Senior student-athletes Anna Johnson and Clyde Love play for different Colorado Academy teams, but they have one big stat in common: 1,000, the number of points each scored—and quickly surpassed—during their four years with CA’s Basketball program. Johnson and Love both celebrated reaching the huge milestone during this past winter season, as their Varsity squads made it all the way to the “Great 8” (Girls) and Championship game (Boys) of the CHSAA Class 4A State Tournament, held at the Denver Coliseum, in March 2025.
But competing for the Championship after wrapping up memorable Senior seasons as team captains isn’t the only thing these two standouts share. Johnson and Love literally grew up together, playing youth basketball and attending St. Anne’s Episcopal School from pre-kindergarten through the eighth grade, when they both came to CA for high school. Their families are close, and cherished photos show the two future stars posing side by side in sports and school gear at various points over the more than 14 years that they have known each other.
Their twin successes as CA Mustangs were destined from the start, it seems.
“Whenever we see each other in the hallways of the Upper School, we joke about who got the most points in the last game,” explains Johnson.
“Yeah—we have been playing basketball together for a really long time,” adds Love.
The two friends, who once staged their own head-to-head free-throw competition at a CA talent show, embarked on their journey together around first grade, when they both fell in love with sports. Love’s passion was basketball, which he pursued through elementary and middle school, encountering the CA Basketball program for the first time in sixth grade when he was playing with the “feeder” program run by the legendary CA Boys Basketball Coach Steve Hyatt. He has also competed with the CA Varsity Soccer team.
Basketball wasn’t Johnson’s first love—she plays tennis competitively, too—but after being part of Cherry Creek High School’s feeder program in middle school, she had so much fun on the CA Girls Basketball team during the winter of her Ninth Grade year that she immediately made it her main sport. “Can I play this in college?” Johnson asked her coach at the time. She joined a serious club, and there was no looking back.
It turned out to be a great decision: Johnson ended up breaking CA’s all-time Girls Basketball scoring record, and she has regularly earned shoutouts in local sports coverage as one of the school’s main playmakers. At the end of the 2023-2024 season, she was named to the CHSAA/MaxPreps All-State First Team.
For his part, Love has heard the word “dazzling” applied to his scoring consistency season after season, and he earned “Player of the Game” distinction this year too many times to count. In 2025 post-season play, though CA fell to rivals the Kent Denver Sun Devils in the Championship game on March 15, Love was the high-scorer who drove the Mustangs’ gallop to the finals.
Two-thousand-plus points later, these two friends and competitors look back on their time on CA’s courts with insight gleaned from years of experience.
Johnson notes, though CA’s program may not be as big as some of the other area high schools, “We pull in a lot of great athletes, and most of those are multi-sport players, as well. CA doesn’t want you to specialize in just one; it makes it more fun and takes some of the pressure off to know that you have another season to look forward to.”
The Athletics Department also nurtures most of its student-athletes for all four years of high school, a huge plus for Love. “Coming into the Soccer and Basketball programs,” he observes, “I got to meet people across grades and interests that I might never have had the chance to get to know otherwise.”
Academics and the arts have provided plenty of highlights, too. Johnson is busy preparing to mount her Senior Portfolio exhibition of oil paintings, saying, “I knew I wanted to do Senior Portfolio the first time I heard about it in Ninth Grade.” And though she admits math isn’t one of her natural strengths, she explains that she’s spent so much time in the Math Department’s offices during Extra Help time that her teachers now attend all of her games to cheer her on.
For Love, the combination of athletics and academics has been the best part of the CA experience. With a full schedule of ASR and AP courses in STEM fields including physics, statistics, and economics, Love says, “I feel really well prepared for wherever I end up.”
Love isn’t sure exactly where that will be, but there’s no doubt both athletics and academics are in his future. If Johnson has her way, the two of them might even keep their lifelong friendship streak going: When she accepted an offer this year to play Division III basketball with Claremont McKenna College in California next fall, she made sure Love was also going to apply there.
But whether this incredible duo sees four more years together, or whether their paths diverge after Commencement, they’ll surely never stop comparing their stats from the previous day’s games. The impact CA Basketball has made on their lives feels just as deep, whichever Senior you ask.
One of Love’s CA memories makes that clear: When he was just getting started with Coach Hyatt, he used to look at the commemorative basketballs displayed in the cases in the Athletic Center. One of them features the name of an idol, Elliott Cravitz ’22, who scored over 1,000 points during his own CA career.
“I remember going to CA Varsity games when I was on that feeder team in sixth grade,” Love recounts. “I thought it was the coolest thing ever to watch Elliott play. Even though I didn’t go to school here yet, I still looked up to all those Varsity guys. And then when I came to CA, I got to watch him hit 1,000 points in his Senior year when I was just a Ninth Grader.”
Johnson, too, always saw 1,000 points as something some other player would accomplish—until this year. “Coming in, basketball was my second sport. But once I committed to it in my Sophomore year, my coach said, ‘You know, you could do it.’ And then, at the end of my Junior year, when I knew I could hit 1,000 during the next season, I still couldn’t believe it.”
Breaking the Girls Basketball all-time scoring record on top of hitting the 1,000-point milestone, Johnson, like Love, believes it now—a belief these two will always share.
