Aquinas hoops star Beatrice Culliton is The Star’s Female Scholar-Athlete of the Year
The top women’s basketball recruit in Kansas City took visits to two college campuses during the season. That’s it. She would have felt guilty, she told her parents, about wasting the time of any others, even though she’d not yet made up her mind.
It stands to figure, then, that Oklahoma and Northwestern thought they had a pretty good chance of luring Beatrice Culliton, a 6-3 post player finishing out her senior year at St. Thomas Aquinas.
The trip to Oklahoma came first. They provided Culliton a tour of the athletics wing of the campus, including a sprawling 150,000 square-foot indoor facility, before offering her a Sooners jersey to try on for size. A stroll through the academics setting downtown followed, including a meeting with advisors ready to guide Culliton through her desire to major in pre-med.
Before the visit concluded, though, Culliton made one more request — one that future college athletes don’t typically include on their recruiting trips.
“My one request,” she said, “was they give me a tour of the library.”
The library.
To understand the request is to understand Beatrice Culliton. She might have recently capped her high school basketball career with a third Kansas Class 5A state championship — which probably would have been a fourth if the COVID-19 pandemic hadn’t wiped out her sophomore postseason — but she can’t stray far from her first calling.
She was in diapers when she first picked up a basketball, to be sure, but that still came after she began reading — on her own, by the way. Her parents would turn to see their daughter sitting on the floor, one cover of a book spread in each hand, talking out loud to herself. Some traits don’t leave you. On a recent 10-day trip to Florida, she plowed through five novels, and what most her age would call homework, she termed a vacation.
The back end of all of this stands as a little surprise — Culliton was named the top female basketball player in Kansas City while graduating Aquinas with summa cum laude honors. Not a B-grade on her resume.
She is The Star’s Female Scholar-Athlete of the year. In the fall, she will begin her college career — basketball and academic — at Oklahoma.
The library passed the test.
“If you’ve never been,” she said. “you gotta go see it some day.”
THE ATHLETE
Culliton insists she wasn’t much of a basketball player back in elementary school — too tall for her own good, she says — but that suited her best.
Following her mother’s advice, she preferred never to be the best player on her team. That would make things too easy. She’s long embraced the challenge — taking the hardest classes she can find in the curriculum or surrounding herself with better talent on the basketball floor.
But she ran into a problem by the end of her high school career.
She wasn’t just the best player on her team. She was the best in the city.
Culliton won the DiRenna Award, presented to the top player in the Kansas City metro area, after averaging 15.3 points, 8.9 rebounds, 2.6 assists and 1.4 steals per game for the Saints, who finished 23-2.
“What she really enjoys is being better this week than the last week and better last week than two weeks before that,” her father, Edward Culliton, said. “She enjoys the progression of it.”
Culliton started for the varsity team all four seasons. Her coach, Rick Hetzel, remembers how long it took him to determine he would move her to varsity during her freshman year.
“Oh, I think it was about five or 10 minutes into the first practice,” he said.
Culliton is an old-school player in a new-school game. As the strategy has gravitated beyond the three-point line, all of her production comes in the paint.
“Great hands, great feet,” Hetzel said.
A school that has won six straight state titles calls Culliton its all-time leading rebounder and field-goal percentage leader. She finished fifth in career points.
It runs in the family. Her grandmother broke an Oklahoma high school record when she scored 58 points in a game. Her mom played. Her brothers were college athletes, and considering they are nine and 10 years her elder, she has an explanation for how she thrived playing a physical game.
That and, well, she’s a tad bit competitive. The Clue board game is banned from family game nights, for which she readily takes responsibility. If you talk to the family, that doesn’t go unmentioned.
On the floor, you might not guess it, though. In a standout career, Culliton’s standout game came against Blue Springs in a showdown of Division I recruits. She topped 20 points and 20 rebounds that day. But those who saw her play for the first time noticed something else entirely. After a basketball had rolled out of bounds, Culliton chased it down, jogged past a few players and handed it to the official.
And then she did again.
And then again.
There is a kindness to her in a game that requires intensity, apparent as she often reaches out a hand to help an opposing player to her feet. At practice, if a teammate is required to run an extra lap, Culliton will get on the baseline so the player doesn’t run alone.
“When you see her, you know she’s a good player,” Hetzel said. “But what really gets you is how much kids like her.”
THE SCHOLAR
A road trip was rarely met with silence, whether it spanned a few hours or a few minutes. Culliton would sit in the back row, nestled into her car seat, and pepper her parents with questions.
The inquiries were so inquisitive — or maybe just so out of left field — that her mother began posting them on social media.
Asked to share an example or two for this story, Lisa Culliton declined.
“Oh, thank goodness,” Beatrice said. “I’ve trained her well.”
Lisa had tried to stick to the prototypical parent who can feed their young kid any answer, but eventually, with Beatrice still in grade school, she had to relinquish.
“I don’t know the answer to that,” she finally said.
Fast forward to her senior year at Aquinas, and Beatrice’s honors statistics teacher, Brendan Curran, received a notice about recommendations for The Star’s Scholar-Athlete honor. If you have anyone to nominate...
Four sentences into a persuasive write-up, he mentioned something familiar.
“She asks good, clarifying questions because she is curious to truly understand the content,” Curran said, later adding, “A lot of questions want to know how many points something is worth or when an assignment is due. She has always wanted to understand why.”
Culliton completed high school with straight As. In fact, in four years, she never received worse than a 92% grade in any of her classes.
To be fair, she’d been preparing for high school for quite some time. As a toddler, rather than playing with something like a dollhouse or perhaps a tea party set, Beatrice would mimic a school classroom. The teacher, the students, all of it.
Before they celebrated her second birthday, and her dad swears this is no exaggeration, she began talking with her parents about becoming a doctor someday. Both parents work in healthcare, so that’s a natural landing spot, but they just knew they had a gifted kid.
She grew beyond gifted. She grew to be curious and immune to boredom. Aquinas offers students a free period during the day, which many use as an opportunity to catch up on homework or perhaps study for an upcoming exam. Cringing at the thought of relaxation, Culliton signed up to be a National Honors Society tutor during that period.
“I am terrible with free time — I don’t know what to do with myself,” Culliton said. “I just want to find something productive to do.”
Volunteering has become a regular slice of her schedule, crammed in like it’s a necessity. She coaches for the Special Olympics. There’s the tutoring. And then there is the occasional one-time project, like those at Children’s Mercy Hospital or when she volunteered to help kids with special needs.
Within 24 hours of the latter, the host called her mom.
We’d like to hire her.
People gravitate toward her, her high school coach says — teammates, classmates, whoever meets her.
She moved to Oklahoma last month. It feels like home already. helps that she has family there, including an older brother. And while it might provide her a bit of a head start as she prepared for her college basketball career, there was another draw too.
She’s a bit closer to that library.
Home, indeed.
This story was originally published June 5, 2022 at 5:00 AM.