Coming full circle to her 20 square feet

Emma Christiano always knew she would be here, on the floor at the Pan American Center, as a point guard for New Mexico State University.

As a child, she started with gymnastics, and then it was basketball, football, and baseball with the same group of boys. Christiano considers Alex Petermeier, the coach of those youth teams, one of her greatest mentors.

“He definitely set a foundation just for my competitiveness, my drive, playing with the guys,” Christiano said.

Once she arrived in seventh or eighth grade, it was time to get a little bit more serious about basketball. And that was in large part due to her bigger objective.

“It was my goal since I was four years old to be an Aggie, to come to New Mexico State,” Christiano said. “I grew up in the stands my entire life. Having my coach tell me I need to pinpoint basketball in order to play at the Division I level, it was a no-brainer for me and from that day, I dedicated thousands of hours to it.”

Christiano was drawn to the hardwood by a number of factors, but the team aspect of the game is high on the list.

“I love the physicality of it,” she said. “I work really well under pressure, and I love its fast pace. I really love the fact that it involves a lot of people, it's not an individual sport, and that's what I'm kind of about. It really does take all 12 of the girls, plus our coaching staff, plus our support staff.”

It isn’t just the need for all of those elements to be working in concert to succeed on the scoreboard that entices Christiano.

“Just to be able to have those touching relationships with a huge group of people was what I think kind of really dragged me to stay with basketball,” she said. “I've been very blessed to sit under a lot of great role models who have taught me that environment and culture of the program and treating the people around you in the program well is vital to our success.”

When Christiano wasn’t recruited to NMSU out of Las Cruces High School, she believed that was just another step in the process. She went instead to Division II New Mexico Highlands and spent the first two years of her college career with the Cowgirls. She knew, however, that it was only a temporary home.

“Every single day it was, what am I going to do to come back home? How am I going to complete my full circle?” she said. “I was watching every New Mexico State game, talking to the players, understanding what it takes to go from high school to Division II, then to Division I. Me and Jody (NMSU head coach Jody Adams) talk about it all the time, how sometimes it's just a timing thing.

“I can't go back and say I was ready to play Division I basketball when I was a senior in high school. I've grown tremendously in the last two or three years. Your journey is different than everybody else's and I learned so much those two years playing Division II basketball that absolutely play a role in what I do here.”

Christiano grew up an Aggie fan and spent a lot of time in the stands with her parents, Stacie and Bill, and her family. Many NMSU players impressed her. She feels that she was really influenced, however, by what was happening on the east coast at the University of Connecticut, where head coach Geno Auriemma built a women’s basketball dynasty.

“When they had an 111-game winning streak my dad flew me out to Baylor to go watch UConn with him, and they ended up losing their 111-game winning streak that night, the most in college basketball ever. We were at that game, and it was the worst day of my life to this day,” Christiano said.

She loves to watch basketball and learns a lot as she sees how teams and players perform, and also how players carry themselves. It’s helped Christiano work on that aspect of her game.

“I think the number one thing that really sticks out is body language,” she said. “Eye contact, how they're communicating with their teammates, are they diving for 50-50 balls? Are they upset if someone misses a shot, turns the ball over? Kind of seeing if they have that competitiveness, that next play mentality to lead positively, love the game passionately.”

Christiano says you can learn everything about a team by watching what’s happening on the bench.

“You can see how selfish they are, or how unselfish they are, how bought in they are to the game,” she said.

Coach Adams says the first thing she noticed about Emma was what was in her heart.

“What I loved about Emma was her energy,” Adams said. “She was just infectious, contagious. She’s a great human, has a great heart for people and wants to see them do well. I think that's rare for somebody to be somebody else's cheerleader.”

Changing roles

One of the challenging things with college basketball is the merging of talents with a group of players who were all stars on their high school teams.

“I think Jody really helps me with that,” Christiano said. “She taught me a lot about we have something in our program called your 20 square feet, and that's really your role. Everyone has a completely different role and as long as you buy into that role, that's how we're successful. Transitioning from high school to college, for me, was really transitioning from an all-around player to a true, true point guard.”

While she always intended to get back to Las Cruces, to play for the Aggies, Christiano used her time at New Mexico Highlands well.

“I spent two years really going back to the basics,” she said. “I spent a long time focusing on bettering my shot, bettering my handles, bettering my confidence in myself and taking those two years to lead a collegiate level basketball team.”

Now that she’s back home, Christiano relishes the opportunity to play in front of the people who helped her get here. The NMSU junior knows she has been blessed by goodly parents and a supportive network in this community.

“I've had a personal wallet and a personal Uber service with my parents my entire life, especially playing sports,” Christiano said. “My mom is my number one supporter, she's very positive. She's very much so about interpersonal relationships. My dad is the hardcore, you need to be shooting 10,000 shots, you need to go to bed, are you eating correctly? Having both parents that truly do support me in different ways has been tremendous.”

Coach Adams knows how important parents are in the dynamic as she brings players into her program.

“If I'm going to sign somebody from Las Cruces, it’s not just about the person that's going to play for me, but how I would want their family to be, and that's two feet in,” Adams said. “And they are. They love New Mexico State. They love Las Cruces.”

Christiano knows no one watches her more closely than her younger brothers and she said she has learned a lot from watching them play, to take some of the seriousness out of the game.

“I've been blessed with my parents and my siblings, my high school basketball coach, my really good friends, and the city of Las Cruces filling in that support family role for me for 20 years,” she said. "It did not start when I got to NMSU. It has been since the start and that has been really important in my role here.”

Christiano believes basketball teaches you how to love people that have completely different stories, that come from so many different places, have different morals, different values, who all can share the same collective goal and learn how to overcome adversity together. She really honors her teammates who do their jobs in their own assigned space.

“It may be their 20 square feet on the team to set that really good screen so this teammate can get that shot off and their job is just as important as a statistical outlook on basketball,” she said.

Mostly, she is just grateful to have come full circle and be back home.

“It's really special how supported I feel and what this community and this university has meant to me and my family for the last 20 years,” Christiano said. “It really is kind of indescribable. You wake up and it's the best day ever, every day, because you’ve been waiting for this for 20 years. I just continue to say that I'm the happiest person in the city of Las Cruces.”