More confident King helps Southeast Missouri State women's basketball team reach conference tournament

A small chuckle escapes from her mouth as Olivia Hackmann describes teammate Connor King as a "smarty pants."

It's meant in the most endearing way and sums up the Southeast Missouri State women's basketball player and biology major quite well.

Talk with King, a senior and Jackson native, for a few minutes and it's clear that the young woman who wants to attend medical school is intelligent. Hackmann also described her as a bookworm and a hard worker.

Those seem like words intended to reveal who King is in the classroom, but it's not limited to that. While she undoubtedly spends time studying for school, she's also been a student on the court and learned immeasurable things about herself over the past year.

The hard work that has helped defined King as a person has been a part of every phase of her life.

"I'm a total Type-A perfectionist like to the point where I retake classes because I got a B, so, like, for me understanding that [first-year coach Rekha Patterson] didn't want perfection but instead she wanted me to do my best -- whether that was as good as somebody else's best or not, but it was my best and it was OK -- was a big thing that I had to come to terms with, understand and then be OK with," King said. "I think I'm getting there."

Southeast Missouri State's Connor KingFred Lynch

Part of King's "best" is the perspective she's gained from her freshman, sophomore and junior seasons at Southeast. She and Hackmann are the only current players who were a part of the program the past three years, during which the Redhawks went 31-56 overall and 14-34 in the Ohio Valley Conference, failing to ever make the conference tournament.

This season, which King described as "a fun, exciting, tough, hard roller coaster," Southeast managed its first above-.500 regular-season record -- at 15-14 -- since 2008-09. Its 8-8 conference record secured the program's first conference tournament berth since 2009 as well.

The roller coaster of the previous three years featured many more lows than highs; this season has been all over the place, though with far more reasons to cheer.

After two lopsided exhibition wins to open the Patterson era, King couldn't help but feel excited. Then the realness of a new coach and her final season set in when the Redhawks lost their season opener to Saint Louis, who went on to win a share of the Atlantic 10 regular-season title.

Hackmann, who led the team in scoring at 16.4 points per game, suffered a Jones fracture in her foot nine games into the season and less than a month before conference action began.

The Redhawks began their OVC slate, "on, like, the highest high I've ever been," King said, as they jumped out to a 6-1 record.

Southeast Missouri State's Connor King cheers on her team during a game against Tennessee Tech last season at the Show Me Center.Southeast Missourian file

Southeast dropped seven of their final 10 games, but for King the feeling of a continued slide to the bottom of the OVC standings didn't arrive. She took what she'd learned in past seasons and led the team like only she could.

"I think that when Olivia went down we kind of lost a lot of experience, and obviously our leading scorer, a lot of offensive firepower. But we also lost all that Olivia and I had been through," King said. "And so then I kind of felt like it was my job when things were bad to be like, 'OK, we've been in worse and this is how we get out of it,' or when things are good, 'OK this is what we have to do to continue this.' I just really try to focus on coming in every day with a good attitude and kind of laying the foundation of what I hope and I know Coach P will take this program to be in the future."

King's been a steady presence for the Redhawks throughout her career, and this year was no different. She played in all 29 games as a sophomore and junior, starting 25 and 28, respectively.

Southeast Missouri State's Connor King goes up for a shot during a game last season at the Show Me Center.

She's played in 28 games so far this season and started 26 of them. She missed a game in early December with a concussion and then didn't start the next two.

"You know kind of what you're going to get with Connor whenever she goes in," Hackmann said. "She's going to rebound hard. Once she gets a rebound she's going to secure it, she's going to push it up the floor. She's fun to play with, she's good to play with, she does her work."

King's averaging 4.0 points and 5.3 rebounds this year, which are lower than her numbers a year ago. But her role as the team's leader, whether or not she's on the court, and her ability to rally her teammates has been critical to the team's success.

"Connor has been a leader in stuff you may not see in a stat sheet," Patterson said. "She has come to work every day with a great attitude and she has come to work every day with a positive mindset, considering the fact that she could have just hung it up this last year and said, 'Well, things didn't go the way I wanted them to my first three years, I've got a new coach, not really sure how it's going to be, I'm just going to focus on academics.'"

Patterson made an immediate impact on King.

She could tell from the moment the entire team sat down with the new coach for the first time after she was hired last April that this year would be different.

"It was something completely new and a completely blank slate," King said. "Then I think when you have a blank slate and you kind of get to start over you have to dream big and you have to realize that the potential for greatness is always there."

King remembered how nervous she was to meet Patterson and was concerned that the first impression of her, injured and in a walking boot, would not be a positive one. She wanted her new coach to see the "good that I thought I could do."

Now King thinks Patterson helped her realize that she can accomplish more than she ever thought. It all comes back to the team's mantra, "She believed she could, so she did."

King's come a long way in living by that, as has the entire team, but she's still got a ways to go when it comes to having confidence.

"I hate that I only have her for one year because there's a lot of times where she beats herself up and I want her to believe in herself so much more than what she does," Patterson said. "She can be really down on herself, but I've seen her sort of snap out of that. At the beginning of the year she talked about how sometimes it's still difficult for her to get out of a bad place mentally, and sometimes that happens when you lose a lot, but I've seen her get down and then say, 'You know what? No. My team needs me to be different, so let me be different.'"

Occasionally she needs a reminder to have faith in herself that she can get through something. As King prepared to take the MCAT, the Medical College Admission Test, for the second time, that reminder came in the form of a picture that included the phrase, "She believed she could, so she did," that Patterson sent her.

"I doubted myself that whole test and she just believed in me and she's believed in me since Day 1," King said. "She's like, 'With your passion for what you want to do and your abilities, there's nothing that you can't do.' She's kind of helped me realize that I don't even know what all I can accomplish if I just get myself out of my own way. Still learning [that]."

King, whose mom Sheila Beussink has been a nurse for as long as she can remember, decided she wanted to study medicine at 13 after reading a book about a woman who'd been on life support after a car accident and eventually came out of it. She understood it wasn't a realistic tale, but made her understand how powerful medicine can be.

Her passion was only cemented after a tragedy in the midst of her freshman season.

King's 10-year-old cousin Parker King died the day after Christmas in 2012 from injuries sustained in a utility vehicle accident. His physician at St. Louis Children's hospital left an impression on the young basketball player with aspirations to be a doctor.

"Yeah, he changed it for me," she said. "I kind of knew I wanted to pursue medicine after this book, but then like that guy -- I wrote in all my med school essays when he looked us in the eyes and he said, 'We did all we could,' I had no doubt. Like. I had no doubt that it was just Parker's time to go. I want to impact people the way he impacted our family."

King plans to study pediatric medicine and wants to be a neonatologist (handling complex and high-risk care for newboarns) or pediatric endocrinologist (dealing with hormone-related issues in children, including growth disorders, puberty and diabetes).

Patterson believes King's ambition translates on the court as well.

"I felt how bad she wants to have success -- in whatever area in her life. I know she wants to have success and she puts a lot of pressure on herself to succeed," Patterson said of her first impression of King. "But I saw a fighter, I saw someone who is really, really strong, and I saw someone who wanted to turn this thing around, who really wanted to get to Nashville."

King got the text message confirming that Southeast had reached its goal of making it to the postseason on Feb. 20, hours after a victory over Eastern Illinois.

She was babysitting her 1-year-old cousin and immediately turned to her and exclaimed, "We're going to Nashville." She got a smile in return and then excited texts from the rest of the team started pouring in.

King's not sure if it's really sunk in that the team accomplished the feat.

"Whenever I am in a huddle and we're talking about things here recently she has this look on her face like, 'Wow, this is really happening. Like, this is really happening. We did it," Patterson said.

The sixth-seeded Redhawks face No. 3 SIU Edwardsville at 2 p.m. today at Municipal Auditorium in Nashville.

Regardless of what happens in the tournament, King's impact on her teammates and coaches and her role in the program's turnaround has, she hopes, extended beyond points, rebounds and wins.

"I kind of hope I'm remembered as someone that came everyday and just worked hard and that kept the bigger picture at the forefront because sometimes I think you get lost in all the little things," King said. "I want to be remembered as someone who worked hard and was focused and was disciplined and determined and passionate and all those cliche things. But I also want to be someone that was a good teammate and you could talk to and that you could trust and that if you needed something or if something wasn't going your way or you were in a situation that maybe I had been through and you knew that Â… that you could come talk to me and I could help you out of it. Like, I want to be remembered as someone who helped build a family atmosphere."

So does she think she's done what she needed to leave that legacy?

"I hope I have," King said. "I think all you can do is do your best and if at the end of the day that's enough, then it's enough."