Girls Hoops: Manasquan's Dara Mabrey forging own path in NJ's premier basketball family

It hasn't always been easy growing up Mabrey.

The name Mabrey echoes throughout the basketball courts of New Jersey. Michaela. Marina. Fierce competitors both who dominated girls hoops in the Shore Conference, and who went on to success at Notre Dame.

And now there's Dara.

The senior point guard at Manasquan is the last of the Mabrey sisters -- among the first families of girls basketball -- but she's not looking for to be known just for her familial legacy.

Though she takes pride in being a Mabrey, the comparisons get old for her. Dara doesn’t want to be always regarded as the kid sister of Michaela and Marina who is expected to head out to South Bend in the fall, following her sisters. She wants to be known as Dara.

“I kind of want my first name to be remembered because you’ll hear Mabrey and then Notre Dame, ” Dara said, sitting on the bleachers on the Manasquan gymnasium earlier this month. “I’ve wanted to pave my own path, which is exactly what I’ve done. To be compared to your sisters all the time, they’re great players to be compared to, but after a while, it was like, I’m my own player, and I’m my own person off the court too. I live a different life than my sisters.”

Dara has defiantly blazed her own path despite the incessant comparisons and the seemingly unattainable expectations. After winning the Tournament of Champions as a freshman alongside Marina, who was then a senior, Mabrey has led the Warriors to two additional Tournament of Champions appearances and a Shore Conference Tournament title on Saturday with a career-defining 33-point performance against St. John Vianney

Standing at only 5’7”, Dara is much shorter than her older sisters, both six-footers, thus she’s a completely different player. Dara is a true point guard and plays with intense passion.

She also decided to continue her basketball career at Virginia Tech, not Notre Dame.

“The recruiting process can get ugly sometimes, especially having two sisters who went to the same school, you always hear voices outside, and they’re trying to come in and tell you what to do,” Dara said. “That’s why I kept the whole thing private. I didn’t want anyone to know. I didn’t want people to talk about it because I just felt like it was my decision, and the only thing that mattered was the choice that I was going to make.”

Despite this, Dara’s sisters and the rest of her family have played an integral role in shaping her game and the girl who she is today.

Growing up Mabrey

For someone who has won a litany of big games during her high school career, Dara spent a lot of her childhood losing.

To be fair, she played one-on-one with Michaela and Marina, six and four years older than her, respectively. Playing against competition that was both significantly larger, stronger and more experienced, Dara lost often, and her sisters let her hear it.

Dara’s mother, Patti, would referee the games but also double as a quasi bouncer, breaking up the scraps and verbal jabs between siblings.

“If you lost, you were going to hear about it the rest of the day,” Dara said. “There were tears sometimes. I’d say to my mom, ‘Marina did this,’ or, ‘Michaela fouled me, that basket shouldn’t count.’ And then when you check the ball up, you would throw it right in their stomach because that’s the level of competition we were playing at.”

These seemingly innocuous games -- and in the eyes of Patti, sometimes downright funny due to the girls’ rabid reactions -- were crucial to Dara’s development. She is objectively one of the fiercest competitors in the state, and that competitive drive came from not wanting to lose to her sisters.

“I think her competitiveness started with playing against us because she was always the smallest and the youngest, so she’d always lose, and then she’d run to our mom being super upset,” Michaela, now an assistant coach at Miami of Ohio, said. “She’d try to find ways as we grew up to win. Even if she didn’t win the game, a few points here and there, she’d take pride in that.”

The pickup games in the park -- games that Dara still plays with her eighth-grade brother, Ryan, who Dara admits can finally beat her one-on-one -- also helped Dara develop a hard-nosed, pitbull-like attitude and confidence on the court that’s helped her excel. That swagger helped Dara compete with bigger girls at a much younger age, like when Dara, one of the best defenders on Manasquan, went toe-to-toe with the state’s best talent as a freshman as she took home a Tournament of Champions title alongside Marina.

“Every single day, she’s playing the best of the best because Michaela was the best of the best, and I was the best of the best,” Marina said. “To her, she was used to playing with people like that. She’s not afraid of anybody. She has the most confidence in herself. When she was a freshman, she wasn’t even thinking the girls were older than her.”

Michaela and Marina, when they weren’t consistently trouncing Dara in one-on-one, helped mold her game with their own in-house training. But ironically, the sibling who Dara credits the most for her ability on the court is not the two family members who she’s constantly being compared to. It’s her older brother, Roy Jr., who was a standout point guard, like Dara, at CBA.

“She wasn’t born with as much natural talent as the other two, and it was much like myself, so for her, I told her that she had to do all the other things that other people don’t want to do,” Roy, now head women’s basketball coach at ASA Miami, said. “Being scrappy, getting rebounds, all the things that come naturally to some people, you have to work for. She took it and ran with it.”

Drowning out the noise

What gets lost in all the hype surrounding the Mabrey lore is the fact that Dara is still a kid. it's easy to forget that all the criticism, the jeers and the expectations are being thrust onto a teenager.

Manasquan coach Lisa Kukoda remembers exactly when she fully understood what her point guard was going through. She was watching Dara in a fall league game a couple years ago and was sitting amongst the onlookers in the bleachers.

“The people around me were saying, ‘that’s Dara Mabrey, her sisters play at Notre Dame,’ and it hit me that every single gym that Dara walks into, this is what she knows is being said,” Kukoda said. “That’s a lot for a teenage girl to handle.”

And yet, she’s handled it. The constant comparisons were brushed right off her shoulder. When people chirped her for not following her sisters’ footsteps by going to Notre Dame, or even more viciously implying she wasn’t good enough to play for the Fighting Irish, Dara had the natural ability to shut out the noise.

“It started to bug me a little bit, but it doesn’t really matter what anyone else says because I’m just going to go to Virginia Tech and try to make history there,” Dara said. “Some said, ‘congrats, but I would have loved to have seen you in an Irish uniform,’ I saw that tweet like 17 times. I was like, oh my god, I’m so over this. A lot of other people might say, ‘oh, she’s not as good as her sisters because she’s not going there,’ but that doesn’t mean anything.”

Patti has witnessed first-hand her daughter’s ability to shake off the negativity.

“She’s mature enough to see the damage that can be done with critics because we’ve lived a lot of that,” Patti said. “What Dara has learned to do is just say they’re not worth it.”

The Mabreys are no strangers to the critics. Michaela heard the outside voices when she transferred from St. John Vianney to Manasquan after her freshman season. Marina got an earful when she pinballed from Manasquan to Point Pleasant Beach and then back to Manasquan.

“When you reach a certain level of excellence, people want to take you down, I think it’s a certain level of jealousy,” Marina said. “Half the people that are saying this about her aren’t attending an ACC school or don’t have a daughter attending an ACC school. Whoever is saying anything about it is just hating on our excellence.”

Through it all, the heads of the family, Patti and her husband, Roy Sr., have stuck with their children. They’ve had to defend them tooth-and-nail through every decision they’ve made, especially those that have been heavily scrutinized under an unforgiving microscope.

“I don’t even know if I have the words for the things my parents have done for all of us,” Dara said. “I should thank them more than I do.”

So now Dara sits cross-legged on the Manasquan gymnasium floor wearing a grey long-sleeve sweater and navy gym shorts. Her fellow students, who are standing around her and waiting for the final bell to dismiss them for the day, surround her. Dara is just anxious to put up some shots even before the school day ends.

She’s determined and bent on winning another Tournament of Champions title. Others might think she wants to win her second Tournament of Champions title, and her first without a sister to help, to match what her siblings have done. That doesn’t matter so much to her. She simply just doesn’t want to lose, something she learned to despise while growing up.

“I don’t really think about what my sisters won and what they accomplished, I just think from within myself, I hate losing,” Dara said. “If we lose, I’m automatically thinking about what the hell I did so that we didn’t win. I put a good amount of pressure on myself, but a good pressure. I just go over what I need to do to help us win the game.”

Daniel LoGiudice: @danny_logiudice; dlogiudice@gannettnj.com.