By Howard Tsumura, The Province -- Put a basketball in Jaime Hill's hands and she defines her position as the starting point guard with West Vancouver's Mulgrave Titans senior girls basketball team by making her teammates better, something she'll do this week as she leads her team into the B.C. Single A championships which opens a four-day run Wednesday in Keremeos. But that innate quality of passing first is a pay-it-forward trait that extends off the hardwood and into her community, despite the fact that she's only 14 and a Grade 9 student. Last spring, when one of Hill's childhood friends, Vita Sackville-Hii, was diagnosed with leukemia, a part of Hills knew that she wanted to do something to both honor her friend's courageous fight and help in the battle to beat cancer.

So when Mulgrave held its annual Spirit Week two weeks ago, Hills volunteered to have her head shaved in front of the school, and she selected as her personal barber Sackville-Hii who has since regained her health. And the fund raising campaign, in which Hills sent out a few emails asking for donations, topped even her wildest expectations, raising over $7,000 in about one week. "It's pretty amazing," Hills said late last week of the donation total she is now channelling to the oncology ward at Vancouver Children's Hospital where Sackville-Hii received her treatments. "I didn't even think I could raise $2,000. But I just kept getting emails from people and cheques in the mail with little notes attached from people who said 'I hope this helps.'"

Thomas Staron, who trains many of the best prep basketball players in B.C. including Hills though the 3D Basketball Academy, just marvels at the maturity level of Hills. "There's a lot of adults that wouldn't even think like that," says Staron, "so she is really a girl beyond her years. To have that level of compassion, it's something that takes years to develop but it's something she already has. The line I remember from her is that she told me 'It's only hair.' Fourteen year olds don't say things like that." And most her age don't play the game like Hills does. In the Lower Mainland championship final, she put up a stat line that included 23 points, nine steals and eight rebounds. "I get some funny looks when I walk down the street, but that's OK," says Hills. "I have always known that I wanted to do things to help other people, to make things better for them because I know I am really fortunate to have what I have."

View The Province article here.