Basketball was not in Alexis Roberts’ family growing up. Her father swam and played tennis while her mother played volleyball. 

But basketball was one of the first sports Roberts tried, and she quickly found a love for the game, beginning her career as a point guard with the Michigan Monarchs travel team in fourth grade. 

“As a kid, my dad would always say… ‘Alexis, you’re the floor general,’” Roberts said. “‘You have to know where everybody else is and you have to know what everyone is supposed to do.’

"Having that responsibility at such a young age kind of prepared me for the next level and beyond.” 

Over the past four years, Roberts bloomed into the floor general for Mercy basketball, serving as the team’s starting point guard for the past three seasons after fluctuating in and out of the starting lineup as a freshman for a senior-heavy 2017-18 team. 

In four years, Roberts and the rest of the Marlins have won 70 games and three consecutive district titles. 

Mercy head coach Gary Morris knows how tough it is to play point guard, yet has high expectations for whoever is in the role. 

“You are kind of, generally speaking, the coach on the floor,” he said. “The basketball is going to be in your hands quite often, and you have to make the right decisions with the basketball in terms of when to go fast, when to go slow, when to look for your shot, when to think pass first."

When Morris first met Roberts before her freshman year, he noticed her maturity. Putting her on the varsity roster from the moment she stepped onto campus, Roberts learned from senior point guard Jenna Schluter, starting at times next to her at shooting guard, but scrimmaging against her at point guard in practices. 

For Roberts, it took some time to find her role with the team, but when she came into the gym for her sophomore season she knew she wanted to be more of a leader for the group. 

As a junior, the responsibility heightened as Morris challenged his point guard to take charge and be an anchor for the offense, the centerpiece to the team's success. 

“If they can’t stop you, we won’t be stopped,” Roberts remembers her head coach telling her. 

Roberts’ career has an advantage that many other players do not have: to grow her basketball game with many of the same teammates around. 

“Not everybody has the opportunity to play with the same girls for three or four years,” Roberts said. “I think that gave my class an advantage almost because we got to learn about each other: our strengths, our weaknesses, what are our better parts on the floor, learning when to pass, when we don’t.

“It’s brought us together off the court because we have grown this wonderful bond on the court.” 

Even while the Marlins played without senior Julia Bishop for the majority of the 2021 season — a forward who Roberts said is destined to record a double-double each time she steps on the floor — that experience showed on the court. After losing three of its first five games, Mercy won 13-straight games before losing to Detroit Renaissance in the regional semifinal. 

Roberts never expected for Mercy’s season to end in any place except the state final. To her, the ending was abrupt. Each of the seniors were in awe and in tears on the bench as the realization came to each of them. 

“I don’t think it really hit me until I got subbed out at the end and I was like, ‘Wow, this is it,’” Roberts said. “I watched the clock go down and thought that this is my last high school basketball game.” 

Roberts’ basketball career isn’t over. She knows she will be playing basketball somewhere next season, despite not knowing where.

But after playing with a team for four seasons, with many of the same teammates, Roberts is just thankful, imploring her younger teammates to never take a game, a practice or a time with their teammates for granted. 

Morris knows Roberts and the rest of the senior class have left more than that one lesson through their play over the past four years. 

“If anybody saw us play, all seven of our seniors… they get on the floor, they are going to compete,” Morris said. “I think that might be the legacy that Alexis and the seniors leave for our program is the importance of… and it sounds simple to go out and compete, but it’s something you don’t have happen every year.”

Contact reporter Colin Gay at cgay@hometownlife.com or 248-330-6710. Follow him on Twitter @ColinGay17. Send game results and stats to Liv-Sports@hometownlife.com.