THE FRONT ROW WITH BRUCE BOURQUIN: Friday, December 4, 2015

Despite having a name that could bring to mind some people of a Disney princess or superhero, Stormee Van Belle knows how to get down and dirty, bringing a hard work ethic to the North Idaho College women’s basketball table.

After spending last season playing for Merrimack College in North Andover, Mass., an NCAA Division II program in the Northeast-10 Conference located 25 miles north of Boston, the 6-foot sophomore power forward decided to play a bit closer to home. Coeur d’Alene is roughly a three-hour drive northeast of Sunnyside, Wash., where Van Belle grew up.

“We have a 40-acre farm there,” Van Belle said of her parents’ multifaceted farm. “We have 28 acres of Concord grape roots, kind of like those in Welch’s grape juices. The main thing we do is haul cows to an auction, we have a 50-cattle herd, we have Angus beef cows. Spring and summer are busy. We do something we call suckering, where we’ll go through the whole field and cut sprouts. We have eight acres of corn that we feed to cows. There’s always something to do.”

Some parents ground their children. But this 19-year-old’s parents, Shawn and Paula, had something more creative in store for her brothers, Rylee, who’s 24 and a father of a 1-year-old, and Ryker, 22, who works on the farm, and her.

“If you got in trouble, you’d do extra rows (of grapes or corn),” Van Belle said.

SO WHAT does this all have to do with playing college basketball for the Cardinals, a stellar 5-1 so far this season? Well, Van Belle did pick up at least one thing that was enhanced during her time playing for Merrimack, where as a freshman she scored 4.5 points per game while averaging 16 minutes per game and starting four. She got a 3 1/2-year scholarship, meaning she had to pay her own way during her first semester and the rest would have been financially covered as a full scholarship.

So far at NIC, Van Belle has averaged a double-double, scoring 10 points and grabbing 10 rebounds per game.

“I was told I was going to be a workhorse,” Van Belle said. “I’d have to go after those 50-50 balls, rebounds, things like that. I apply a workhorse mentality to us (at NIC). Get every board, bring a hardworking ethic.”

Cardinals coach Chris Carlson is enjoying having Van Belle on the team, if only for one season.

“She wants to take full advantage of our last year in the SWAC and the potential to continue at the highest level possible,” Carlson said. “She has been a coach’s dream as far as being coachable and putting her best foot forward every day. She is blessed with inner strength and we are blessed to have her here at NIC.”

Van Belle lives in a places her teammates and her call ‘the basketball house’, where only players from the team live. Her roomates include Australian Grace Varcoe and Charity Marlatt of Cranbrook, British Columbia. She has yet to decide on a major, but is leaning toward biology or counseling.

“I enjoy it, I love the atmosphere,” Van Belle said of NIC. “I have dealt with a lot of different philosophies, how people say certain things. Here it’s pretty laid-back but there is not stuff going on that’s negative. It’s been really fun. I wish it was a four-year school.”

IN ORDER to bounce back near home to play at NIC, Van Belle liked Carlson’s coaching philosophies.

“I knew Chris was quite successful,” Van Belle said. “Merrimack’s coach (Monique LeBlanc) was in her fourth season and she was building a program. I was into structure, and they had structure every time down the court, where the coach would yell out something and we did it. It knew Chris would allow us more freedom on the court. Instead of running through the plays, you have to see basketball is more free, so you can play out of it.”

Van Belle has not received any athletic scholarship offers, but she has talked to teams in the Big Sky Conference, such as the University of Portland and Northern Arizona University, as well as Central Washington University, a Division II program located roughly 90 minutes away from Sunnyside.

Not that Merrimack, a private Catholic university that preaches Augustinian values, didn’t offer Van Belle quite a few things. It just wasn’t necessarily the right fit for this farmer’s daughter.

“The main thing was dealing with the distance and being away from my parents,” Van Belle said. “I liked the fact everything was on campus. Some colleges I visited had houses in the middle of campus, which was weird to me.”

Raised a Christian, Van Belle has stayed true to her religious roots.

“We have NIC FIT, which keeps our spirituality in shape,” Van Belle said. “It’s a youth group, with athletes on campus. A handful of us go to it.”

VAN BELLE was part of a graduating class of 27 at private school Sunnyside Christian, in a town of nearly 16,000. As a junior, in the Washington Interscholastic Activities Association state 1B girls basketball tournament, Van Belle was part of a team that reached the championship game but lost.

At NIC, Van Belle doesn’t see why this season’s team can’t excel as well.

“We have a lot of potential,” Van Belle said. “We can be very great.”

Bruce Bourquin is a sports writer at The Press. He can be reached at 664-8176, Ext. 2013, via e-mail at bbourquin@cdapress.com or via Twitter @bourq25