Around the world and back again; Elsa Lemmilä’s journey back to Columbus
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Ohio State University Athletic Department
The Buckeye who turned down Stanford and UConn for Scarlet and Gray.
On Dec. 31, 2018,
Ohio State women’s basketball faced the
Nebraska Cornhuskers. After a back-and-forth three quarters, the Cornhuskers ran away in the fourth, outscoring the Buckeyes 27-16 on the way to a 78-69 loss. A forgetful night in a season of forgetful nights than resulted in the Scarlet and Gray missing the NCAA Tournament and ending with a sub-.500 record.
In the loss, freshman forward Dorka Juhász scored 14 points and added seven rebounds. The Hungarian was a bright spot that year, averaging nearly a double-double with 11.7 points and nine rebounds.
Photo by Jason Mowry/Icon Sportswire via Getty Images
Sitting in the crowd was an Ohio State alum who brought her family to the game, one of many Buckeyes doing the same that New Year’s Eve. The key difference is most fans don’t travel 4,400 miles to get there.
“We actually ended up sitting, I don’t know how, because we didn’t know where to buy tickets, but we ended up with a bunch of the Nebraska parents, which was a bit strange. So we were kind of like, wait, cheering. And they were cheering something else.”
That’s Jocelyn Striker-Lemmilä, who sat alongside 13-year-old Elsa Lemmilä, taking in her first American sports event.
From Bucyrus to Zurich
After college, Striker-Lemmilä took a different route than most people from Bucyrus, Ohio. It began with a stint in Columbus and Cleveland, working for an international tech company, where she met native Finn Jari Lemmilä. The two married and while living in Switzerland, the Lemmilä family grew by two with the births of Stella and Elsa.
From there, frequent flyer miles kept adding up. the Lemmilä’s moved to China for four years and back to Columbus for a year before returning to Switzerland. That’s when Elsa started playing basketball.
This isn’t the part of the story where Lemmilä picked up a basketball and the rest is history. Real life isn’t always that clean and tidy. Enrolled at an international school in Zurich, 12-year-old Elsa had an American sports experience. That means playing multiple sports like volleyball, track and basketball.
When it came to basketball, it didn’t take over Lemmilä’s life. There was one hour of practice a week, some games, and after two months the season was over and Lemmilä was on to the next activity. For her that means picking up a book and spending time with her family.
Following 12 years of globe hopping, the Lemmilä family settled down and moved home to Jari’s native Finland. With the move, athletic focus shifted. In the Nordic nation, kids typically choose one sport and stick with it. For Lemmilä, it was basketball, but adjusting to playing a new sport in Finland wasn’t easy.
Within the walls of the Lemmilä household, English is the primary language. Lemmilä knew it fluently, along with some German and French, but playing club sports in Finland took her away from her Americanized international school teammates. The language barrier was an issue right away.
A Perfectionist
Tapiolan Honka club became Lemmilä’s team. Structured more like youth soccer with teams comprised of kids within certain age groups, sometimes playing well enough to move up against older opponents, Lemmilä joined a team where she couldn’t verbally communicate with her peers.
“These girls were only 12, so they did learn English in school but they were too shy to speak English with her and she couldn’t speak Finnish to them,” said Striker-Lemmilä. “For the first year, she didn’t want to go to practice half the time because she was so uncomfortable with the language.”
While playing basketball is a language of its own, spoken by millions who play across the world, the 12-year-old had two things she had to fight through to get over that discomfort leading her to potentially step away from the sport for good. Being shy was one hurdle. After all, being a kid already comes with enough challenges, then add not knowing what those around you are saying to the list.
“One thing I forgot to say is she’s also a perfectionist,” said Striker-Lemmilä.
Helping Lemmilä was Anja Suomalainen (Bordt). A former Saint Mary’s women’s basketball guard, inducted into the school’s Hall of Fame in 1997. Suomalainen became a translator for Lemmilä and became the first coach in the center’s development towards Lemmilä’s own collegiate career.
As comfort grew, the basketball ability shined through those early language-induced cracks. The perfectionist filled those cracks too, learning fluent Finnish.
“She’s dedicated to everything she does, school, sports,” said Striker-Lemmilä. “When she starts to love a topic, she dives into it.”
That topic was basketball. Within a year of moving to Finland, Lemmilä joined camps, had a growth spurt, and viewed as a potential high performer in Finland youth basketball. By the time the Lemmilä family came to visit family in Ohio in 2018, Elsa was 6-foot-2 at 13-years-old.
Jocelyn Lemmilä
Elsa Lemmilä visiting Columbus in 2018
While sitting in the Schottenstein Center that night, looks came the family’s way. Likely wondering if Lemmilä was there as a recruit instead of the true story of a young basketball-obsessed player taking in her first basketball experience on the largest stage in her life to date.
Back in Finland, the Lemmilä family went to Honka games for their top level women’s side, but it wasn’t the same. There wasn’t an arena that can hold nearly 20,000 people and the lights and sounds that come along with it.
Even then, as the sport took over her life, Lemmilä didn’t see playing at Ohio State as a goal.
“I didn’t really know it was a possibility,” said Lemmilä. “I didn’t really think about it at all.”
However, after watching her first college game, Lemmilä immersed herself even more into the game. That included reading a book about Breanna Stewart, a
WNBA Champion at the time, and someone Lemmilä would meet eight months later during a trip to Orlando, Florida.
That’s when Lemmilä took part in the 2019 jrNBA Global Championship. Playing in the same tournament as Jaloni Cambridge and JuJu Watkins and, although never playing against either of them, it gave Lemmilä the chance to test her skills against some of the best teenagers in the world.
Photo by Tony Firriolo/NBAE via Getty Images
Elsa Lemmilä competing in the 2019 jrNBA Global Championship
At one of the player events at the tournament, Lemmilä met Stewart, coming in off a WNBA title the year before, and there was no looking back.
European Recruiting
Lemmilä’s journey continued. The center represented her country on the youth and senior national team levels, and from that came recruiting attention.
European recruiting is different from the United States where players excel in their school or club system to make it into AAU basketball. In Europe, independent scouts identify talent and get that information back to universities. If they’re interested, they reach out. If they aren’t, there’s still an abundance of players both stateside and abroad.
At this point, Lemmilä excelled with Honka but also played at both the Finnish youth and senior national team levels.
Tapiolan Honka
Elsa Lemmilä playing for Tapiolan Honka
Yohanna Araya, now Yohanna Araya-Brooks, was one of those recruiters. As a former coach in Europe, Araya knew Finland National Team head coach Pekka Salminen, who spoke highly of Lemmilä. Araya told then Ohio State women’s basketball assistant coach Wesley Brooks about the center. Then a friend of Brooks also reached out to tell him about Lemmilä.
“We connected Pekka with Kevin [McGuff], and Kevin went to Finland a couple times and met with Pekka and got to see Elsa,” said now Utah State head coach Wes Brooks. “And he’s like ‘Wes, this kid’s really good. She’s really, really good.’”
In the summer of 2022, Brooks called the Lemmilä family to gauge interest.
“He had happened to contact me because he couldn’t talk to her yet and said ‘hey, we saw her play and we would be interested to talk to her, what do you think?’’ said Striker-Lemmilä. “And I said, well, ironically, we’re in Columbus, Ohio right now and we could do an unofficial visit.”
The next day, the Lemmilä’s sat in a golf cart that trekked through the Schottenstein Center on a quiet summer day on Ohio State’s campus, three years after they sat in the crowd watching the Buckeyes play for the first time.
Even with the alumni connection with Lemmilä’s mom and the Buckeyes asking about the center earlier in the recruiting process than others, the family kept their options open. Some big names came calling.
Stanford,
UConn, UCLA, Louisville and more. When Lemmilä was old enough, her and her mom had phone calls with legendary coaches like Geno Auriemma and Tara VanDerveer, all hoping to add Lemmilä to their prestigious programs.
Through the process, it was never the Lemmilä family’s intention to push their youngest daughter towards Ohio State, even if the positives added up.
“We tried to be completely neutral and really didn’t wanna say anything,” said Lemmilä’s mom. “I didn’t wanna steer her any way. For example, when we got to talk to Geno Auriemma and Tara VanDerveer, I mean, I was just like oh my gosh, I was taking pictures on the side.”
Despite the stiff competition of a pair of NCAA coaches with 14 combined National Championships, Ohio State was persistent.
Brooks carved out time with Lemmilä every week, even if it was only checking in for a few minutes. It made a lasting impact as other schools didn’t put as much time or attention into their recruitment of Lemmilä.
Ohio State was one of many interested schools, eventually offering Lemmilä a scholarship. Then came an injury.
The day before leaving for the United States, a trip that included stops at Stanford, Ohio State and a potential pitstop at UCLA, Lemmilä practiced like usual. At the end of practice, in a lighter than normal session, Elsa tore her ACL.
“She was really at this like peak and that happened,” said Striker-Lemmilä. “It was just devastating.”
Choosing Ohio State
At this point, it makes sense that schools would move in other directions. The focus around Lemmilä didn’t leave and McGuff was one of the first people to reach out to the family after learning about the injury.
“He immediately said, we’re thinking about Elsa and our offer still stands.”
In the year off ACL tears need to recover, Lemmilä completed an intensive educational program where the injury gave her the time to complete it without basketball interfering, a minor silver lining on an otherwise difficult time of life.
While hurt, Lemmilä made the decision to wear Scarlet and Gray. Lemmilä’s mom texted the Buckeye coaches asking if they could talk when she broke the news.
“She didn’t ever, ever think that I would go to Ohio State, that either of her children would ever end up back in Ohio,” said Lemmilä about her mom. “She never, ever would have thought of that. So it was kind of shocking for her.”
Look past the family and the attentiveness and care of the coaching staff and Lemmilä also picked Ohio State for the sport of basketball.
Lemmilä joins a trend of McGuff bringing in European bigs. It was Juhász first, five years of Rebeka Mikulášiková and now the Swiss-born, Finland-raised, Lemmilä.
“I know it’s kind of the style of play that he chooses, you know, finding European bigs,” said Lemmilä. “It has a lot to do with playing five out and playing really fast with your bigs as well. So I really like that style of play.”
Acclimating Well
In a 64-point win over the Ohio Bobcats in Lemmilä’s fourth college game, her teammates on the bench loudly encouraging Lemmilä to take another shot. Make them and she’d become the leading scorer in the runaway Ohio State win.
Lemmilä hit the shot, scoring an early career high 21 points, with 14 rebounds and five blocks on a night where Lemmilä showed better patience under the rim, taking better shots and not rushing opportunities to score.
The improvement in two weeks of real games came from coaching advice that Lemmilä took and applied in-game. Following the win, McGuff gave the freshman the dub crown, the next iteration in the famous dub chain given to a player after each win over the past two seasons.
After the 6-foot-6 center bent down to allow McGuff to reach to the top of her head, Lemmilä’s teammates serenaded her with a version of “Let It Go” from the Disney classic Frozen, sung by arguably the most famous Elsa in pop culture today.
It was a moment almost two years in the making, shared with her new family.
“I acclimated a lot better than I thought I was going to, especially coming off not playing for a year and a half,” said Lemmilä. “It’s been a lot of fun. I really liked it here and a lot of that is also due to the players.”
Lemmilä didn’t initially make the connection between Juhász playing at Ohio State and eventually for UConn, both schools who pursued the center’s abilities on the court. The center from Finland has the chance to be the first Buckeye to average double digit rebounds per game since Juhász.
If the perfectionist has her way, Lemmilä could do that and more.
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