LEWISTON — Former Blue Devil and Mustang star basketball athlete Kristina Blais might be beyond her playing years, but these days she’s busier than ever with the game.

When the 26-year-old Lewiston native isn’t in the Edward Little High School gymnasium coaching the girls varsity basketball team, she can almost certainly be found at her 4 Gendron Drive business, Maine Basketball Club.

In the middle of her second season with the Red Eddies, Blais spends most of her time at the club training athletes from prekindergarten to 12th grade. She said there’s nothing like helping a young athlete discover their potential and learn more about the game.

The club was born out of Blais’ recognition that Maine needed a place for young basketball athletes to learn and elevate their game. That is, having grown up in Lewiston, she understood western Maine, perhaps the entire state, lacked skills coaches specifically for basketball.

“I didn’t have the high-level basketball I craved,” she said. “I walked to school with a basketball in my hands, I was at recess playing basketball, playing before school and after school. When I got home, I was playing basketball. I would play basketball with my brothers in the park or in the driveway. It was nonstop and I just loved it that much. I always just wanted somewhere to go play.”

When it was cold out and there was nowhere to play indoors, Blais would continue shooting hoops in the driveway until her fingers would turn blue and the ball’s location would have to be pinpointed on spatial awareness alone.

After graduating from Lewiston High School in 2016, Blais attended Central Maine Community College in Auburn where she was a freshman captain and starter helping lead her team to a national championship. Blais said the following year her team made it to nationals again and lost.

Around the same time, Blais had to turn down a scholarship to a university in North Carolina due to issues with her legs that had been plaguing her over the past season.

So, she attended the University of Southern Maine where she played with two former Blue Devils, Victoria Harris and Morgan Eliasen. Blais’ leg issues persisted as she started giving lessons that summer, so her second year at USM was spent diving into the world of training and coaching. But she identifies much better as a coach than as a trainer.

Blais was 19 when she discovered she should be the one to provide some of that one-on-one training she craved as a young athlete. However, she was posed with the same problem: space.

“I’d go from park to park, house to house just giving basketball lessons because there wasn’t anything like it in the area,” she said.

Four years later in 2021, Blais is a small business owner serving hundreds of athletes, many of whom travel nearly two hours for her training. Maine Basketball Camp, at its very basic, she said, is an opportunity for athletes to take extra shots, do some extra training and for teams to practice their craft more when school gyms are locked and there’s nowhere else to go.

“The biggest thing is providing the space,” Blais said.

Serious as she may be with the sport, Blais said her initial focus when coaching and training is getting everyone on the same page with “life lessons off the court” and then build up to “what can we learn from basketball?”

“Basketball doesn’t have to be our main love, our main focus, but what can basketball teach us? I enforce an environment of growth and family and the rest really just takes care of itself. I say from day one: ‘who wants more in life?’ Through our season we can teach that. Basketball is just a driver; it’s not the end all be all. I say it’s the vehicle.”

Being young and passionate is often too much, Blais said, but the guidance we have through those times is paramount to our future success. For Blais, it was family; her mother and father, though not big on sports in the beginning, got with the game; her two brothers, seven and 10 years her senior, pushed life lessons that made her become a better basketball player and a better person.

“I also try to teach the athletes I work with everything that I had to learn the hard way. … I try to guide them to make healthy choices. I’d say the reason I didn’t have great legs by the time I was 20 was because I didn’t eat right when I was a kid even though I was in unbelievable shape. I was a great athlete.”

What is the small business owner, former high school and college basketball star-turned-top-notch coach want most in life?

“Just to inspire every young person I meet to live their most fulfilling life and teach them life lessons on and off the court,” she said. “I care more about where the kids are going to be in five years versus a win or a loss and I think that is why my kids trust me and why we’re able to build that camaraderie. I’d say my biggest goal is to inspire every athlete I work with to pursue their dreams.”

Off The Court is a monthly series that profiles people in the region who made or are still making an impact on local sports in ways other than actively playing. If you would like to suggest someone to profile in Off The Court, email writer Joe Charpentier at jcharpentier@sunjournal.com or write to him at the Sun Journal,64 Lisbon St., Suite 201, Lewiston, Maine 04240.

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