The opponent was a skilled 15-year-old, not backing down.

What about the next shot?

"Jump shot," the teenager said.

"Back up," an older man on the sideline yelled.

A typical-enough summertime hoops game, except for this: The players were mother and daughter. The 46-year-old mother was not backing down, either. She wanted to win - anybody could see that - but really, she had another goal in mind: impart everything she knew about hoops to her daughter.

"Give her everything in me," the mother said later.

The first couple of years, the daughter just tagged along, sitting on the single bleacher row at the recreation center. By all accounts, she usually looked bored.

"I wasn't that into it," Betnijah Laney said.

Her mom had some of the best girls' basketball players in the city working out in that gym. Every Saturday morning during the school year, Yolanda Laney led hours of drills. She had gone to this gym herself while a teenager living in the West Queen Lane projects in Germantown. She had always been a force as a player: an all-American forward at University City High; an all-American at Cheyney, when she played in two Final Fours against the likes of Tennessee; briefly a pro in Europe before she got her law degree from Temple.

Even as a lawyer working for the solicitor's office in Atlantic City, Yolanda couldn't leave the game behind. She began the Saturday morning drills in 2001, commuting from her home in Delaware. Dozens of top area players have picked up tips from her.

The best of them may turn out to be her daughter.

"I was around it too much for me not to play," Betnijah said.

Now she's the force. Going into her junior year at Smyrna High in Delaware, Betnijah already has scored more than 1,000 career points. Not quite 6 feet tall, she scored 52 points in a game last season, breaking Elena Delle Donne's state record by a point. Betnijah averaged 29.6 points a game in 2008-09 and made USA Basketball's under-16-year-old national team that will play in Mexico this summer, and she sat behind Connecticut's bench on Senior Night last season.

She's a bluest-chipper. The Huskies and Rutgers and everybody else are recruiting her.

But Betnijah's first passion was dance. She used to go to Brenda Lee's Dance Studio on Stenton Avenue. "Ballet, tap, jazz. I think that helped with her footwork," her mother said.

Betnijah wanted to be a cheerleader. Mom said that was fine. Her younger brother, Shakaris, now 13, was into basketball. Betnijah could cheer for him. She still tagged along to the workouts, and about five years ago she told her mother, "I want to play."

She was in dress clothes. Her mother told her to change. A dress code is taped to a wall at the rec center: 1. ATHLETIC SHORTS ONLY. 2. BASKETBALL SHOES OR SNEAKERS ONLY. If that wasn't clear enough, there were more rules. No boots or street shoes. No cutoff shorts. Not even sweatpants or warm-ups while playing. The gym is for serious, sweat-inducing hoops.