Don’t you dare call her Lauren’s little sister anymore.

Grandview sophomore Sienna Betts, now a phenom basketball player in her own right, willed the Wolves to another championship this year. The 6-foot-4 Betts led all classifications with 26 double-doubles while averaging 21.4 points and 16.5 rebounds, including a 20/20 effort in Grandview’s win over Monarch in the Class 6A title game.

For that, Betts is no longer “Lauren’s little sister.” She stepped out of the shadow of her sibling, now at Stanford, and with her dominance became the clear choice for 2023 Ms. Colorado Basketball.

“My whole life, people were considering me Lauren’s younger sister, and still this year I’m getting the ‘younger sister’ label,” Betts said. “I’d walk into the gym and felt weak being labeled as the younger sister. There was a moment where I was like, ‘I’m sick of this, I want to be my own person.’

“Her success as a player and as a person drove me to want to be better, to want be as great, but to also want to be my own person. And I want to be better than my sister.”

Without Betts, Grandview probably doesn’t even get to the Great 8 at the Denver Coliseum, much less win the title.

The Wolves lost nine times during the regular season and entered the tournament as a No. 11 seed. Betts, a key role player on Grandview’s Class 5A title team last year, averaged 20 points over five playoff games and was the tournament’s most dominant defensive player. That allowed Grandview to control the pace of the game and win low-scoring battles in the semifinals (31-28 over Centennial League foe Cherry Creek) and championship (38-28 vs. Monarch).

“She controls the paint and challenges or blocks virtually every shot they attempt in the paint,” Grandview coach Josh Ulitizky said. “The other effect she has is she also limits your attempts because she is so efficient on the defensive boards.”

Betts’ club coach with Hardwood Elite, Derek Griffin, said her ability to be a team’s primary catalyst developed last summer.

“In May, we had our first stop on the Adidas circuit, and we won all four games, but it started with her hitting a step-back 3-pointer at the buzzer to beat one of the best teams on the Adidas circuit,” Griffin recalled. “From that point on, it was, ‘We’re going to put the ball in Sienna’s hands.’ She, in turn, realized, ‘I can carry this team,’ and she took that mindset into the high school season.”

Betts already has a tall stack of Division I scholarship offers, including Stanford, UCLA, Arizona, Notre Dame, Tennessee and Louisville. Not bad for a player who once considered giving up basketball in middle school, when hoops was No. 2 to soccer.

“Sienna wasn’t a starter on our seventh grade team — she was coming off the bench and she was floating between our top team and our second team,” Griffin said. “She was at a tipping point of deciding whether or not she wanted to play basketball. She was sick of struggling. She could rebound and defend, but not much else consistently well.”

When the pandemic hit in 2020, while most everyone else’s world was thrown into disarray, Betts’ came into focus. She enrolled in online school and spent hours at the gym every day with Griffin, who saw a player “who had a fear, and a frustration, of not being good and not being as good as her sister, and that fueled her.”

“That eighth grade year was a big mental and physical leap because I completely changed my mindset,” Betts said. “It was sweat, tears, struggle and finding a way to believe in myself and that if I kept working, I could be great too.”

As a freshman, Betts averaged 10.4 points and 9 rebounds. Grandview had just lifted the trophy last year, and Betts was already thinking about this season and the leadership role she’d inherit with her sister and Division I guard Marya Hudgins off to college.

“The minute last season ended, I was wondering to myself, ‘How is next season going to be?’ I knew I was going to have to change and adapt because I’ve never had to be the leader I was this year,” Betts said. “I had to mature a lot, especially with the schedule we played and the growth we went through.

“I also had to learn and reflect on how I behaved in those (losses) as a leader. If I have a negative attitude or the minute the game starts going against us I show it, I know my teammates feed off that. So I had to truly learn how to stay positive and relentless in any situation.”

This summer, the left-handed Betts is focused on improving her right-handed dribbling, transition game and outside shooting. If the 16-year-old improves all three, adding more guard abilities to an already dominant forward skill-set, Grandview will be a state title favorite each of the next two years.

“If she can establish perimeter shooting more, every team is out of luck,” Griffin said.