Balancing Act: How Izzy Borlase is juggling her double life

The 19-year-old is on the verge of becoming Australian basketball’s next big superstar, but admits she sometimes wishes she could just be a normal teenager. How exactly does she balance the two?

Image: FIBA

“Do you want to hear a funny story?”

Izzy Borlase, both the future and potentially the present of women’s basketball in Australia, poses this question to me with a giant grin on her face, midway through an iced chai – she doesn’t like coffee – at a café in Adelaide’s eastern suburbs.

“I just watched One Day on Netflix. I finished the series on Saturday, like mid-morning, and it was like, so sad. [Tayla Brazel], my roommate was just like, knocked out asleep, and I’m just sitting there on my iPad, bawling,” she laughs, becoming more animated as she speaks. “And it just put me in my feels for the rest of the day! So that day, my first half against Southside was so bad. I shot the ball out of the back of my hand, I falconed myself, and I was just in my feels, which is why I played so bad in the first half.”

She concludes her story – which was in fact, very funny – by showing me a professional photo that captured her moments after the said shot had gone straight over the back of her head: mouth agape, both hands pulling her cheeks down, eyes rolling into the back of her head. The kind of pose you make after you’ve done something really embarrassing, and just want to disappear into the background.

Unfortunately for Izzy Borlase, there’s no background to disappear into. Not when you’re a 19-year-old member of the WNBL All-Star Five and an MVP finalist, fresh from an international debut, and now with a very real chance of being both drafted into the WNBA and selected for a maiden Olympic campaign in the next four months.

But beyond being a funny anecdote, that story perfectly encapsulates the essence of the double life Izzy Borlase is currently living. There’s the Izzy that plays basketball – better than most people on the planet – with a future as bright as anyone in Australia, and who did in fact shake off a bad first half to lead Adelaide past eventual WNBL champions Southside. But there’s also the Izzy that’s just another teenager, happily binging on soapy Netflix dramas, planning her university timetable, and occasionally wanting to disappear into the ether after doing something embarrassing.

Like most teenagers, Borlase is still trying to figure life out. For Izzy the basketballer, that involves working out how she can win a spot on the Opals team heading to Paris for the upcoming Olympics.

“I think there’s an opportunity in front of me for potentially going to an Olympics,” she shares. “So, I’m going to do everything I can to put myself in the right environment to help me achieve that.”

And yet. In amongst all the fanfare, the excitement, and the meteoric rise to stardom most people can only dream of, Izzy the teenager candidly admits there’s times she wishes she could just be… normal.

“It's interesting and it’s different. And sometimes I wish…” she pauses. “I’m not saying I’m not normal, but there’s an element of my life not many people get to do. And sometimes I find it annoying, and just wish I could go to uni and get a job. And then other times I go to Brazil, and I’m like, ‘Wow, this is so cool, like, I’ll never get to do this sort of stuff again for the first time.’ So, I do think I live two different lives, two different worlds.”

So how exactly does one balance the life of a normal teenager, while simultaneously being one of the world’s best young basketballers?

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