Whether it was every weekend at the YMCA basketball court or in a small alleyway between condos, starting at the age of five, a little Annika Shah was out for hours, basketball in hand, alongside her father Bijal and brother Devan.
“I think part of those memories is somewhat of my ‘Why,’” Shah said. “That’s what created the love for the game because family is super important to me and that’s something that brought together my family.”
Shah’s father, Bijal, grew up in Chicago during the Michael Jordan era and fell in love with the sport, though he wasn’t allowed to participate in many extracurriculars, Shah said. So, he set out to ensure Shah and her brother did every extracurricular possible.
Shah played tennis, soccer, softball and taekwondo, wherein she earned her first-degree black belt. But she always found herself back on the basketball court.
From the time she started playing club basketball in second grade, her coaches moved her to play with boy’s teams.
Shah said she attributes a lot of her grittiness and basketball knowledge to growing up playing with boys.
“Boys, they are taller than you, they’re stronger than you,” Shah said. “It kind of built me into who I am today and separated myself.”
In high school, Shah, a 5 foot 3 point guard, began playing for an Adidas-sponsored Amateur Athletic Union (AAU) youth program, Peninsula Elite, where she said she felt she had been working harder than ever to get noticed.
“A lot of times, I got overlooked because I’m small and not the most athletic,” Shah said. “I just felt everyone else on my team was getting looked at and I wasn’t because of just who I am and what I look like.”
After Shah’s sophomore year club summer session, she was riding a high. She started to get noticed by some UC schools, Ivy League institutions and some smaller colleges.
She was named Central Coast Section Division 1 Most Valuable Player and became the only sophomore public school athlete ever to make the California All-State Team, according to the Cal Poly Athletics website.
And then, as everything was falling into place, it quickly shifted for Shah.
Shah’s “defining moment”
One day in the summer before her junior year, Shah decided to play in a tournament for her high school team, Palo Alto High School. Shah rarely played for her high school in the summer due to her rigorous AAU basketball schedule.
After reaching for a pass from her teammate, the player guarding Shah ran right through her leg.
“It all happened so fast that I can’t really remember all the emotions that happened in that moment, but I do remember kind of just having a little bit of a panic moment,” Shah said.
Shah eventually got up and walked to the bench, thinking she could still play. Then, a tingling sensation hit her leg.
She would later realize she tore her ACL and meniscus.
“That was my first major injury that I was like, ‘What is this?’ I don’t know how to sit out from basketball,” she said. “I don’t know what my life’s gonna be because it was so much basketball and then I had to not play for a year. I was kind of lost for a little bit.”
Determined to bounce back from her injury, Shah got surgery a month later and stayed on top of her physical therapy.
“We talk about this in our program a lot, that everybody has a defining moment,” Cal Poly Women’s Basketball coach Shanele Stires said. “I think Annika’s defining moment was that injury in high school.”
Nearing the end of her recovery in March 2020, just as the sport seemed back in reach, the pandemic ceased all in-person basketball.
All of the universities that expressed interest in Shah prior to her injury and the pandemic never called her back, except for one: Cal Poly.
“Obviously, I just remember that moment, my parents were on Zoom with me and I was sitting in the middle and my dad’s about to tear up and my mom’s on the edge of her seat,” she said. “That was like a moment that I’ll never forget, just getting that first Division I offer and, you know, it happened to be my only Division I offer.”
Shah was recruited by Cal Poly’s previous head coach Faith Mimnaugh, before she retired in 2022.
Becoming a pivotal player
Currently in her junior year at Cal Poly, Shah leads the team in points, averaging 12.2 points as of Feb. 5 with significantly more attempts than any other player on the team, according to Cal Poly Athletics.
When Cal Poly switched over coaching staff, Stires noticed that Shah immediately bought into the coaching staff’s message, she said.
“She was so passionate about, you know, turning this program into a winning program and so she’s just somebody that we’ve really anchored on and really relied upon to start building this program into a championship level one,” Stires said.
Junior forward Sydney Bourland and current roommate of Shah said that she leads the team by connecting with players on a deep level and building their trust. Stires called her a voice the team “looks to and rallies around.”
“I just think she’s a great example of what I think what passion and hard work and dedication and determination can do,” Stires said. “And I think her basketball career is a living testament to that and it’s very inspirational.”