Last Mamba Amalia Holguin Is Ready to Show the World What Kobe Bryant Taught Her

Amalia Holguin has a day off from school and the entire world in front of her.

Her high school basketball team has a bye for the next round of the state playoffs. After that, right as the season ends, Amalia will turn 18, and her birthday will line up with spring break. She's thinking about how to celebrate-something low-key, maybe, just family and close friends. The senior knows it may be her last birthday at home with her parents, James and Flora, and her sister, Elisa. And then will come prom, and graduation, and then all her dreams. She will spend the summer playing hoops in Greece, where her family has roots and where she will train with the national team, and then she will leave to play at the University of Texas.

But now, it's March, and there is no school, leaving Amalia with her license and her car and the freedom that any 17-year-old would love on a stereotypically gorgeous day in Southern California.

She does have basketball practice, of course, two hours of grinding with her Sage Hill School team. But she will start hours earlier by getting up shots in the gym with one of her old coaches, and she will finish hours later with strength training and weightlifting and then another block of private skills coaching.

There are other players carrying similarly intense schedules in the demanding world of modern elite youth hoops. There are none carrying quite the same weight as the one they call the Littlest Mamba.

The plucky guard was the youngest AAU teammate of Gianna Bryant and, by extension, the last high schooler coached by Kobe Bryant. She lost a combination of beloved coaches, teammates and their parents when a helicopter crashed into a Calabasas hillside six years ago and killed Kobe and Gigi; Christina Mauser; Payton and Sarah Chester; and Alyssa, John and Keri Altobelli, along with the pilot, Ara Zobayan.

Amalia was not yet 12.

The other members of that roster, the older girls on Team Mamba, have all graduated and gone off to college. The last one remaining is Amalia. That has left her figuring out what it means to be the last of the Little Mambas, and what it will mean for her to be more than that.

When Amalia and Elisa were in elementary school, their parents decided they were ready for a dog, and they did what so many other basketball fans in the area had done before them in Southern California. They named their new dog Kobe.

Bryant was the focal point of their Lakers fandom, a symbol more than a person, impossibly larger than life. They watched his last game together in their living room. Amalia nestled into the corner of the couch nearest to the television and burst into tears when the buzzer sounded. She had just turned 8.

Amalia knew already that she loved basketball. She also knew that she was pretty good. Good enough to stand out in her local youth program. Good enough to play with older kids and hang with the boys. Good enough that Flora would soon talk with her about choosing between soccer and hoops. Amalia knew already the answer was basketball.

Then came a weekend tournament where Amalia's team played in the same gym as Gianna Bryant's. (Kobe had gotten involved with the roster following his retirement but was not yet its namesake and mastermind. This team was called the Riptide.) Flora and James watched a typically strong game from Amalia, scoring at will, controlling the action. So did Kobe Bryant.

"Is number 10 your daughter? She's really special."

James can repeat this easily, a story told a thousand times, a moment that became a great dividing line in their lives. As it was happening, though, he could barely understand it.

"Listen," he said apologetically, his first words to Kobe Bryant, "I didn't hear anything you just said."

Gigi Bryant and her teammates were 12. Amalia was 9 going on 10. Nearly all of the other girls had been on the same local All-Star team. Amalia had never met them. They all lived in or near the ritzy community of Newport Beach. Amalia lived an hour away in West Covina. But when Bryant saw Amalia, this curiously intense little kid with a sweet jump shot, he believed he saw the missing piece for the team that would soon be called the Mambas.

That left just one problem. Bryant had told the team they needed a big. The girl he brought to practice was smaller and younger than everyone on the roster. Flora recalls the reaction: This is our big? And she recalls, too, how Bryant laughed off the surprise. "We'll grow a big!" he said. (They did get a real big eventually: former NBA center Zach Randolph's daughter Mackenly.)

For the first two months or so, "I couldn't really grasp anything," she says. "I was just starstruck." But that feeling soon disappeared. She became the beloved little sister of the team. It was unlike anything she had experienced before: The expectations were higher, and the work so much harder, but the group was so much closer, too. Kobe became Coach Bryant. And this is where she struggles sometimes. It can feel like people ask the wrong questions.

They will ask, for instance, whether she really met Kobe Bryant. What do you mean?, she wants to say. Bryant was there for every practice and every game. "Twice a day," Amalia says of their weekend and summer sessions. "He wanted to go three times a day." His standards were high. "He didn't treat you like your typical 10-, 12-year-old," she says. But that was magical for a young player who only ever wanted to be seen as a serious baller and not as a little kid. Yet she was, of course, a little kid, and Bryant knew that, too.

At the end of one early training session, Amalia burst into tears. It was not that she was exhausted so much as simply "homesick," she remembers, even though she was only an hour away from her neighborhood and her mother was right outside the gym. She felt like she had pushed herself further than she had ever been from home.

Bryant scooped her up. He carried her off and talked until he got her giggling. No more practice this weekend. "He had a great brake pedal," says Brenan Ghassemieh, who became Bryant's personal trainer after he retired from the NBA and then worked extensively with the Mambas. (That began after the umpteenth time Bryant asked how to adapt a workout for 12-year-old girls.) "I do think a lot of people on the outside looking in would say, ‘Oh, that was overkill, too much practice.' But I think as a coach and a parent, he knew what to do."

This is another question that feels wrong. People will sometimes ask Amalia about the hypercompetitive Black Mamba. But he was her coach, the father of her beloved teammate, someone who pushed hard yet always knew when to schedule a rest day. He did not yell during games. ("He knew if he stood up or felt too animated, it might intimidate the girls," Ghassemieh says. "He kind of went a little Phil Jackson.") Bryant had them do strength training and countless drills but did not use running as punishment-except for one fatherly point of concern. When temperatures dipped into the 60s, every girl needed a sweatshirt, or she would run. No catching a cold on his watch.

Bryant took them to get manicures and pedicures. He rented out Dave & Buster's so the girls could have the run of the place. Birthdays and holidays were celebrated as a team. "He was such a private person," James says. "But these girls were such a big part of his life."

Amalia wondered early on if her family should rename their dog. "It's kind of awkward," she says. "Having your dog's name as your coach." But Kobe the Dog already knew his name, and besides, Kobe the Coach never had to know. Until one day at practice, Flora got a panicked call about the dog getting into something in the kitchen.

"Kobe ate what?" Flora gasped.

Bryant turned around, confused, and then laughed and laughed when they explained.

The roster was impossibly close. Bryant had wanted strengths and styles to complement one another on and off the court. Even the way the girls bickered felt special-"Like how me and my sister fight," Amalia says. They called themselves a sisterhood. No one could find a better word for it.

And here is another question that feels wrong. People ask Amalia about the Mambas as if they were any other team, a group that practiced and saw each other at games and then went home. No one seems to understand that it felt so much bigger. The girls spent nearly all of their time together. It started with their demanding training, of course, but that carried over into sleepovers and endless hangout sessions.

The result was an AAU experience that was completely ordinary in some ways and totally extraordinary in others. Bryant did not want a staff loaded with NBA icons. His lead assistant was Christina Mauser, a former gym teacher and local mom of three, whom the girls called the Mother of Defense. "He just wanted it to be down-to-earth and normal and never make us feel like we had to be under the spotlight," Amalia says. But, of course, when they walked into a gym, everyone knew.

Cameras would come out. Strangers asked for pictures, or worse, took photographs of the preteen girls without asking. Bryant had security for them at every game. They did not hang out with players from other teams-a back room was set up for them at tournaments to avoid people swarming Bryant. If a player needed extra water, a security guard would leave for a refill. This strange dynamic made their circle even closer.

But proximity to celebrity also came with perks. Their basketball education featured incredible guest speakers and trainers. Bryant ushered the girls into the Phoenix Mercury's locker room to meet Diana Taurasi and into the Las Vegas Aces' locker room to meet A'ja Wilson. They worked out with Tracy McGrady and Sabrina Ionescu. Bryant got a private dining room for a team meal with Devin Booker. When he decided they should watch an elite girl closer to their age, he brought in Azzi Fudd, then a top high school prospect and now a star at UConn. The Mambas were even on a March 2019 cover of SLAM. Bryant handled the interview-the girls posed for photos but did not talk to reporters.

Bryant ordered photo albums at the end of each of their first two seasons. They feature those superstar meetups, the courtside seats, the magazine cover. And there are, of course, game photos, too. But there is mostly everything that made the girls sisters: giggling in hotel rooms and splashing each other at pool parties and blowing out candles on cupcakes. Between the experiences that no AAU team in the world has ever had, there were the experiences that every close-knit, sisters-for-life preteen friend group has always had.

There is a third photo album, too. It begins like the earlier volumes-the girls playing and laughing and practicing. There is a holiday party from December 2019, girls and parents and coaches all squeezing into the frame with presents on the table next to them, Gigi and Alyssa and Payton wrapped in the arms of teammates. Then comes January 2020. The pages then show only funeral programs and memorial tributes and candlelight vigils.

After the helicopter crash, the girls watched the basketball world mourn Kobe in terms of what he meant to the game, permanently memorialized in his jersey. It felt wholly unconnected from what they saw in their own hazy grief. They had lost Coach Bryant, who brought them all together, who joked about going to their weddings, and Coach Christina, who taught them defensive stances and showed up for them every day. They were mourning three precious, irreplaceable pieces of their sisterhood, Gigi and Alyssa and Payton, and their dear parents.

Team Mamba shuttered. But as the girls split across other top AAU programs in Southern California, they had their high school futures to consider, too. Their plan had always been to play together at Sage Hill. A private school near the Bryant home in Newport Beach-Gigi's older sister, Natalia, was a student there-it was better known for academics than athletics. Bryant had been intrigued by the possibility of the girls building up the program together.

Five of the eight girls stuck with that plan. In the fall of 2020, four would start as freshmen at Sage Hill, and two years later Amalia would follow, their little sister finally catching up. The fivesome carried the weight of their legacy together. Amalia loved her first two seasons at Sage Hill alongside her old friends Emily Eadie, Annabelle Spotts, Kat Righeimer and Zoie Lamkin, collectively boosting the school into a new division of competition. They understood each other implicitly, and they held each other through grief and joy alike. They were best friends, but they were something more, too.

And then, like any kid sibling, Amalia prepared for her surrogate older sisters to graduate and head off to college.

Well, after they leave, what's next? Amalia thought. Like, I'm going to be left alone.

All five Sage Hill Mamba girls had been training with NBA alum Darren Collison. Amalia kept working with him-focusing on ballhandling and playmaking. ("She wants this so bad," Collison says. "She's serious about her craft.") And her father thought it might also be useful to contact an old coach.

Brandon Holmes ran the youth program where Amalia had played in elementary school. He had known her when she was a shy, serious kid dribbling circles around older players. Amalia was now looking ahead to her junior year, her first season without the other Mambas, and James thought maybe she could benefit from working again with Holmes.

"The first thing I thought was, Are we going to be able to connect like the way that she connected with Kobe?" Holmes says. "Can I teach her something? Will she be receptive?" He made their first workout deliberately tough. Amalia did everything he asked, but she "didn't say two words the whole workout," Holmes remembers. Afterwards, he gave her a hug, but he figured that she might not come back. James called. She had loved it.

Over months of sessions, Holmes finally saw the goofy little sister that she had always been with those who knew her best. He saw how much her game had developed-her smooth handles, her impressive court vision, her deep shooting range-and how desperate she was to make herself even better. And he saw what it meant for Southern California to look at her and see only Kobe's Littlest Mamba.

"When I train her, I don't want anybody in the gym," Holmes says. "I don't want anybody with their cameras out. It's hard for her to navigate that-everybody knows that she played with Kobe."

Amalia never wanted to shy away from how much their relationship meant to her. Yet as Bryant grew increasingly mythologized, remembered as a legend rather than as a real person, Amalia was seen as a chance for outsiders to access that legend themselves, rather than as a real, grieving teenager. "If I have a bad game, it's all over the internet," Amalia says. "It's all over everything, like, Last Mamba didn't have this game." Everything she did was linked to him.

"People don't take that into consideration, being so young and dealing with something so tragic," Holmes says. "And people are constantly talking about it. It never, ever goes away."

Amalia had grown into a serious college prospect. A crafty, confident combo guard, who stood only 5' 9" but played above her size, she would have her pick of major programs. And she had also grown into a new perspective on her old team.

She was just old enough to know how young she was at the moment when her world changed. "Nobody really has a set life at 10," she says. There was so much that she had not fully understood then. Bryant used to encourage them with his signature motivational quotes. Some of them had just washed over her. Being great isn't easy-or everyone would do it. "I was like, O.K., I don't really know what that means, but sure," she says. "But now, looking back on it …" During tough workouts, Amalia still hears Coach Bryant's voice in her head, and Coach Christina's, too.

Nor had she not realized how rare it was to have such a tight group. Even at 10, Amalia had known the Mambas were unlike most teams. But she had not yet understood just how difficult it would be to find more of that sisterhood in the years ahead. She felt, on some level, that she was always searching for something that she had already had.

"I need to find a place that felt like my past," she says of her recruiting framework, "and like what I had before."

James took her to UCLA and USC games when she was a kid. Very much a child of Southern California-she has still seen snow just once in her life-she thought she might want to play her college ball at home. But when it finally came time for recruiting, she says, "I feel like I needed to go be away from home and just grow as a person."

Her first official visit was to Texas-fresh off its run to the 2025 Final Four and positioning itself for another in '26. She liked the bonds that she saw on the roster between starters and bench players alike. She liked that Longhorns coach Vic Schaefer was never going to go easy on her-or, for that matter, on anyone-but she liked that he could joke around with everyone, too. She liked that his daughter was on the coaching staff and that he introduced her to his wife and son. This was it. She canceled her other visits.

The program liked what it saw in her, too. "What separates the kid is that she's just so competitive," says Schaefer.

People often look at that competitiveness and see Kobe. The Littlest Mamba. Yet that had always been Amalia. That was the kid playing two grades up, the kid who pushed at workouts until she cried. "That kind of fire has to burn for a long time," Ghassemieh says. "It has to be genuine. It wasn't Kobe giving her this fire of emotion and inspiration, and then this horrible accident happens, and now she's just dragging herself just to prove something. This is just who she was."

That has crystallized over these last two years, where she has been not just the Littlest Mamba but the Last Mamba, as she turned 16 and 17 and now 18. Amalia has always said that she plays for Gigi, Alyssa and Payton; for their parents; for Coach Bryant and Coach Christina. Her basketball experience has been framed by that loss. But she does not want to be completely frozen by it. Of everything that she has picked up over these last few years, her floater and her knowledge of how to move off the ball and her growth as a more vocal, persuasive leader, she is especially grateful for this: She knows that even when basketball feels impossibly tied up in grief, the game has the power to keep carrying you through, and it will eventually bring you somewhere else.

"She had to grow up a lot faster than everyone else," Sage Hill coach Jethro Julian says. "She's ready to just show the world who she is."

So on her day off from school, Amalia puts up a hundred shots in the gym on a quiet morning with Holmes, and she practices with Julian, and she lifts weights with Ghassemieh, and she runs some drills with Collison. And in a rare down moment, between all of this, Amalia sits in the bleachers at Sage Hill, where she is a little more than a week away from her final high school game.

This is where Coach Bryant had said they would all play, where they would go to class and learn to drive and get asked to prom and hopefully play for a state championship. Some of them never had the chance to start. Now there is only Amalia left to finish.

"Only eight girls have had the experience to tell this story in the whole entire world," Amalia says, curls piled on top of her head for her next workout, looking across the gym to where her name is on the wall. "And there's how many people in the world? Like, it could have been anyone. But it was me that got chosen."

Which is both correct and not quite. Bryant recognized her fire but did not start it. It could not have been anyone. Really, always, it had to be her.

This article was originally published on www.si.com as Last Mamba Amalia Holguin Is Ready to Show the World What Kobe Bryant Taught Her.

Copyright ABG-SI LLC. SPORTS ILLUSTRATED is a registered trademark of ABG-SI LLC. All Rights Reserved.

This story was originally published April 21, 2026 at 4:00 AM.