Minutes into a November game against St. Paul’s, Sophie Zirkin walked up to her dad, who also happens to be her Park School girls basketball coach, and threw her hands up.

What was she supposed to do? The defense started playing a triangle-and-2 — a hybrid concept traditionally used to key in on two premier players. St. Paul’s sent both loose defenders at Zirkin, a Hail Mary attempt to keep the ball away from one of the best high school shooters in the country.

“I looked at my assistant coach like, ‘Have you ever seen this before?” asked former Maryland state senator turned basketball coach Bobby Zirkin. “They had two big, athletic guards legit face-guarding her all over the court.”

That’s how dangerous this 17-year-old senior from Pikesville, committed to play at Division III Dickinson College, is with the ball in her hands from pretty much anywhere on the floor.

Her reputation precedes her. Sophie stands only 5-foot-3 but can shoot the lights out.

It is believed that her 130 3-pointers in 24 regular-season games set a single-season Maryland state record, beating her own mark of 99 triples in 22 games as a junior. Bobby tirelessly scoured the internet trying to find a better shooting performance in the area. Nothing came close. The Maryland Public Secondary Schools Athletic Association said they only keep records for the state tournament. According to MaxPreps, which relies on self-publishing, Sophie has the fifth most triples in the country this season. State record or not, she topped 1,000 career points in November and her jumper is impossible to ignore.

Sitting off to the side at a recent Park School practice, Sophie had trouble answering how she first learned to shoot a basketball. “I guess I kind of figured out I was talented at shooting more than anything and just really fixated on that,” she shrugged. Truth is, to some extent, she was born into it.

Her dad played high school ball at Pikesville then was recruited to Johns Hopkins, making the varsity team as a freshman. Academic issues hurt his playing career, so he spent his sophomore varsity team. Bobby then carried a basketball with him across the pond playing for the London School of Economics. He said they were the No. 2 team in the country but might’ve lost to his Baltimore County high school team.

Bobby moved home, started working in the Maryland legislature and put a basketball in his daughter’s hands from the day she was born. Although he was a 5-5 point guard more inclined to distribute the ball, his daughter showed an inclination to take matters into her own hands.

“She got put on this Reisterstown travel team with a team that was a little bit older,” he said. “And she wasn’t, at the time, athletic enough to be able to compete. But she could shoot. So they put her out there with a team that was a lot older than her and said, ‘If you get it, just shoot it.’”

Sophie’s jumper blossomed from there, to the point she’d garner the nickname “mini Caitlin Clark.”

Like the sharp-shooting WNBA first-overall draft pick, Sophie (coincidentally) wears No. 22 and ties her jet-black hair up in a ponytail. Sophie sports bright pink sneakers and has a high flick that, like Clark, can find the bottom of the net from just about anywhere — catch and shoot or off the dribble with impressive range. “The way that she’s able to get her shot off is how I want to be able to do it,” Sophie said.

When a teammate’s dad joined a practice scrimmage and chucked up a 3, he yelled “Sophie style!” Bobby pulled up a video on his phone from a narrow loss last month against Severn. With about two minutes left, down by 4, Sophie took one dribble left off a very high screen. She let it fly from the circle at half-court. Cash.

“If she sees daylight,” Bobby said, “the ball is going up.”

Sophie’s quick trigger is a product of her singularly focused work ethic.

Shortly before the coronavirus pandemic, the Zirkin family built a full-sized basketball court at their house. It was something Bobby had wanted for years. “He hates when I say this,” Sophie laughed. She called it her dad’s midlife crisis. It took some lawyerly convincing to get his wife on board. But Bobby got out of the legislature to spend more time with his daughters.

So for a basketball-inclined family, it made perfect sense.

His daughters, Sophie and Emma, a freshman sharpshooter for Park, have been the real benefactors of their father’s project.

During the pandemic, the trio spent all their time playing outside. Then, in 2023, Sophie started working out with Savannah Simmons, who played at Kansas State by way of John Carroll. She helped Sophie rough out the edges of her game, tightening her dribble and improving her athleticism, all to complement a dead-eye jumper.

Bobby said he’ll roll out of bed, shuffle into the kitchen for his morning coffee at dawn and what does he hear? The sound of basketballs bouncing outside. As long as there isn’t snow on the ground, she’s out there.

For Sophie, it’s become about more than winning Maryland Interscholastic Athletic Association games.

When her grandmother died of lung cancer, Sophie and Emma put up 1,000 shots in their driveway streaming on Facebook Live under intermittent rain, raising almost $15,000 for the nonprofit GO2 for Lung Cancer. The second iteration of the Barbara Zirkin Memorial Three-Point Challenge is scheduled for April 8-9.

Sophie will put up 500 shots at school and another 500 at home the next day. There, she won’t have to deal with pesky defenses going to great lengths to get the ball out of her hands.

“There’s not a single coach that plays us,” Bobby said, “that isn’t yelling from the sideline, ‘Stop 22!’”

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