THE FRONT ROW WITH BRUCE BOURQUIN: Friday, Nov. 25, 2016

Charity Marlatt is currently a center on the North Idaho women’s basketball team who as a child moved 11 times until she was 10 years old, due in part to the fact her father was a pastor and her mother a family physician.

She’s a NIC dean’s list student with a 3.78 grade-point average who can cook a mean Thanksgiving dinner, as she cooked for the entire team during Canadian Thanksgiving on Oct. 8.

Plus on the court, the 19-year-old is a backup center who has a shot at competing for a starting job. She is also one of two sophomores on the team and is the lone foreign-raised player on the Cardinals’ roster playing for NIC coach Chris Carlson. She grew up in Jaffary, British Columbia, 30 miles southeast of Cranbrook, B.C. Jaffary is located 187 miles northeast of the main NIC campus.

Charity’s toughness may be OK for now, but her coaches have said it could always get even tougher.

“Coach said I’m not mean enough,” Marlatt said. “He told me to be like a Canadian hockey player. He said I’m too nice on the court.”

When Marlatt is on her game, she can be a lot to deal with for opponents. In the Cardinals’ first win of this season, a 61-46 win on Sunday at Chandler-Gilbert Community College, Marlatt played nearly 20 minutes but she still had six points and five rebounds. Last season, she was a backup for her role model at the time, starting center Grace Varcoe, who’s an Australian who now plays for California State University, East Bay, located 18 miles southeast of Oakland.

Marlatt said she may want to transfer to a four-year school in Canada, possibly at a place like the University of Victoria in British Columbia. Others who know about her and have tried to recruit her to play for them have included Trinity Western University in Langley, B.C. and Lethbridge College in Alberta. That is unless she gets a better scholarship offer in the United States. Marlatt

“She can be a double-double kid for us,” Carlson said. “Coaches at Trinity Western and Lethbridge know all about her. She’d move around, she’d hit some shots when we beat Chandler-Gilbert.”

JESSICA THIELEN, who played for the Cardinals’ women’s basketball team from 2006-2009 and teaches both in Canada and travels abroad to teach, was Charity’s math teacher when she was in Grade 10 at Mount Baker Secondary School. Instead of sophomore in Canada, they call it Grade 10 and instead of high school, it’s secondary school. Welcome to Canada.

It was Jessica who told Marlatt about the wonders of North Idaho College.

“She said the Carlsons were awesome people and the campus was beautiful,” Marlatt said. “She texted Chris and then they told her, ‘Send her down here.’ She said she loved it here, she had only good things to say about it. I always wanted to play past secondary school. I played for a club team called the Junior Dinos. We’d leave Wednesday and come back Sunday, we’d practice Thursdays and Saturdays. I did a CP (Center for Performance) camp as a kid with Alison McNeil, who’s the coach of the Canadian national team. So I didn’t know where I wanted to go.”

McNeil spent 11 years as Canada’s head coach of its Summer Olympic women’s basketball team. She decided to step down in 2012, which was Marlatt’s Grade 10 year, in order to focus on other things that needed her attention.

So in Grade 12, Marlatt transferred to Western Canada Secondary School in Calgary, Alberta, in order to play against tougher competition. To get a general idea of the difference, it’s a four-hour drive away from Mount Baker and it had roughly 2,400 students to Mount Baker’s 800. She attended Mount Baker in Grades 9 through 11 before that happened.

“I was coached by Greg Colburn at Mount Baker,” Marlatt said. “He was let go when I was in grade 11. Jessica would help us out at practices and she was my math teacher. I was MVP of the league at Western Canada, I was the leading scorer and rebounder. At Mount Baker, some girls, like 10 of us, played together since Grade 5. I had an $800 scholarship, it was the Melissa Bone scholarship. She was an athlete who was a teenager who died in a car accident and her parents wanted to have her remembered.”

While attending Western Canada, Charity lived with her aunt, Naureen English, at her home from September 2014 until that December. Then her father and brother moved to Calgary, they all lived in suite in January to help her settle in. After that in 2015, Charity lived by herself from February to July as she graduated from Western Canada and then prepared to go to NIC. Charity’s the oldest sibling, with 16-year-old Rhys, Chantelle (15), Abigail (9) and Mason (8) following her.

NOW ABOUT that Thanksgiving dinner. Marlatt cooked the usual turkey, complete with stuffing and a new dish for her, green bean casserole. She also whipped up a sweet-tasting pumpkin pie for coach Carlson and his wife and assistant coach, Carey Carlson. She lives with five roomates in a nearby house off campus — Cardinal freshman teammates Shae Logozzo, Kassin Hopkins, Lana Berg, Shanna Floerchinger and women’s soccer player Jocelyn Cook-Cox. Carlson said the team had a practice that Monday and said he noticed a little tryptophan, which is an amino acid in turkey that can make some people sleepy, that made that practice a little ... different.

“It’s about the same as over here,” Marlatt said of what kinds of dishes they serve up north versus here in America. “I got to cook for the whole team. It was fun.”

Marlatt, who this semester is taking classes including English and physics. She also tutors the Carlsons’ nephew, NIC student Zach James, who works on repairing airplanes. Plus Marlatt loves peanut butter so much she sometimes eats it straight out of the jar on a spoon and hates spiders.

The 6-foot-1 Marlatt has a lot of potential, of course, and she said she needs to work a little on her ball-handling and free throw skills.

“She’s a strong presence, a good rebounder and she’s got a nice shot,” Carlson said. “She could get a little tougher. But once she gets competitive, that is when she’s at her best. She really tweaked her ankle, it folded like a wrist. She’s right there for a (potential) starting spot when she gets fully healthy, she’ll be right there challenging for playing time. She has a nice jump hook and overall, her shot is getting better. She’s helped us out with our younger players, she does a good job keeping them focused on what our expectations are here.”

MARLATT HAD her official visit to North Idaho College in Oct. 2014, when she was in Grade 12 at Western Canada. Last season the Cardinals were in the Scenic West Athletic Conference, and this season they are playing in the Northwest Athletic Conference and this season.

“I don’t like big cities with a lot of people,” Marlatt said. “Back then I joined them in a practice, they were fun. It’s a nice family atmosphere, it’s a beautiful campus. When we were in the Scenic West, we traveled. We’d leave at 10 p.m the night before games, the men’s and women’s basketball teams would sleep on the bus, sometimes some of us would sleep on the floor spread out all over the bus. I got my hair stepped on.”

When Marlatt was a college freshman at NIC, she started a couple of games at the beginning of the season. This season, NIC was 1-2 going into Saturday’s game against the North Idaho College All-Stars, with losses to Cochise College from Douglas, Ariz. and Mesa Community College, both at Mesa CC.

“Between Lana and Shanna, all of us can interchange and play the ‘4’ (forward) or the ‘5’ (center). I know how to approach practices, we’re expected to work on our shots on our own. If I know I can do better, I really work on it. Mesa had strong girls.”

But Charity is very strong herself, has shown more than enough good skills and will be an important cog as one of NIC’s two sophomores.

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 @BruceCdAPress