BLOOMINGTON — When Mackenzie Holmes was going through the recruiting process, she had a singular connection to Indiana: her dad, a basketball coach, brought his players to a camp hosted by legendary IU coach Bob Knight.

Long before Mackenzie was born, Lenny Holmes rounded up his players and made the 16-hour drive from Gorham, Maine, to Bloomington.

“If you're coaching in the late 80s, early 90s, Bobby Knight was someone you paid attention to,” Lenny said. “I had always heard about Indiana and the basketball hotbed, so I had a pretty decent team of kids, so one summer we just raised the money, we rented two vans  — I drove one of them and my assistant coach drove the other one — and we drove.”

It was a one-off connection. Mackenzie wasn’t even a thought in Lenny’s mind at the time, and he didn’t know his future daughter, born years later, was going to grow up to be a coveted basketball recruit.

When IU first expressed interest during her sophomore year, Mackenzie wasn’t on the map as a five-star recruit yet. IU was her third Power 5 basketball offer, joining Iowa State and close-to-home Boston College.

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At the time, she was keeping her options open. And that one connection from her dad in the 90s was enough for her to agree to come to Bloomington for a visit.

“He said it was great,” Mackenzie said. “So, when I got recruited here, that was like his only connection but he's like, ‘We should go check it out because it was really cool when I brought my team there.’”

Lenny and Mackenzie made a summer out of traveling to different schools on unofficial visits, including Indiana, Belmont and Iowa State. Her first stop was Bloomington, and she was immediately hooked on the culture coach Teri Moren and associate head coach Rhet Wierzba created.

“IU was our first visit, and, I mean, I instantly knew I was wasting a lot of money on the next five visits," Lenny said. "I could just tell afterwards that her heart was on that campus and everything about it.”

Mackenzie still wanted to go on the other visits she scheduled — for the sake of honoring the recruitment process and seeing if there’s anything out there she missed. But she was captivated by IU, and she let Moren know as soon as possible.

“Pretty much after that last visit got done, like two hours later, we’re in the parking lot of a mall somewhere,” Lenny said, “and she said, ‘I want to call coach Moren. I want to commit.’”

Now, five years later, Holmes is capping off her IU career as one of the best players the program has ever seen. She was the program’s first preseason All-American, the second to reach 2,000 points in her career, and an unstoppable force under the basket. She’ll likely become the program all-time leading scorer by the end of this season.

“She came here and fell in love with Bloomington, us being a basketball school and you know, the rest is history,” Moren said. “She's really made her mark, and she's gonna leave a very impressive legacy when she graduates.”

Returning home

One summer day, around 8 a.m., Lenny got a call from Mackenzie. She almost never calls him that early, so he immediately got worried. Is something wrong? Did she hurt her knee again?

It was quite the opposite. Her excited whisper came through the phone, he said, saying “You can’t tell anyone, but we’re going to play U-Maine, and we’re going to do it in Portland.”

“It means everything,” Mackenzie said. “I don't think I could put it into words. I have so many friends and family that never got a chance to see me play in real life, and for them to get the opportunity, it's just going to be very striking.”

The No. 17 Hoosiers (5-1) will play Maine on Thursday night at Cross Insurance Arena in Portland — just 30 minutes from Gorham.

When Lenny heard IU was coming, he immediately got to work. He became the box office, of sorts, for people in the area who wanted to travel to Portland to see Mackenzie play in what she basically considers her home arena.

“I played all my high school tournament games there, won two state championships there, so it's a very special place to me,” Mackenzie said. “Home is extremely important to me, and representing it in the best way I can. It's gonna be a really fun time. And I've talked about Maine a lot to everybody, so I think they're excited to see it.”

Lenny posted on Facebook, asking if people wanted to come see IU play Maine. What started out as a “Mackenzie home section” turned into 1,000 tickets so Cross Insurance Arena eventually just gave the reins to Lenny. The arena sent him the tickets and allowed him to seat everybody himself, which became sort of a game of Tetris for him.

“I felt like I was doing a wedding reception,” Lenny said. “‘Okay, how close are you? We don't really know your name, so you're going back over here. You're her coach in eighth grade, OK, you get to come over here.’”

Portland is two hours away from Maine's campus in Orono, so, especially with the large contingent of Holmes fans, Thursday could end up feeling like an away game for the Black Bears.

“It speaks volumes to (Indiana’s) coaching staff, but I contacted (Maine coach Amy Vachon) and thanked her as well,” Lenny said. “It takes two to tango, and they could have said, ‘No, we're not gonna go do a home game in Portland’ where I've personally sold 1,000 tickets for this game, and it could very well be a pro-IU crowd — at least half Indiana crowd, half Maine crowd, so they’ve given up home-court advantage.”

One basketball town to another

Gorham, Maine, is a basketball town. In general, Maine is a basketball state.

Maine residents don’t have any professional sports teams to root for in-state. The New England Patriots and Boston Red Sox and Celtics are relatively close, but still more than 100 miles away. There isn’t a Power 5 program in the state to root for, either.

So, a lot of the focus goes into youth sports — indoor, so they can get out of the dreary Maine winter.

“The winters of Maine are long, so there's never been a lot for people to do,” Lenny said. “But high school basketball has just always been a passion … especially when you get into the smaller towns in Maine.”

Lenny has coached AAU basketball for years and opened up the state’s first basketball academy. Mackenzie’s mother, Denise Payette Holmes, was a varsity high school coach and college assistant.

So, Mackenzie grew up intertwined with the sport.

“As long as she can remember, she has been in a gym somewhere,” Lenny said. “Her brother played, so we were literally carting her around in her little baby carriage as someone watches her during a practice.”

She started playing organized basketball in the third grade, and it helped that she was a tall kid. While she was playing youth basketball, she towered over her teammates and opponents — enough so that some parents would question if she was in the right age group.

Because of her skill, Mackenzie was well-known by players and coaches around the area. Laughn Berthiaume, who has coached at Gorham High School since 2004, was anticipating her freshman year more than anything.

“She was just kind of that missing piece,” Berthiaume said. ”She was such a massive problem and gave us that threat on the inside. Because of the attention that they needed to give her, other kids had more opportunities to score.”

With a starting lineup of five Division I-caliber players, Gorham had no trouble in Mackenzie’s freshman and sophomore seasons. They went undefeated over two seasons, winning two state championships.

Then, every player in the starting lineup graduated except for her. Gorham started to struggle (relative to its recent success), losing a game for the first time in Holmes' high school career her junior season and going on a four-game losing skid in her senior year.

That experience, though, made Mackenzie a leader on and off the court.

“She had to learn to lead through some frustrating times, because as our team changed and there was more focus on her, it was certainly a learning curve,” Berthiaume said. “She became a more vocal leader, and really had to do it in a positive way when things were tough at times.”

Mackenzie became the biggest cheerleader on the team in her final two seasons in Gorham, and it translated to her time in IU.

Pregame, she is always the one to talk to her teammates for final words of good luck. She is always the first person to celebrate a big shot or jump out of her seat to celebrate when she’s on the bench. At the end of each quarter, she is always the first person to high-five the entire team and coaching staff.

“She's a fun, fun kid, even when she's on the bench,” Berthiaume said. “She's the biggest cheerleader. And so I think she really looked at her role in those later two years as making sure that no matter what happens, ‘hey, we got to keep this going, you got to be positive.’ I watch her on TV now, and I just see the same person.”

Now, years after she was a cheerleader for Gorham, the town has become a cheerleader for her.

“Maine people really love basketball,” Mackenzie said. “They take it seriously. They love watching high school games. You know, there's not a ton of college basketball to watch there, but just knowing that, you know, they love basketball and my hometown has been nothing but supportive for me since I've gotten to IU.”

Thursday night, they'll get to show that support in their own backyard.

This article originally appeared on Indianapolis Star: Indiana women's basketball: Mackenzie Holmes gets Maine homecoming