going to Harvard.”
The tears flow easy between the two. When Gottlieb called Forbes that summer in 2019, delivering the news she took the Cavaliers job, they both started crying, Forbes remembered. She was a blue-chip recruit who’d committed to Gottlieb out of Folsom, an instant contributor as a shooter off the bench at Cal; the coach’s departure completely transformed things.
Damn, Forbes thought then, basketball can just kinda blow up in front of your face.
She entered the portal and took visits to Duke and Gonzaga, among other programs. It didn’t feel quite right. Forbes’ mind was broader, veering away from basketball, rattled. She simply wanted happiness, security and a good degree. And she thought of her brother Mason, who was happily hooping at Harvard.
When she reached out to coaches there, she was told the transfer deadline had passed, and she’d have to wait until the next semester’s window. And she’d have to go to community college to get an associate’s degree. And she’d have to finish that associate’s degree in one year instead of two. And she’d have to get straight A’s, because she once got a C in high school, and this was Harvard.
“My parents wanted me to just – they were like, ‘Go to Duke!’” Forbes recounted, laughing.
Her parents knew that wasn’t going to sway her, of course. When Forbes was little, she played tackle football in an all-boys league for four years, the starting quarterback of the Mighty Mites. There were a lot of pissed-off fathers, dad Sterling Forbes remembered, that there was a girl running the offense. She didn’t care.
“I’m so stubborn, honestly,” Forbes smiled, sitting in front of her locker years later. “I was just like, ‘I’ma (expletive) get in there. No one can make me go back on this decision.’”
No holding back
By all reported data, Harvard accepts less than 1% of transfer students.
The women’s program has such a miniscule history of taking transfers that back home, in Sacramento, longtime trainers would question why Forbes was so hell-bent on Harvard. What are you doing? You’re a hooper.
But she was in too deep. This wasn’t about proving others wrong – it was about proving herself right. When she’d catch up with old friends, she’d tell them she’d be playing at Harvard the next semester.
She hadn’t even been accepted yet.
As late nights studying the stars added up, though, Forbes watched as her friends’ college careers advance without her, feeling completely alone. In December of that gap year, she broke down, typing out emails to coaches at a couple less-touted programs to see if she could simply get in for the second semester.
You have no backup plan, she told herself. What are you thinking?
She scrapped those emails, because stubbornness won out. That May, an email popped into her inbox at 8 a.m. one day: a financial-aid offer from Harvard. Forbes was confused. Why’d I get this? I haven’t gotten in yet. She furiously scavenged through her messages, only to find a message from Harvard a day earlier.
She’d been accepted. She completely missed it.
She ran downstairs screaming, waking up her entire house.
It wasn’t that easy, of course, because nothing ever has been. When Forbes finally arrived on campus, Harvard’s season was shut down amid the COVID-19 pandemic, wiping out another year of organized hoops.
In the two years that followed, though, she grew from an out-of-shape near-retiree to an all-around force, averaging 14 points a game in two years at Harvard. Her competitiveness, Harvard coach Carrie Moore said, drove the Crimson every day for two years before her transfer to USC.
And as a Trojan, she played like she had nothing to lose, because she’d already seen everything one could see in college basketball.
“I’ve been waiting my whole life, but honestly my whole college career to make a deep run in March Madness, because I always felt like I was – I always felt like I deserved to be on that stage, and showcase my game, and that I was good enough for it,” Forbes said last Sunday. “And so, I think, just to have that opportunity, that’s why you see me, like – I just don’t like to hold back any emotion.”
‘Absolutely fearless’
An hour after USC’s win over Baylor in the Sweet 16, Watkins stood by her locker in Portland’s Moda Center, her ears perking up at the beginning of a question about Forbes.
It feels like every time you guys need a bucket —
“She’s there,” Watkins interjected, smiling, finishing the statement herself.
And Forbes did it in style, across a run dancing through the Pac-12 Tournament and deep into March. Her jumper was a backbreaker, motoring down the floor for off-the-bounce 3-pointers in transition that had an incredibly high bucket-followed-by-timeout ratio. She relished those looks – “I really do think that’s my highest-percentage three-point shot,” she murmured Sunday – and she let crowds know it, through a parade in March.
Fourth quarter, in that Sweet 16 win over Baylor: a pull-up three to give USC a 59-57 lead, screaming Let’s go! at the crowd in Portland.
Fourth quarter, in the Elite Eight loss to UConn, the final game of her collegiate career: a three to tie it 59-59, grinning and walking slowly back to her bench like the Terminator.
“She’s like a breath of fresh air,” Watkins said. “When you’re a hooper, you know – Kenzie’s just a dog, and I love that about her. When you need a bucket, she’s going to be the one to get it.”
These shots were the product of constant repetition, of daily morning shooting drills. They were the product, too, of pure self-belief, of having no shame in taking a risk and missing and coming back down to launch another one.
“She is absolutely fearless,” Moore said of Forbes, a Crimson team captain in her second season. “She doesn’t think about, like, you know, tie game, need a big bucket – what’s the downfall of taking this shot? She just thinks about the positive, and that says a lot about her and how she operates.”
“Like, she doesn’t think about not getting into Harvard,” Moore continued. “All she thinks about is getting in, and what that journey looks like on the other side.”
Her journey on the court is over, as Forbes confirmed simply after the UConn loss, when asked if she’d petition for another year of eligibility: “I’m done.”
Her future is just beginning. Gottlieb has stated multiple times she believes Forbes is a WNBA-caliber player, but also has complete faith Forbes – again, an analytics junkie – will be in a basketball team’s front office someday. Maybe that starts now. Maybe later.
But whatever she wants, she’ll chase, because she’s done it before.
“She speaks things into existence,” Moore said. “She sees things before they even happen.”
Glowing bright
The nights are dark in Folsom, dark enough that the stars glow bright, in all their complex formations.
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During that year at home, when Harvard and USC and the life that lay before her was nothing but a dream, Forbes went out on her family’s backyard porch one evening with her father. They sat, at peace for a moment, staring at the pinpricks in the sky.
“Oh, that looks like – what is that?” Sterling asked, pointing at one constellation.
Forbes pulled out an app on her phone, aiming it up at the stars. She begun to rattle off planets, off constellations, a woman who’d earned every bit of an A in that astronomy class. That’s the Milky Way. That’s Venus. That’s Sagittarius.
Her father listened. Amazed, still, all these years later.
“She’s seen it all,” Sterling said, pride echoing in his voice. “She’s seen it all.”