Coco Lohmiller, an eighth grader who lit it up for the Pierson High School girls varsity basketball team in the winter, could have played girls lacrosse or softball this spring, but chose instead to stick to her first love, basketball, as a member of the Huntington-based Empire Amateur Athletic Union’s eighth-grade team overseen by Long Island Lutheran’s Christina Raiti, the Naismith high school girls coach of the year.
The athletic 5-foot-8-inch guard-forward, the best female player, many agree, to come out of Sag Harbor since Katie Browngardt was stopping-and-popping for the Whalers in the mid-1980s, almost 40 years ago, has been playing the demanding sport since moving to Sag Harbor from Madison, Wis., at the age of 4.
“You glide,” her interviewer said at her house, which is across the street from the elementary school’s basketball court, the other day. “Have others told you that?”
No, she said, though people have said she moves smoothly.
“She’s always played with and against boys, as long as she can remember . . . she still does,” her stepfather, Joe Weeks, who was sitting in, said, adding that “she played on the boys S.Y.S. team that Jeff Aubry coached, and still practices with them. Jeff’s son, Orion, is her age — they’ve always hung out together, ever since Coco and the Aubrys moved here. Carl Johnson coaches her too — Coco and her best friend, Skye Smith. Up until this year, when puberty began to kick in, she would dominate the boys.”
She said she was lucky to have those people, and Woody Kneeland, who coaches Pierson’s girls varsity team, as well as Raiti, as mentors. Aubry, who works for the N.B.A. now, played professionally in the N.B.A.’s G League, the equivalent of baseball’s minor leagues, and in other pro leagues. Johnson, a member of New York State’s Basketball Hall of Fame, won three state championships as a player with Bridgehampton’s Killer Bees, and won four state titles as their coach. Raiti’s LuHi girls team was a national finalist recently, and her eighth-grade A.A.U. team is to play in six tournaments throughout the eastern region this spring and summer.
In her first season of varsity play, Lohmiller, who will turn 14 on June 15, wound up as the county’s 19th-leading scorer with 241 points, averaging 15.8 points per game, and was named to the all-league and all-conference teams. “She didn’t make all-county, though I think she should have,” said her stepfather.
That per-game average would have been higher had she not missed a game and had she been at full strength in two others. It probably would have been higher still had she passed less. “You probably could take over a game,” her interviewer said.
“Sometimes she should,” Weeks said, adding that the pass-first instinct could be traced to youth hoop — “she’d always pass to kids who weren’t great shooters so they could score.”
Aubry, who has trained and coached Lohmiller “since pre-K or kindergarten,” said of her, “She’s tall, fast, and strong, a gifted athlete, and she’s always had a strong will. The combination of those things will take you far.”
He said, moreover, that she had decided she wanted to concentrate on basketball at an early age. “I think it was during the Covid pandemic in 2020, when she was around 9 or 10,” Aubry said. “She and Orion would shoot every day on the court behind the high school. That’s when I think she determined that she wanted to give basketball everything she had. You could see that she was determined, that she wanted it.”
Lohmiller’s weekly schedule underlines that point: Mondays and Wednesdays, her stepfather said, she practices with her A.A.U. team, in Oyster Bay on Mondays and in Huntington on Wednesdays. Tuesdays and Thursdays she and Skye Smith, her best friend and high school varsity and A.A.U. teammate, train with Johnson at the Bridgehampton School, using a Dr. Dish machine that enables them to get off as many as 250 shots a session from all over the court. On Sundays, she goes to Kneeland’s open gym workouts at Pierson, and there’s always the elementary school basketball court across the street.
“It’s not just training, there’s unorganized playing too — that’s just as important,” said Aubry. “That’s where you figure things out.”
He said he could see her playing Division 1 basketball someday. “Certainly. No doubt about it. She’s willing to put in the work.”
Asked if she wanted to go to Long Island Lutheran at some point, LuHi being a school that, according to Aubry, plays a national schedule and gets 90 percent of its players into D-1 schools, Lohmiller said, “Yes, that’s my goal . . . it would give me the exposure and opportunities.”
Her mother, Jenny Doud, who, with Weeks, runs the Corner Bar in Sag Harbor, went to the University of Wisconsin. Lohmiller too wants to go to a Big Ten college.
As for LuHi, “We’re not forcing anything,” said her stepfather. “The most important thing is that she still loves to play basketball.”