LOS ANGELES — Home for Nirra Fields these days is her own room in a five-bedroom suite on the U.C.L.A. campus. It is not luxurious: Fields has decorated with basketball and family pictures, and she shares a common space and a single bathroom with four other students. But the space is clean and it is organized and — this is most important — it is all hers.
After the route Fields took to get to it, that is enough.
Any athlete can lay out the arc of her career as a journey, but it would take quite an imagination to conjure one to match Fields’s.