GLENVIEW, Ill. (CBS) — The Glenbrook South High School girls’ basketball team currently sits atop the standings in the Central Suburban Conference and are in the hunt for a conference title — thanks partly to a senior standout who played with some of the world’s best this past summer.
The team started out the school year with a challenge, having lost five starters.
“We just learned to play together really, really quickly,” said Glenbrook South junior guard Priya Nimmagadda. “It’s hard when you only have one returning starter and not a lot of chemistry together yet.”
But it certainly helped when the one starter returning was DePaul commit Gina Davorija, who has been starting since her freshman year.
“Gina’s always been a leader, all four years on varsity. She makes sure that everybody knows where they’re going,” said Glenbrook South senior forward Natalie Hudson. “She kind of puts the team before her, and I think we see it a lot in the games and a lot of practices.”
Head Coach Scott Nemecek said Davorija has a strong drive and work ethic.
“The thing about Gina, besides just high basketball IQ, excellent basketball skills, great athlete —she’s a tremendous worker. She’s relentless,” he said, “and when your best player works as hard or harder than everybody on the team, it’s a piece of cake for the coach.”
Davorija got a pretty amazing opportunity this past summer. She got to play for the Serbian national at the EURO 2024 U18 championships in Portugal.
“It was definitely a really cool experience. I was kind of starstruck. It came really fast — it was a really fast decision I had to make. But just seeing how excited my parents were, I kind of understood how big of a deal it was.”
Both of Davorija’s parents are Serbian, which is how she was able to play for their national team —and it wasn’t just they who helped Gina realize just how big a deal it is to play in the EURO 2024 tournament and represent an entire country.
“I kind of could tell after we got third place, I could see like videos of celebrations and stuff. It was huge, and all the girls were so excited about it,” she said. “Tons of family members watching, calling, like people I didn’t even know, I’ve never met, but they just said they’d been watching all the games.”
Davorija said her teammates there embraced her, even as the only American on the squad, partially because she could speak their language.
“Through my grandma at home — she definitely, she speaks to me in Serbian to me all the time. My parents, not as much anymore. When I was younger, they did,” Davorija said. “But I would say like semi-fluent — just the grammar that’s bad, but other than that I can understand everything, speak almost.”
She said she had to learn some new terms in Serbian playing in the EURO 2024 tournament.
“I guess it was just like names of plays, and like, ‘рогови (rogovi)’ is like something that I didn’t even know was ‘horns,'” she said. “I was just like, what is going on?’ But I figured it out.”
Back home, Davorija and her teammates are trying to figure out how to keep this season going as long as possible, with what they hope is a deep playoff run.
Davorija’s Serbian team did qualify for the 2026 world cup by finishing in the top five. She is not sure yet if she will be joining them again, but did say all her teammates were excited about the possibility of playing Team USA.
