A lot of people don’t believe me when I tell them my daughter is named Detlef Schrempf. A lot of those same people don’t believe me when I tell them that Detlef Schrempf (the two-time NBA sixth man of the year, not my daughter) once grabbed 9 offensive rebounds in a game. And that’s probably not a coincidence.

See, there are really only two kinds of parents in this world: the kind who don’t name their kid after the greatest basketball player ever born in Leverkusen, North Rhine-Westphalia Germany, and the kind that do. I guess I’m the latter.

Our little girl, Detlef Schrempf

Sure, there was some internal debate whether it really was the best name for my little angel. Shawn Kemp was an option. So was Hersey Hawkins. And naturally, I considered gender-nuetral names like Kendall (Gill), Benoit (Benjamin), and Frank (Brickowski). But then I really had to ask myself — was I thinking about Shawn or Kendall because it was the best choice, or was it because they were much, much more suitable for a girl than Detlef?

Right in the heart of my internal struggle to find the name that fit, while watching Dr. Phil highlights on YouTube, I had something of an epiphany: Sometimes as a parent you have to ask youself if you’re doing what’s right for your kid or just doing what’s right for you. So my wife and I decided that we’d wait until the baby arrived before we picked her name; we were, after all, pretty confident that once we saw our little angel we’d know what was meant to be. And we did.

The moment she was born, the moment we saw her beautiful blonde flattop glistening in her mother’s afterbirth, we knew. We hadn’t picked the name; our little one picked it for us. She was a Schrempf.

Not that being a Schrempf makes her life any different than any other little girl. She likes her American Girl dolls and playing princess with daddy. And sometimes I wake up in the middle of the night in a cold sweat worrying about the day some punk kid comes knocking on my door trying to date my little angel. But then I remember I named her Detlef Schrempf, so I don’t really think that’s going to be a problem.

Nothing calms our little one like low-resolution Detlef Schrempf highlights.

Are the expectations on our little one too much? Perhaps. Some have suggested we might as well have named her after Abraham Lincoln or Mahatma Ghandi or Toni Kukoc. But we didn’t name our daughter Detlef Schrempf to burden her with grandiose expectations. We named our daughter Detlef Schrempf to inspire her to greatness, even if she is ultimately doomed to ever come close to the original.

No, our Detlef Schrempf may never grow up to play 15 seasons in the NBA. She may not post career highs of 19.2 points a game while shooting 51% from deep. And it’s very unlikely she will lead the West German Men’s National Basketball team to an 8th place finish in the 1984 Summer Olympics. But this much I do know: When I was a kid, watching those SuperSonics, I always thought to myself, “Man, there’s never going to be another Detlef Schrempf, not in my lifetime there’s not.”

I was wrong.