Bishop McNamara’s Trinity Davis named Daily Journal Girls Basketball Player of the Year

For Bishop McNamara senior guard Trinity Davis, basketball isn’t just a game. It isn’t just a way of life.

It’s the core fabric of her family.

Davis, is the daughter of former Kankakee standout Christian Davis and sister to former Daily Journal All-Area talents Faith (Bradley-Bourbonnais) and Isaiah (McNamara).

Being named this year’s Daily Journal Girls Basketball Player of the Year wasn’t the culmination of a seasoned competitive career as a youngster.

Davis didn’t start her organized basketball career until sixth grade, but immediately earned a starting spot on the Bourbonnais Upper Grade Center eighth grade team. She hadn’t played a game with an official before, but Davis already was a seasoned vet after countless hours with her siblings and dad, who works as a basketball trainer, and credited her first head coach, Mindy Gamble, for helping her translate her game to the organized level.

It’s all of those sessions in the gym as a family that allowed her to hit the 1,800 career point mark during the Fightin' Irish’s run to a Class 2A sectional championship and put together one of the best four-year girls basketball careers the All-City scene has ever seen.

“I always watched my siblings play growing up,” Davis said. “And anytime my family was in the gym, I just played with them.”

Davis, whose familial basketball legacy goes back to her grandpa, Greg Montgomery, a 1978 Bradley-Bourbonnais graduate and the first Black player in school history, also found a basketball family at McNamara.

After earning her first of what became four Daily Journal All-Area selections in as many years and making it to the second round of the now-defunct IHSA Class 4A Queen of the Hill 3-Point Contest as a freshman at Bradley-Bourbonnais, Davis and her brother transferred to Bishop McNamara after the 2021-22 school year.

Other than Leigha Brown, a classmate who also transferred to McNamara that summer, Davis knew hardly anyone at her new school until she met the basketball team at summer workouts.

It was also the same year that 2015 McNamara graduate, state champion and all-time leading scorer Khadaizha Sanders returned as head coach. Davis said that while Sanders could demand a lot of her players, the team wanted to meet those expectations because of their respect for her.

“With [Sanders] I grew a lot as a sophomore,” Davis said. “Her workouts were so hard. But I got through them, and she was an amazing coach.”

And it didn’t take Sanders very long to see that she had a tremendous talent and ferociously hard worker in Davis.

“Especially in this generation, you really don’t see a lot of kids with the drive motor she has,” Sanders said. “Trinity is the first person in the gym and the last person to leave. She puts in overtime, puts in extra hours on her own with a dad.”

Davis and the Irish won a Class 2A regional plaque and the then-sophomore sharpshooter was named Metro Suburban Conference Red Division MVP after making 50% of her 3-pointers and averaging 14.5 points a game.

She got her first All-State recognition as a second-team pick by both the media and coaches, was named the first-ever Chicagoland Christian Conference MVP, reached the 1,000 career point mark and made another All-Area team after averaging 17 points a game.

But the Irish were upset by St. Joseph-Ogden in the regional championship, again denying Davis the accolades she wanted most with postseason success.

The Irish were able to use that heartbreak to fuel a return to statewide relevance this winter, with Davis at the center of it. She averaged an area-best 20.4 points a game, thanks in large part to her 122 3-pointers, including one that will go down as one of the greatest moments in program history.

Davis drilled a half-court buzzer-beater to end the first half of the Irish’s Class 2A sectional championship game against Watseka-Milford, one that put them up 27-25 and fueled a dominant second half that gave them a commanding 69-38 win.

“It’s definitely pretty up there [on her best shots list],” Davis said with a laugh about the shot.

The Irish saw their run end against Mt. Carmel in the supersectionals, and while after the game there was about one tear for each of the more than 300 3-pointers she had in her career, Davis ended her career as an unquestioned great who was able to help instill the area’s most historically successful program back to its high standard with its 27th regional and 10th sectional.

Davis also was able to take some of Sanders' history away, surpassing her program record for single-game points by one, dropping 40 in a 75-17 win over Oakwood on Feb. 17.

When she first arrived at McNamara, Davis was drawn to a banner in the gym that displayed the names of the program’s All-State players, something she accomplished twice after earning second-team IBCA honors again this year (Editor’s note: this year’s media team has yet to be released.)

“It’s an honor,” Davis said. “My first year here, I looked at it and was like, ‘I want my name to be up there. I want to be remembered.’”