Paurová has played a lot of different sports – Bowling Green Daily News

 

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Dominika Paurová describes herself as a “dynamic player” and that’s why Kentucky women’s basketball coach Kenny Brooks was so happy to add her to his first roster at UK last season.

The Czech Republic native played in 35 games at Oregon State during the 2023-24 season and averaged 5.5 points, 2.1 rebounds, 1.4 assists and 16.4 minutes per game for an Elite Eight team. She shot 48% from the field and 37% from 3-point range.

The 6-foot-1 guard missed last season after injuring her knee playing with her national team against Iceland in Bulgaria last summer. She needed surgery and did not get to Lexington until mid-August in 2024 and spent last season rehabbing her knee.

Now she’s healthy and ready to help offset the loss of All-American guard Georgia Amoore and shooting guard Dazia Lawrence off last year’s team that finished fourth in the SEC and won one NCAA Tournament game.

“I like to play hard on defense and offense. I can drive to the basket. This past year I had a lot of time to work on my footwork and shooting technique,” Paurova said. “I can play multiple positions, but I like playing as a guard the most.”

Both of her parents played basketball. Her dad, Marlin Paur, played professionally in a Czech league while her mom played just for fun “but loves basketball” as much as anyone.

“I have been in the gym since I was in diapers. I had my small basketball. Once we grew up a little bit, my parents made me and my sister costume jerseys. That was really cool and I still have that jersey,” Paurova said. “While I was in the gym all the time, my parents didn’t want to force basketball on us so I did every other sport possible. It was around third grade when I started playing and I played with boys at first and then my parents actually started coaching.”

Her “other” sports included swimming, skiing, competitive water rescue, volleyball, windsurfing, track and field, and tennis.

She swam in elementary school and was a five-time Czech national champion.

“My parents taught me to swim when I was 2 years old. In first grade we went to swimming classes with my school and the coach was surprised I could already swim and asked if I wanted to join the team. I joined and did both swimming and basketball for quite a while,” the UK redshirt sophomore said. “I still like to swim, but I like basketball more.”

She placed third in the Czech nationals in skiing in 2016. She said her parents put her on skis at the top of the hill and told her to go.

“We skied like 30 days each winter until I got more serious with basketball,” Paurova said. “There was a competition with like 10 qualification windows and I qualified for nationals and ended up third, which made me kind of mad that I didn’t win. I tried again the next year, but unfortunately had an accident. I really liked skiing.”

In competitive water rescue, she was a national champion. She grew a bit weary of swimming from one end of the pool to the other and back when she decided to join the competitive water rescue team.

“You had to (rescue) this plastic person and swim under obstacles and stuff like that. That was more entertaining for me and I really enjoyed it,” Paurova said. “I played soccer for a little bit because my cousins played. I surfed when we traveled. I danced. I can snowboard. But honestly, tennis, cycling, rollerblading … pretty much anything you can think of, I tried because we are a sports family. I have even recently tried pickleball.”

If that’s not enough, she not only speaks Czech and English but is also fluent in Russian. She’s currently learning Spanish.

“I started learning English in third grade, but learning English in school was not ideal. So in sixth grade, my mom sent me to England by myself for two weeks. Just put me on a plane and sent me off. I was going to school Monday through Friday each morning and then had other activities,” the UK player said. “I rode horses there, so I can do that too. I learned to speak English and lost the fear of speaking English.”

The following year, her parents sent her to Malta for three weeks by herself.

“That was way different because I was way more independent there. I lived in a hotel with other students as a seventh-grader. We traveled the island on the bus,” she laughed and said.

Paurova played on the Czech Republic U14, U15, U18, U19 and U20 teams between 2018 and 2023. On the U18 team, she was considered a most valuable player candidate at the FIBA European Championship in 2022, averaging 14.7 points and 9.3 rebounds per game at the tournament. She came to the U.S. for her high school senior year and helped DME Academy in Florida to the Sunshine Independent Athletic Association State Championship by averaging 11.5 points, 5.0 rebounds and 2.2 steals per game.

She has a family group chat and still depends on her mother for her morning wake-up call.

“l am scared my alarm won’t go off, so the night before in our chat I tell my mum what time I want to wake up and thanks to the time change (her mother is six hours ahead time-wise) she wakes me up,” Paurova said.

She goes home each summer to visit and takes her family a special gift that has nothing to do with basketball.

“We have no plastic cups, no plastic straws. Everything is paper. It’s super annoying,” Paurova said. “When I go home every summer I bring like two packs of plastic straws for my family and they really appreciate me doing that.”

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A year ago, Trent Noah was “a disaster” as he tried to adjust to being a University of Kentucky basketball player. The Harlan County High School star was coming off a brilliant high school career that ended with his team losing in the state title game. However, transitioning to playing for new UK coach Mark Pope last summer was not easy.

Pope told Matt Norlander of CBS Sports that Noah had trouble “understanding” what UK was trying to do on both ends of the floor. He still managed to play in 24 games as a true freshman.

Now teammates are calling him not only the best shooter on the team, but one of the best in the country.

“Trent, he doesn’t miss,” UK freshman Braydon Hawthorne said.

Pope is even more impressed with Noah’s improved leadership. The 6-foot-5 sophomore is now one of the players showing newcomers what to do and what is expected of them.

“It’s really fun to watch Trent Noah,” Pope told Norlander. “One year later, he walks in, and he’s the most veteran, seasoned voice on the floor. He’s like, ‘Guys, just everyone relax. Let me explain what Coach is saying right now.’ It’s actually so fun to watch from summer to summer and season to season, watching these guys grow.”

Pope said earlier in the summer that “being a Kentucky legend is different than being anything anywhere else” but predicted Noah could handle any pressure because he is “made different” from most players.

Pope knows year two should be easier for Noah, like it has been for most players he’s coached.

“These kids, these young people, they are just so dynamic as human beings. So much of what happens on the court is what they take into it that day. Their lives can change so fast. We’re not dealing with someone that’s actually in the same space in their life right now today as they will be in three months — thankfully, right? Because they’re growing, so there is some error rate,” Pope told Norlander.

•••

Kentucky volleyball always plays a demanding preseason schedule and this year is no different with the Cats playing Pittsburgh, Nebraska, Penn State and Louisville, last year’s Final Four teams. However, coach Craig Skinner believes he has a roster that can cope with the scheduling challenges.

“We have players that have played against really good teams last year,” Skinner said. “We have experience returning. There’s inexperience in the setting position and on the right side. But the decision was to schedule tough because we have some great players and have a chance at the end of the year to compete for a national championship.”

Skinner said he had no choice but to be part of these high-profile matchups. Kentucky plays Nebraska on Aug. 31 in the Broadway Block Party in Nashville on ABC-TV. The Cats play at defending national champion Penn State on Sept. 5 on FOX-TV. They play Pittsburgh on Sept. 10 in the Shriners Children’s Showdown in Fort Worth, Texas, on ESPN. Skinner’s team will play at Louisville, runner-up to Penn State in 2024, at the YUM Center on Sept. 18 on ESPNU.

“We need to learn about our team. So this schedule is what we typically do, but maybe even a little bit tougher with all of the Final Four teams from last year on our schedule,” Skinner said. “But I do not feel like we will get to where we want to go if we don’t play these teams.”

Skinner knows the “most powerful teams” are player driven and he likes his team’s potential to do that.

“I can drag them down the tracks, but it’s not going to be as powerful as if they’re driving the train on their own,” Skinner said. “All of them are recruited into this knowing that this is your program. Wherever you take us is where we’re going to go and they all have to help guide us down the road.

“Our staff will help get us going in the right direction, but you (players) have to drive the bus. I kind of joke in the recruiting process, if they aren’t able to coach their own team when they leave this program, then we failed.”

Former Kentucky men’s basketball coach John Calipari preached that Kentucky was not for everyone. Skinner tells potential recruits the same thing.

“A program like this is not for everybody and that’s OK,” Skinner said. “If you want to play at this level, you have got to crave volleyball. If you don’t crave it you probably will not do well at this level because it consumes you.

“Our kids crave volleyball and crave Kentucky. We talk about competing for championships. We have not talked about winning the SEC or national title since the first team meeting we had. We talk about playing in a way worthy of winning. If you are doing that, then you have a chance to get victories.”

•••

Last season, Kentucky cornerback Maxwell Hairston continued his development and became a first round NFL draft pick by the Buffalo Bills.

Could cornerback DJ Waller be the breakout star on this season’s UK defense?

“DJ is unique in terms of what he can do. It took him a while to understand our process (after transferring from Michigan). He came from a program that had a lot of success and we did things differently, so it took him a little bit of time to transition,” Kentucky secondary coach Chris Collins said. “It wasn’t a seamless transition to understand the expectation, the level of work, the accountability, things of that nature.

“He slowly started to buy into that (last season), and his play started to elevate, and elevated fairly quickly. Now it is about consistency. I don’t ever want to put something on a young man that they didn’t necessarily ask for. I don’t know where the future holds. I know the young man loves ball. He’s been really really engaged this summer and he’s seen a lot of growth.”

Collins warned that Waller, who started four games last season before missing the final four games due to an injury, will have his “ups and downs” this season like most players do.

“It’s a fickle position. I’m excited about where he is and his growth. He does have a big upside. I tell guys every day that potential is a dangerous word because a lot of people have it, but a few people reach it,” Collins said

•••

Quote of the Week: “The closest I had been to this area was Texas. Texas gets hot, but not humid like this. It took me a while to not be dying on that (practice) field. I am fine now. At Washington State we would be practicing in the snow and then go to UCLA to play and I am dying. Thank God we are not going to Florida (to play). I heard the Swamp was really humid,” Washington State transfer David Gusta, on adjusting to Lexington weather.

Quote of the Week 2: “When you ask me, the biggest thing is that my heart is full of gratitude in a really sincere sense. The fact that we had 27,000 people show up for my press conference, which didn’t really have much to do with me but what BBN is. Forever in my life, I’ll be grateful for all those people that trekked from wherever and stood in line forever to come here. It’s hard to express how grateful I am,” Kentucky coach Mark Pope on the “Eye on College Basketball Podcast,” on what he was most grateful for during his first year at Kentucky.

Quote of the Week 3: “Very cerebral and I heard he’s pretty good at chess. He’s a cool guy and he runs a tight crew,” UK offensive tackle Shiyazh Pete, on Kentucky men’s basketball coach Mark Pope.

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