Watch: Highlights from the East-West girls basketball all-star game
Watch highlights from the East-West girls basketball all-star game
Nearly 2,500 miles separate Los Angeles, California from Corry, Pennsylvania.
LA’s population of nearly four million dwarfs that of Corry, a city of roughly 6,000 residents. Some 500 miles east of Corry sits Boston, Massachusetts, a city of more than 600,000.
What do these places have in common? For Jody Burrows, the answer is basketball.
Burrows starred for Corry Area High School in the early 2000s before playing collegiately at Northeastern University in Boston. A career in coaching now finds her at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles.
Quite the change of scenery for a woman who once dominated Erie County League opponents both on the hardwood and the softball diamond.
Burrows is among nine inductees in the Erie Sports Hall of Fame’s 2025 class. Even beneath the California sunshine, a phone call from former Corry girls basketball coach Bill West brought Burrows back to snowy Corry, where she started an ongoing career in athletics.
“It honestly gave me chills when (West) told me,” Burrows told the Times-News via phone. “(My induction) is probably a testament more so to the people and relationships I’ve built around basketball and softball.”
Beavers had game
Burrows remembered two things about her two-time Erie County League champion Corry girls’ basketball teams: The Beavers were ‘tiny.’ But they were tough.
“I think every game that we played, we thought we could win it,” Burrows said. “That was a collective buy-in from the whole team, but I think it started with the coaching staff. They made us believe in us, even though we were undersized against everyone in the ECL.”
West, a passionate coach still in his early 20s when hired, led Corry to its first PIAA basketball victory during Burrows’ senior year. Burrows scored four All-Erie County League basketball selections, a second-team PIAA All-State nod as a senior, and earned Most Valuable Player of Pittsburgh’s 2003 Girls Roundball Classic.
Burrows ranks third all-time in scoring at Corry and first in career assists and steals. She was twice awarded Times-News Player of the Year before forging a collegiate career at Northeastern, where she still ranks sixth in career assists and third in assists per game.
“I love basketball. I love learning it, watching it, studying it, and I certainly love playing it,” Burrows said. “I was fortunate to play for people who invested in me and made me believe in me even when I didn’t.”
More than a hooper
Burrows also starred as a softball catcher, scoring three All-ECL nods before missing her senior season due to injury. These Corry teams, with some crossover athletes from basketball, won multiple ECL and District 10 championships.
Burrows, though, returned to hoops upon graduation. She traded Corry’s rural hills for the concrete shores of Boston, staying at Northeastern to start her coaching career after four seasons as a player.
“I knew pretty young that sports would probably be my ticket out,” Burrows said. “I knew there was something bigger out there. Not necessarily better, but something I wanted to experience.”
Teammates eased adjustments to city life. Next came coaching stops at Bates College, Case Western Reserve University and the United States Naval Academy.
After a five-year break from coaching, Burrows settled at Loyola Marymount, where she recently completed year three as an assistant.
Home is Corry, she said, and always will be. But Burrows enjoys quality basketball in the West Coast Conference and values the relationships she’s built through sports.
Whether in rural Pennsylvania, southern California or coastal Massachusetts, it’s all just basketball.
“I’m always a flight away,” Burrows said. “I’ve traveled to a lot of cool places around the world and basketball has been the constant.”
Contact Jeff Uveino at [email protected]. Follow him on X @realjuveino.
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