FRISCO — McKenzie Adams often has a U.S. Secret Service agent watching her every move during basketball games.
But when the Frisco Centennial point guard looks into the stands, she sees just a proud father who helped launch a burgeoning career. The fact that her dad protects former President George W. Bush is secondary to the 18-year-old senior.
“I just think of it as that’s his job,” Adams said.
That job, though, is why Adams is starring for Centennial instead of for Bryant High School in Arkansas.
During his first 10 years in the Secret Service, Gary Adams helped protect foreign dignitaries and political heavyweights such as then-President Bill Clinton, former President Jimmy Carter and vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin when they traveled. But his primary job was investigating financial crimes such as forgery and credit card fraud, which he views as the more dangerous work.
“If somebody is involved in financial crimes, you might have to kick a door in or something like that and go in,” Gary said. “[On the protection side], everything we do is planned out. It’s not as bad as you might think. … But there is still always that danger, because you carry a gun on your hip. You encounter guys that don’t really want to go to jail.”
In 2010, Gary was assigned to his first full-time protection detail — one that watches Bush and his family in Dallas. That required Gary to leave the Little Rock, Ark., suburb of Bryant, where McKenzie blossomed into such a basketball phenom that colleges started recruiting her as an eighth-grader and she received her first scholarship offer after her freshman year of high school.
The original plan was for Gary to work in Dallas and for McKenzie to stay with her mother and sister in Arkansas. That lasted seven months.
“We were just going to stay there and let her graduate,” McKenzie’s mother, Michelle, said. “One day out of the blue, [Gary] called me and left me a message and said, ‘I want you guys to come. I don’t want to miss everything Kenzie does her last two years of high school.’”
So Gary was reunited with the daughter he helped coach and teach basketball after she took up the sport as a third-grader. Dad has witnessed a superb senior season for the 5-81/2 point guard.
After signing with Arkansas — choosing her father’s alma mater over Texas Tech, Florida State, Georgia and Oklahoma State, among others — McKenzie entered this week averaging 22.7 points, 4.8 rebounds and 3.5 assists for a team that is 26-8 and in second place in District 9-4A.
She ranks fifth among Dallas-area players in scoring. And after scoring a season-high 37 points in Tuesday’s win over Frisco, she’s 11 points away from 2,000 for her varsity high school career, even though she couldn’t play on varsity as a freshman because of an Arkansas rule.
McKenzie’s father played football for Arkansas and was an all-state basketball player in high school. Her mother played basketball and volleyball at Missouri Southern State. And McKenzie’s seventh-grade sister, Mallory, is a rising basketball talent.
But it took more than good genes for McKenzie to become a player that Arkansas coach Tom Collen said “is one of the top five players in the state of Texas in the 2013 class and maybe the best overall guard.”
“I’ve never coached a kid that puts as much time into the game as she does,” Centennial coach Wesley Charles said.
McKenzie is a tireless leader, running extra sprints at practice to set an example and helping teammates with off-the-court problems. She spends three days a week honing her talents with skills coach Tyler Relph. And she still finds time to thrive academically (she has a 4.49 grade-point average on a 5.0 scale).
As a seventh- and eighth-grader, McKenzie played in an all-boys league to improve her game.
“A lot of the boys teams would laugh, ‘Oh, they’ve got a girl on their team,’” her mom said. “Before it was over, they respected her. Their team ended up winning the whole league. She ended up starting for them.”
Gary Adams has been with Bush for two years, giving McKenzie a couple of chances to mingle with America’s 43rd president at Christmas parties.
“It was overwhelming the first year,” she said. “The second year I was more calm about it.”
Does McKenzie worry about her dad’s safety?
“I guess I really haven’t thought about it, but when I think about it, it is kind of scary,” she said.
She doesn’t plan to follow her father’s career path.
“I want to do athletic training or be a physical therapist,” McKenzie said. “He says he didn’t want us to do it because he doesn’t like being away from his family. He said it’s cool getting to travel places and meet these people, but he’d rather be home with us.”
