The highest-scoring duo in the Northwest Conference is just happy to be on a basketball court.
Pacific (Ore.) senior Camy Aguinaldo and junior Brilie Kovaloff are the top two scorers in the league, combining to average more than 36 points a game for the Boxers, who sit third in the NWC with a 6-2 record.
They’ve been together for three seasons, but a leg injury interrupted Kovaloff’s freshman year and last season was canceled due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
They’ve survived practicing outdoors in sweats during the winter to finally come together and turn Pacific into a contender in the conference.
“Honestly this has been probably one of the best years that I’ve actually been happy playing and I think a lot of it comes from that team atmosphere and having Bri there,” said Aguinaldo, a 2017 ‘Iolani graduate who leads the NWC in scoring at 19.4 per game.
The sentiment is mutual.
“I feel like it’s a lot more relief having Camy out on the floor with me,” said Kovaloff, a 2019 Mid-Pacific alumna who is averaging 16.9 points per game and leads the team with 41 3-pointers made. “She’s so fast out there and knows how to give people wide-open looks and get open people buckets. It’s nice to have a point guard like her alongside me to play.”
Although they are both from ILH high schools, they never played each other during the season.
Kovaloff helped guide the Owls to the Division II state championship in 2017, but by the time MPI moved up to Division I in her junior year, Aguinaldo was already at Whitworth (Wash.), where she earned the conference’s Freshman of the Year award.
After spending two seasons there, Aguinaldo followed her assistant coach, Alecia Parker, to Pacific, when Parker became the head coach.
During that summer, Aguinaldo came home and helped out coaching at Mid-Pacific, where she first began to get to know Kovaloff.
“The year before she transferred to Pacific, she helped out at the high school and helped out with practices, so I got to know her,” Kovaloff said.
They went through the pandemic together, including the entire 2020-21 season being canceled. The team got in a few games last spring, but they didn’t count toward a season.
For much of the pandemic, there was just a lot of practice time, but because of the COVID-19 protocols, those practices were outside, during the winter in Oregon.
“(The school) ordered an outdoor hoop for us. We were practicing on the tennis courts,” Kovaloff said. “The coaches were trying their best to make sure we could play as much ball as we could. We would walk to practice with our snow boots and then it’d be a covered outdoor tennis court and once we got there it was freezing, but we got what had to be done, done.”
Aguinaldo added: “No matter how much you ran, you couldn’t break a sweat.”
Although the team is still dealing with COVID-19 issues — four games have been postponed, including two scheduled for this weekend, at Pacific Lutheran on Friday and at home against George Fox on Saturday — a sense of normalcy has returned to their lives.
“I think in the beginning of the season, COVID wasn’t talked about much and so we kind of rallied together and said, ‘OK, let’s do this.’ ” Kovaloff said. “We kind of just go into every week preparing for our next opponents and keeping our fingers crossed we can play and keep our team in a little bubble. We’re doing the best we can.”
Aguinaldo, who is in her fifth season of college, received an extra year of eligibility and had a tough decision to make whether to return or continue on with her life.
She had already applied for physical therapy school and, mentally, was ready to move on.
“It was a constant battle of what am I going to do next year?’ ” Aguinaldo said. “‘Is this the right decision? Am I going to regret this? And I don’t regret (coming back) at all because this year is the best and I love every moment of it. I love my team and that has made it a lot easier.”
Pacific started out 5-0 in conference play before losing two of its last three games.
The Boxers split the season series with first-place Whitman (Wash.), handing the Blues their only conference loss.
Pacific is tied in the loss column for second place with Puget Sound, which beat the Boxers 78-66 on Friday.
The teams will play again in the final game of the regular season on Feb. 19.
“We had two pretty big games that we wanted to win, but we unfortunately didn’t. But it definitely showed us we can compete and what we need to work on,” Kovaloff said. “We have to have a quick mindset, I think, to learn from it, move on, and really anything can happen in the conference.”
The Boxers lead the conference with four players from Hawaii high schools. Junior Kaylee-Brooke Manuel (Kamehameha) has started four of 15 games and averages 4.2 points and 3.6 rebounds in 12.3 minutes. Sophomore Marissa Layosa, a Kauai alumna, has appeared in 13 games.
Name: Camy Aguinaldo
School: Pacific (Ore.)
Class: Senior
Height: 5 feet 3
Position: Guard
High school: ‘Iolani (2017)
Name: Brilie Kovaloff
School: Pacific (Ore.)
Class: Junior
Height: 5 feet 7
Position: Guard
High school: Mid-Pacific (2019)
