woman dictates the action; more often the guys gang up.

This season, though, a 27-year-old former Rancho Cucamonga High School girls basketball player was in there cookin’ — and I don’t mean in the kitchen on the CBS Studio Center soundstage.

Baham won the $750,000 grand prize with one of the most dominant showings in the show’s history. I won’t belabor the details here, just know she was in there, hoopin’-hoopin’.

Imagine her fellow Rancho Cucamonga alumnus C.J. Stroud — the NFL’s Offensive Rookie of the Year in 2023 — having gone up against only rookies in his first professional season instead of playing beyond his years against seasoned vets.

Baham was like that. She pitched a perfect game, this communications director for Abundant Living Family Church in Rancho Cucamonga. Got out of one minor jam unscathed and last month was voted the winner of the season unanimously by a jury of evictees, something that happened only three times before.

“It feels like I won the World Series and the NBA Finals,” said the former Cougars hooper, who in 2014 hit a fourth-quarter 3-pointer in a CIF-SS Division 1AA playoff game that brought her team almost all the way back from 21 points down in a so-close upset bid against top-seeded Bonita.

Call her “fourth-quarter Chelsie,” she said in a phone chat last week. Also: “It feels so good to work so hard for a whole summer and get the dub at the end.”

Objectively, her “W” was one of the greatest of all time.

Subjectively, she was such a force that one of the podcasters who analyzes the show (yes, there are pods, too; not Locked On, but locked in?) described it like this: “She was the wind.”

Watching Baham wrangle a colorful cast and some huge personalities felt, in a way, like the embodiment of all the ways sports are supposed to benefit girls, how they’ve been proven to lead to higher self-esteem, to developing leadership skills, to being more prepared for a competitive job market.

Baham modeled all of that — in as challenging an environment as a girl can wish for. Kept her dribble alive for the whole 90-day social experiment, cut off from the outside world, having every word and movement recorded and most of them fed live to the internet, while being tasked with plotting to evict her roommates before they could successfully plot to evict her.

Through it all, she was confident, cool under pressure, competitive as all get-out.

“I just love to win,” she said. “I didn’t even think about the prize money, that part of winning, until two weeks before the game was over. ... I just wanted to get to the end.”

She played the game like a game, without taking much personally; keeping that no-harm, no-foul, next-play mentality, keeping it moving.

And this woman blessed with a preacher’s oratory chops worked, putting in reps — Big Brother’s version of putting up extra shots being to put in even more face time and have even more conversations.

So I’m telling you, even if the show didn’t initially tell us she was an athlete, I would’ve known she was an athlete, and what kind of athlete she was.

“If you see me in person, I’m tiny,” said Baham, who also played for Biola and La Sierra universities. “And I’m playing a sport that requires height. But I’m not the strongest or even the fastest, so I was a really smart basketball player. I had to be. I read the court very well, I studied players, I was a strategic basketball player.”

What I loved most about her Big Brother strategy: The 5-foot-2 former team captain didn’t make herself smaller, she made herself valuable. She was the player her fellow house guests wanted to keep her around because they came to depend on her for guidance ... as she led them gently away from her money.

That included former Penn State football player Cam Sullivan-Brown, who finished third, and runner-up Mackenzie Manbeck, a former all-state high school volleyball player from Texas who’d earned a scholarship to Houston Baptist — fellow athletes who went to the end with Baham, but who weren’t as familiar with the game and stood no chance against the floor general who’d been calling all the shots.

“What I learned in sports is to work hard, not to give up and to make others better is to make yourself better,” she said. “That it takes late nights and early mornings, studying when no one else is, sacrificing when nobody is willing to ... and it paid off. The lessons I learned as an athlete carried into the Big Brother house.

“And when I have kids in the future, they will definitely play sports.”

Baham knows best: Those skills play in the game of Big Brother — and life.