Drake star’s choice is one for the books
Katie Dinnebier passes on a chance at a pro basketball career to continue her academic career
Katie Dinnebier could have had any number of reasons for not pursuing a pro basketball career.
The WNBA is a tough league to make, with few roster spots available each season. Going abroad presents myriad challenges and life upheaval. Then there’s wear and tear on the body and demands upon your time.
But really, for the Drake player who has starred as much in the classroom as she did on the basketball court, the answer was really quite simple.
“I’m a nerd,” Dinnebier said.
Dinnebier has been among the nation’s top mid-major players the past two seasons and last week was named a first-team academic all-American.
With that success, agents and WNBA teams had reached out to her, but Dinnebier went another direction. Instead of pursuing a pro career, she opted to stay in school to continue her pharmacy studies at Drake. She is finishing the fourth year of her six-year Doctor of Pharmacy program at Drake.
Basketball might have its Dr. J, but in two years the pharmacy world will have its Dr. Dinnebier.
“It was a really hard decision because I do love basketball,” she said. “It would have been really cool to hear my name on draft day or to get an invite to training camp. That's something that a lot of people don't get to say they did.”
That was the thing most people told her. Katie, just do it. Katie, just give it a try. Katie, you can say you did it. Katie, at least go to training camp.
As the deadline loomed to declare for the WNBA draft held last Monday, Dinnebier searched her nerdy soul and made official what she sensed all along: She was staying put.
“Deep down, I knew I didn't want to go,” she said. “Ultimately, I love school.”
At this time of the year, sports news is full of stories about the transfer portal: who is leaving, who is landing where and who is deciding to go pro. That’s why Dinnebier’s decision is so noteworthy and offers some fans a sliver of hope that the concept of student-athlete still exists.
Because they do exist. With a 3.74 GPA, Dinnebier was a first-team all-Missouri Valley Conference scholar-athlete. She was the only one on the first team who didn’t have a perfect 4.0. That includes teammate Anna Miller, who plans to go to medical school. Teammate Courtney Becker, a pharmacy major with a 3.87 GPA was on the second team.
On the basketball side alone, Dinnebier was the conference’s player of the year. If anyone else had gotten that award, it would have been Katelyn Young of Murray State. She was also on the MVC scholar-athlete first team with a 4.0 GPA.
Sports fans are familiar with the commercial that gets shown frequently during March Madness, the one in which the NCAA touts that most of its athletes are going pro in something other than sports. For a lot of the things the NCAA has screwed up in the past decade (or more), that is the truth. The question for the athletes is if that fact is a blessing or a cold slap of reality.
Journalist Melissa Jacobs has an excellent Substack called Good Game, in which she writes about youth sports. In a recent post, she offered details of a parent survey that said 22.2% of parents believed their child could play top-level college sports and 22.7% believed their child could play lower-level college sports. In addition, 11.4% believe their child can have a professional sports career.
The reality, Jacob says, is that 1% to 4% of youth athletes make it to college sports, depending on the sport. And a shot at the pros is but a fraction of that.
So while the college scholarship student-athletes get can pale in value to the money a school can cash in because of these players (which is why the Name, Image and Likeness deals came along), it’s still an opportunity. And it’s an opportunity – and a challenge – sports fans can forget is still there for players on their favorite teams because the big NIL bucks aren’t for everyone.
“Those rigors are real,” Drake Coach Allison Pohlman said. “We talk a lot about how glamorous it is that our team has a very high GPA, and they do really, really well. Well, they also work at it. They’re putting in the hours.”
Dinnebier, already no slouch at the school thing, got a wake-up call in her first class of the current semester. She had already been told that this was the hardest semester of her program, but was a little shocked to hear the professor tell students they should set aside 55 hours a week for pharmacy school this spring.
“I kind of looked at the guy and thought, ‘Fifty-five hours a week? I wouldn't have enough time if I was a normal student, let alone on top of a basketball schedule. Are you nuts?’
“But I think that's where we are blessed as athletes, because we do learn to time-manage at a very young age. You kind of get used to blocking off time to study.”
She figured it out, juggling those requirements while averaging 23.4 points a game for the Bulldogs and finishing second in the nation in assists with 7.2 per game.
Fifty-five hours of studying and Division I basketball? No biggie, as it turns out.
“I love to study. My de-stresser is studying,” she said. “My coaches, my teammates, will all make fun of me because I am the biggest nerd.”
Pohlman saw the nerd in action more than a few times, and not on the basketball court.
“There would be a lot of times when I'd be the first one typically to the gym, but Katie would be there in our locker room in front of the whiteboard, and there's just hundreds of, whether it's vocabulary terms or equations, things that she has written up that she's sitting there studying.”
Pohlman said teammate Becker, also a pharmacy major, took a whiteboard with her on road trips to do the same thing while Miller often would be the first one up in the morning on road trips, sitting in the hotel lobby studying.
The pharmacy program has been home to a few successful Drake players. Tricia Wakely, the MVC player of the year in 1996, and Kiersten Miller, the MVC player of the year in 1998, were both pharmacy majors, as was Laura Leonard, who calls Drake and MVC games on ESPN+.
Leaning into a school’s academic specialties is part of recruiting, and it helps when a school has a niche program that can help winnow the field. (I once asked former Michigan State Coach Karen Langeland if it was her coaching style that explained why so many of her former players were police officers; she laughed and said no, it was the draw of the school’s criminal justice program.)
“Those are the fun ones,” Pohlman said. “Knowing what it is that they're looking for and what their overall goals are and then being able to puzzle it all together and match it up. That stuff is fun.”
Making that match is something even powerhouse programs have to do sometimes. When South Carolina Coach Dawn Staley recruited Joyce Edwards, the homegrown superstar wasn’t that interested in playing for the three-time national champions. The school didn’t have an environmental engineering major and that’s what the player who had a 5.0 GPA in high school wanted.
So Staley spent time with the university’s academic program leaders to understand how Edwards could, through the school’s honors program, create her own major to pursue a degree in environmental engineering. Edwards then accepted South Carolina’s scholarship offer and was one of the nation’s top freshman players this season, when the Gamecocks were the national runner-up.
Academics were always part of Dinnebier’s plan. Though she was Miss Iowa Basketball in high school and led Waukee to the 2021 state championship, a pro career was never on her mind. But a strong senior season that capped four impressive years at Drake got the attention of agents and WNBA team reps, and suddenly there was an option Dinnebier had never considered.
That made watching the WNBA Draft last week a little surreal. She knew for sure her name would never be called because she had, essentially, told the league – and basketball – “Nah, I’m good.”
“It would have been nice to see my name up there,” she said. “But it was also such a relief. Like, ‘Oh I don't have to stress about this.’”
Instead, she’ll enjoy Drake Relays week, not worry about spring practice and focus on an internship at Wellmark this summer. She’s uncertain just which direction her pharmacy career will take; rotations later in the program will help her decide.
Since Dinnebier will still be on campus, she might be a practice player for the Bulldogs and continue to work at summer basketball camps.
“I'll be around. I'll be at games. I'm excited to be their biggest cheerleader in the stands,” she said. “It's definitely going to be a different perspective. But yeah, I'm excited. I love this place.”
Jane Burns is a former sports and features writer for the Des Moines Register, as well as other publications and websites. She’s a past winner of the Women’s Basketball Coaches Association’s Mel Greenberg Award for her coverage of women’s basketball. Over the course of her career she’s covered pretty much everything, which is why her as-yet-to-be-written memoir will be called “Cheese and Basketball: Stories From a Reporter Who Has Covered Everything.”
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Great story about a real college star, I mean, a student who stars in all that college offers. We need more such “nerds.”
Thank you for celebrating student athletes, Jane. Drake does this so well. Katie, Anna, and Courtney are Courtney are a continuation of this tradition. We are very proud of every single one of our athletes and our coaches who make studying a priority.