Cassie Heinrichs (Courtesy UW-River Falls)

RIVER FALLS, Wis. — Since graduating Sleepy Eye St. Mary’s High School in 2019, Cassie Heinrichs has continued to build on her basketball resume at the University of Wisconsin-River Falls.

She’ll continue building on that basketball resume this fall after signing a contract to play with the DCU Mercy, an Irish Women’s Super League professional basketball team based in Dublin, Ireland.

Heinrichs, a 1,000-point scorer for the St. Mary’s Knights girls basketball team and three-time Tomahawk All-Conference player, finished her senior year of basketball with UW-River Falls this past February. She averaged 6.8 points per game in 84 games at UW-River Falls, shooting 39% from the floor and 33% from beyond the arc.

Heinrichs said she’s always wanted to play basketball overseas, and now she’ll have that chance.

After graduating UW-River Falls this past May with a bachelor’s degree and having one more year of basketball eligibility due to COVID-19, Heinrichs said she wasn’t planning to return to school. But out of curiosity, Heinrichs entered her name in the transfer portal to see what came back.

What came back was a Division 1, full-ride offer from Northern Illinois University in DeKalb, Illinois. Heinrichs said she’d have loved to attend the school and play for the Huskies, but by the time the offer came in, she was two days away from signing her pro contract.

“I wanted to do both so bad, but it was just unfortunate that I had these two fantastic opportunities that little Cassie dreamed of,” Heinrichs said. “What 10-, 12-year-old doesn’t dream of DI or professional, that’s what you dream of. And now I’ve got these two awesome things, got to pick one, what if I pick the wrong one? All that. So that was definitely difficult.

“But I’m definitely proud of just the journey because it was not an easy one by any means. Lot of roadblocks, lot of injuries, just tough. So I’m honestly just happy that I made it this far in general. A little luck on my side, definitely good people in my corner helping me get where I need to go.”

Heinrichs’ initial intro to the Irish basketball came with the help of UW-River Falls women’s head basketball coach Shelby Lyman.

“Kind of something maybe you don’t hear a lot about is basketball in Ireland,” Heinrichs said. “So my coach, actually when I graduated, she got me in touch with a couple of people, her former teammates, people that she knew that actually played in Ireland. And I reached out to them, I asked them about their experience, they said they loved it, it was the coolest experience of their lives.”

Heinrichs also reached out to a couple of coaches from other countries like Australia and Germany. But after hearing how big basketball was becoming in Ireland and talking with the DCU Mercy, Heinrichs signed a one-year deal.

“I talked to the secretary of the club first and they put me in touch with Mark Ingle, he is the head of DCU Mercy, which is Dublin City University Mercy, the team I’m going to be playing for, it’s located in North Dublin,” Heinrichs said. “So I got to chat with him personally, which is really cool just to get all my questions answered and dig deep into what I was signing up for and what this whole thing actually is.”

Heinrichs will also get to pursue a master’s degree in international relations while she plays for the DCU Mercy as the team will pay for her schooling at Dublin City University, along with her housing.

“First week September is my flight out, and they book all that for me, they pay for the flight, which is super cool,” Heinrichs said. “So since I’m going to be a scholar-athlete and they’re paying for my master’s degree, I do have to stay in student accommodation. But their student accommodation is a little bit nicer than ours, it’s not like the college dorms you might think of [laughs].”

Heinrichs is a good example of hard work paying off and it will pay off in more ways than one as she works for her master’s degree and plays pro basketball.

“I was never the most talented player ever, I was never the biggest, I was small, I didn’t really have a lot of natural ability,” Heinrichs said. “But I decided that I wanted something and I was, like, ‘All right, I have my work cut out for me.’ Then you just have to do the work. If you keep working your butt off, something good is going to come of it eventually. I can’t tell you when that’ll be, but just work your butt off and you’ll get where you want to go, I promise.”

While Heinrichs said she’s “very German,” she looks forward to her move to Ireland in September for the next chapter of her basketball career.