The Year When It Ended is almost done.
For the DMV-sports obsessed – and/or anyone currently braving the mall traffic so as to return the well-intentioned but totally unwearable knit sweater Grandma got them for Christmas – this is decidedly not the most wonderful time of the year.
The NFL season, and D.C.’s stake in it, is gradually waning. The Ravens are fighting for playoff position. Bowl season is here. Former (?) Nationals wunderkind and uber-free agent Bryce Harper is the talk of the MLB hot stove. The Wizards are aggressively mediocre, which is to say they’re the Wizards.
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In these parts, the zenith came in early June. The Capitals’ first-ever Stanley Cup, their glorious break from the franchise’s crushing never-the-bride existence, gave D.C. its first championship in the four major sports in nearly three decades. The inexorable drought’s end sent the District into an impromptu mass bacchanal – the kind of night fans remember long after the details of the game fade into fuzz.
Asking 2019 to reach those fairy-tale highs is probably unreasonable. Honestly, it’s kind of greedy. Still, a new year does bring new opportunities. More specifically, it offers a chance for a new group of local athletes to begin their ascent to new heights, heights reached by the Ovechkins, Harpers and Michael Phelpses before them. The new year will showcase a diverse breadth of up-and-coming athletes from all walks of local sports life. Some have shown mere glimpses of what they can do. Others have set a high bar already. All of them offer the promise of more.
As nominated and compiled by The Athletic D.C. and The Athletic Baltimore staffs, in honor of the 12 months to come, these are 19 DMV athletes you need to watch in ’19.
Luciano Acosta, attacking midfielder, D.C. United
A precocious 21-year-old named Luciano Acosta arrived at United in 2016, when a loan from his famed Buenos Aires club, Boca Juniors, turned into a club record transfer fee. The hype was real. Big things were expected. Big things did not come. Early in the 2018 season, as D.C. dully trudged through another inert start, Acosta’s frustration nearly boiled over: he skipped Audi Field promotional tours, openly pondered his departure with club staff, and wondered if expectations – and even his own ideas about where his career could go – were too optimistic from the start.
Then Wayne Rooney showed up.
(Yes, that was the 5-foot-3 Acosta on the headed finish. Yes, that piece of allegedly professional goalkeeping might still rank as 2018’s worst. allegedly. Great goal and all, but still.)
You could say the rest is history, except it’s not, at least not yet. Rooney’s signing lifted everyone and everything at D.C. United — and provided the city with the year’s most enjoyable non-Caps-related sports narrative — but no one benefited more than Acosta, whose 15-goal explosion coincided precisely with the former’s arrival. There’s no reason to think a full offseason with England’s all-time leading goal scorer won’t yield similar positive effects in 2019 and beyond. La Joya, “The Jewel,” might shine more brightly yet.
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Ariel Atkins, guard, Washington Mystics
In April, with the seventh pick of the 2018 WNBA draft, Washington Mystics coach-slash-general manager Mike Thibault selected Texas guard Ariel Atkins. This raised more than a few eyebrows among Nike New York Headquarters’s various draft war rooms, which is a polite way of saying most people thought Thibault was crazy. Far safer, far more renowned prospects were still very much on the board; the league hadn’t even invited Atkins to the draft.
Those eyebrows aren’t arched quite so high anymore. A couple months after the draft-night shock, Atkins, 22, promptly put up 11.3 points, 2.4 rebounds, 2.1 assists and 1.3 steals in 22.5 minutes per game in her rookie regular season – which she then promptly followed with a breakout role (15.2 points, 3.7 rebounds per game) in the Mystics’ first-ever run to the WNBA Finals, including a 20-point, 7-rebound performance in the decisive fifth game of the semifinals, on the road, against Atlanta. Thibault’s team is still led by 2015 MVP Elena Delle Donne and All-Star guard Kristi Tolliver, but Atkins’ tireless energy and sheer hoops savvy have made her the league’s most pleasant surprise.
Shakira Austin, forward, Maryland Terrapins
Shakira Austin is only just embarking on her college basketball journey. By all accounts – particularly that of her coach, Brenda Frese, who leads the Big Ten’s most reliably successful women’s hoops program at the moment – her game is still in its embryonic stages, Austin’s size and athletic ability compensating for a relative lack of polish. This is kind of scary. From the jump, the No. 4 prospect in the 2018 NCAA recruiting class is one of her sport’s best rebounders, posting a 10-point, 11.8-board, 2.7-block line that doubles as an ode to peak Ben Wallace. The season is just seven weeks old; Austin has been named the Big Ten’s frosh of the week four times. Now think about how good she’s going to be this time next year. See? Scary, right?
Gervonta Davis, WBA super-featherweight champion
For all of professional boxing’s issues, you have to love its little idiosyncratic anachronisms. For example: At some point in the last century or so, someone decided that boxers absolutely, no matter what, must have nicknames. Oh, also, these nicknames must be placed between the boxer’s first and last names, and bonus points are awarded for alliteration and/or puns. Sorry, folks. These are the rules.
Gervonta Davis, Baltimore’s own WBA super-featherweight champ, is no exception, though there appears to be some confusion over what his current nickname actually is. Wikipedia, most boxing-focused sites, still use Davis’s tremendously straightforward nom de guerre of “Tank.” However, Davis’s Mayweather Promotions bio – and Davis’s Twitter profile – tout him as “The One.”
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The good news here? Both fit. After a distinguished (206-15) amateur career, the 24-year-old Davis is 20-0 as a pro, with 19 of those victories coming by knockout. In April, he took his first belt; in February of 2019, he’ll take on former three-division world champion Abner Mares at the Pechanga Arena in San Diego. At his current pace, it shouldn’t be long before Davis’s titles outnumber his nicknames. (Unless, you know, he picks another. Which would be kind of awesome.)
Azzi Fudd, guard, St. John’s (Washington, D.C.)
Azzi Fudd isn’t just the top hoops prospect in the class of 2021. She is considered, as a matter of basically universal consensus, the best high school-aged female basketball player on Planet Earth. By the end of her freshman season at St. John’s in Northwest D.C., she already reached something approximating LeBron James-in-Akron renown. This summer, she became one of the first two girls invited to Stephen Curry’s elite – and previously all-boys – SC30 Select Camp in California, along with Cameron Brink, a Stanford commit.
Fudd already knew Brink’s game; the week before, they’d been part of the U.S. Under 17 national team that won the gold medal at the FIBA 2018 World Cup in Belarus, beating France 92-40. Fudd averaged 9.7 points per game during the tournament, leading Team USA in three-point shooting (9 of 16, 56 percent), which is slightly more impressive than what most teenagers produce on their summer jobs.
At the Curry camp, she won the camp 3-point shooting contest and a chance to take on The Man himself. Chef Curry won, but Fudd already has an invitation from arguably the greatest shooter in NBA history to come at him again in 2019, when she’ll be all of 16. Has anyone secured the broadcast rights? This revolution needs to be televised.
Derrius Guice, running back, Washington
In the NFL, torn ACLs are a fact of life – a brutal, horrifying fact, to be sure, but nonetheless an understood, ever-present risk. Which is to say that if anyone could be calloused against the news of a serious knee injury, a professional football player would be him.
And yet when Washington rookie Derrius Guice suffered his season-ending knee injury in August, veteran Chris Thompson couldn’t hold it together. “This is my first time ever shedding tears for a player,” Thompson told reporters one day after an MRI revealed the extent of Guice’s injury, suffered on his seventh carry in his first-ever pro game. Thompson spoke about seeing Guice after his diagnosis, and how much it killed him to see the rookie “faking the happiness.”
The point is, Guice’s injury was devastating. The good news is ACL tears are nowhere near the career death sentence they were 15 years ago, and Guice, who’ll just have turned 22 when training camp opens next summer, is likely to be back in time for the start of the 2019 regular season, when his progress will be eagerly monitored by fans already thrilled by that handful of electric preseason touches in his all-too-brief debut. Stay tuned.
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Katharine Holmes, fencer, Team USA
Every so often in life, you come across people who are ludicrously, casually good at almost everything they do. They’re not just good at one sport, they’re good at all of the sports. Also: super smart. They manage their time effectively. They cook delicious food. They play two instruments. They speak three languages. Their stuff is always organized, but not too organized; they’re not weird about it, you know? They make eye contact. They take a genuine interest in what you’re saying, even if what you’re saying isn’t interesting. They have impeccable taste in everything.
Katharine Holmes might be this person, or at least close to it: according to her Team USA bio, at age 15, she was “a finalist for 2008 Sports Illustrated Sports Kid of the Year,” above which there is no higher honor.
In 2011, after graduating from National Cathedral School in Northwest D.C., Holmes enrolled at Princeton on a fencing scholarship, then took two years off to train for the 2016 Rio Olympic Games, then returned Princeton to finish her study of – wait for it – neuroscience. Neuroscience! This past year, the 25-year-old Holmes was on the women’s epee team that came from the seventh seed to win the world championships in China, the first U.S. women’s epee world title in history.
Also, she took this photo with a sword in her hand.
We rest our case.
Marlon Humphrey, cornerback, Baltimore Ravens
Thanks to his remarkable talent and the position in which he employs it, rookie quarterback Lamar Jackson is always going to be the more famous of the Ravens’ group of new and emerging talent. (Winning the starting job from Joe Flacco before the end of Jackson’s rookie season won’t hurt on this front, to be sure.) Yet cornerback Marlon Humphrey, a 2017 first-round choice, has arguably made as big an impact on the Ravens output this season – not least of which in Dec. 16’s 20-12 shutdown win over Tampa Bay, when Humphrey, playing through a groin injury, made the a key interception of Bucs quarterback Jameis Winston. Jackson may be well on his way to mainstream crossover stardom; Humphrey looks headed for a decade-plus of grognard cult appreciation.
Ty Jerome, guard, Virginia Cavaliers
DeAndre Hunter is the positionally ideal, glaringly obvious oncoming NBA talent. Kyle Guy is the former Indiana Mr. Basketball jolting into the space behind screens, burying the subsequent 3s, and holding his follow-through for effect. Ty Jerome would readily admit he doesn’t catch the eye in either of these ways. That’s why he’s Virginia’s secret weapon.
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As good as Guy and (especially) Hunter have been in their unbeaten start to the 2018-19 season, the Cavaliers’ primary ballhandler has just as often been Virginia’s best, most efficient option. After two promising seasons in Charlottesville, Jerome is officially in breakout mode as a junior. His usage and shot rates are up, his turnover percentage is (way) down, he’s grabbing more rebounds, forcing more turnovers, committing fewer fouls, and refining a precise, angular style of play. Jerome’s work on the camp circuit last summer surprised NBA scouts and sparked sudden low-key interest in the 6-foot-5 combo-but-mostly-point-guard, the kind of interest no one would have foreseen a season or two ago. Jerome has rewarded the interest by not only carving out an even more integral place in UVA’s setup, but by being more effective in nearly every tangible way.
Katie Ledecky, literal superhuman
Here’s a thing David Foster Wallace once wrote about watching Roger Federer play tennis:
It’s hard to describe — it’s like a thought that’s also a feeling. One wouldn’t want to make too much of it, or to pretend that it’s any sort of equitable balance; that would be grotesque. But the truth is that whatever deity, entity, energy, or random genetic flux produces sick children also produced Roger Federer, and just look at him down there. Look at that.
Watching Katie Ledecky propel herself through a body of water elicits pretty much this exact emotional effect.
She just graduated from Stone Ridge three years ago. She already has six medals from two Olympics – five golds and a silver. She’s still 21.
Seriously: Just look at her in there. Look at that.
Mac McClung, guard, Georgetown Hoyas
Rarely has the gap between a prospect’s Internet fame and his ratings by recruiting services been as wide as McClung’s. Before arriving on the Hilltop, the Gate City, Va. native was at once an unremarkable three-star recruit and a YouTube mixtape sensation. Open-floor dribble tricks and dunk contest wins don’t exactly fit seamlessly into the college game, but Hoyas coach Patrick Ewing – starved for attacking guards a season ago, and eager to establish a partnership with talented freshman point James Akinjo – is already throwing big minutes, and plenty of touches, McClung’s way.
Anthony McFarland, Jr., running back, Maryland Terrapins
In 2016, as a high school senior – one ready to rack up lord-knows-how-many-yards at DeMatha – Anthony McFarland suffered a broken fibula. He nursed his injury, redshirted during his first true year at Maryland, and slipped well below the casual fan’s college football radar … only to re-emerge, fully formed, in College Park this fall. Despite a crowded backfield – and the tragic, and tragicomic, state of Maryland football as a whole – McFarland’s 1,107 yards from scrimmage set an exciting baseline for much bigger things to come.
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Cedric Mullins, centerfielder, Baltimore Orioles
If Orioles fans could get excited about anything having to do with their 47-win slog through 2018, Cedric Mullins would have to be it. The 24-year-old rookie went 3-for-4 (two doubles, two RBI, one walk) in his Aug. 10 debut, and the Orioles were immediately confronted with the idea that they’d found a franchise centerfielder – a speedy, capable defender with a bat to match. By the end of his 45-game run in the lineup, however, Mullins’ numbers were questionable at best. In 191 plate appearances, Mullins hit .235/.312/.359. His OPS+ was 87. (The league average is 100.) FanGraphs’ measurements of his defense (including a -6.5 UZR) were even harsher. The longer the season went, the less exciting his arrival seemed.
Fortunately, the upside here is twofold. Mullins is still young enough to significantly improve, particularly as he becomes more accustomed to the majors, and by all accounts, he has the natural skills required to be a solid-at-worst outfielder over the long haul. And, if that doesn’t happen, the rebuilding O’s have even more outfield talent ready to pop out of the pipeline. In either case, 2019 will be a crucial year for Mullins’ career.
Ashley Owusu, guard, Paul VI (Woodbridge, Va.)
Shakira Austin was Brenda Frese’s blue-chip recruit in the 2018 class, and that’s already going gangbusters. Woodbridge’s Ashley Owusu, who’s led Paul VI to three straight state championships during her time there and has extended the school’s run of Virginia Independent State Athletic Association Division I titles to 12 in a row, is Frese’s top-rated 2019 pickup. The notion of pairing her – a tough, savvy ballhandler who can get to, and score at, all three levels, and the headliner of Maryland’s top-rated 2019 recruiting class – with Austin’s frontline ferocity for the next three years must thoroughly frighten the rest of the Big Ten. As if, you know, Maryland wasn’t already frightening enough.
Ilya Samsonov, goaltender, Washington Capitals
In 2015, the Capitals made Ilya Samsonov, an 18-year-old from an obscure Russian city that sounds straight out of a certain metal-manipulating X-Men antagonist’s origin story (Magnitogorsk), the first goalie selected in the NHL draft. For the next two years, he remained in his homeland’s Kontinental Hockey League, only signing his entry-level deal with the Caps in May of 2018. Since then – with the exception of the rare injury-necessitated call-up – Samsonov has been learning on the job with the Hershey Bears, Washington’s AHL affiliate, while at the same time adjusting to a new country, a new language, and a solemn duty to serve his roomate, Sergei Shumakov, the rare edible meal.
In short, it’s a long way to Capital One Arena. Then again, compared to how far Samsonov has already traveled – and considering the time and effort the Capitals are devoting to his development – it might not be quite so far after all.
Jalen Smith, forward, Maryland Terrapins
Positionally agnostic four-out smallball may be the hottest thing in college hoops these days, but Maryland coach Mark Turgeon has never been one to shy from a real-deal two-big lineup. In 2018-19, it would be silly to do anything but.
The return of 6-foot-10 forward Bruno Fernando (who considered the NBA draft before withdrawing last spring) would have been an imposing prospect for Terps’ opponents all on its own. That Fernando would pair with Jalen Smith – a 6-foot-10 freshman forward ranked among the 10 best prospects in a stacked 2018 recruiting class – immediately made Turgeon’s team unique. Few teams can match this front line for sheer size; combine the two, and throw in Smith’s bouncy, versatile game skill set, and the Terps ask questions most modern college basketball teams can’t answer.
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Natasha Subhash, tennis player
At first glance, Natasha Subhash, who will play tennis at Virginia beginning in 2019, might appear to be your average (read: insanely talented) college athlete. She’s good at a thing, she’ll play on scholarship, she’ll get a good education, and then a good job, and that will be that. Right?
Maybe. Or maybe not. At 14, Subhash qualified for (and performed well in) the Junior U.S. Open, and since then the Fairfax native has been on a relentless drive toward the pro ranks, practicing for “four to six hours a day, six days a week” while taking online classes from Fairfax County Public Schools. At the moment, she is ranked No. 612 in the world in women’s doubles. Breaking onto the pro tour is – spoiler alert – really, really, really hard. But Subhash isn’t far off.
Victor Robles, outfielder, Washington Nationals
Caring deeply about whether a total stranger goes from tenuously well-paid to fabulously wealthy is not exactly rational behavior, but nothing about sports fandom is particularly rational. (This is why it’s fun.) And there are few moments in fandom quite as fulfilling as seeing a precocious, long-awaited youngster – a kid your club has patiently supported, nurtured, and developed for years – finally make good on his promise.
Bryce Harper’s free agency notwithstanding, the make-good moment might be the singular hope of the Nationals’ 2019 season, and a necessity for the team to move ahead seamlessly if Harper leaves. The Nationals are fortunate enough that Juan Soto burst onto the scene last year, finishing second to Atlanta’s Ronald Acuna, Jr., in National League Rookie of the Year voting after hitting .292, with 22 homers and 70 RBI in 116 games, with a .406/.517/.923 slash.
But the focus in 2019 will be on centerfielder Victor Robles, the dazzlingly gifted 21-year-old who has spent most of the past five years being touted as the Nats’ top prospect and one of the top two or three in the sport- and who would replace Harper in the outfield if Harper leaves. (Robles would not replace Harper in right; that position would be manned by Adam Eaton, who’d move over from center to make room for Robles.) The classic five-tooler has gotten incrementally closer to a full-time spot in the Nats’ lineup over time, only to see his progress derailed by fallow periods, injuries, or both. The breakout hasn’t happened – yet. One way or the other, 2019 may be the year.
Donnell Whittenburg, gymnast, Team USA
Remember the stuff about Katie Ledecky swimming? About how there’s something deeper there, something about watching a human being exceed our collectively understood physical limits, something about being present when a physical being transcends?
Right. So the experience of watching Baltimore gymnast Donnell Whittenburg train is, admittedly, a totally different proposition. But it is just as mesmerizing, in its own way.
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The 23-year-old, who made three event finals at the 2015 World Championships, was an alternate on the 2016 U.S. men’s gymnastics team in Rio. The close miss drove his ambitions of making the 2020 team in Tokyo; after finishing third in the all-around title at the U.S. championships in 2017, Whittenburg looked as if he was well on his way. Collarbone and shoulder injuries have slowed his progress this year, but he presses on, pushing his body to new places, occasionally clad in a high-altitude mask that makes dude look like Bane if Bane stopped being lazy and ever got to the gym. It’s pretty wild.
Yes, we have our faults. But sometimes human beings are pretty awesome
(Top Photo: Maryland Terrapins running back Anthony McFarland: Photo By Mitch Stringer/USA TODAY Sports)