Meet the mother of the only NBA-NHL brother tandem

On Jan. 9, Tonja Stelly had to be in two places at once. That’s nothing new to her. It’s become a tradition over the past three years, whenever the NBA and NHL schedules collide in just the right way.

The Knicks were playing the Portland Trail Blazers inside the world’s most famous arena, Madison Square Garden, that Tuesday. Her son Quentin Grimes, a guard with the Knicks at the time and currently with the Detroit Pistons, had a 7:30 p.m. tipoff. Twenty miles to the east, her son Tyler Myers, a defenseman for the Vancouver Canucks, had a game at the same time, against the New York Islanders in Elmont, N.Y.

So Tonja and her husband, Ken, along with her brother and his family, hopped on a flight from Texas to New York. Tonja and Ken went to UBS Arena to watch Tyler, spending two hours bending their necks between the action in front of them and the cell phone on her lap, which featured the Knicks game. Her brother and his family were doing the same thing at MSG, with the sounds of a basketball kissing the hardwood and the Canucks-Islanders game on a tiny screen nestled in front of them.

“The people sitting around us, of course, were like, ‘Wow! You’re really into sports,’” Tonja said. “We were like, ‘Yes, yes we are.’”

Everyone knows about Donna Kelce, the mother of NFL players Travis and Jason Kelce. Most people are familiar with Sonya Curry, the mother of NBA players Stephen and Seth Curry. Very few, though, are familiar with Tonja Stelly, the mother of the only NBA-NHL brother tandem in history.

She’s a sports mom and former athlete herself, having played basketball at Fort Hays State University back in her home state of Kansas. Quentin and Tyler are her only children, and from October to April, she travels around the country, bouncing between packed basketball arenas and frigid hockey arenas to see them compete.

She gave birth to both in Houston 10 years apart — Tyler on Feb. 1, 1990, and Quentin on May 8, 2000 — but they have different fathers. As a result, they grew up apart in separate households, seeing one another only a few times a year, if that.

“I was like a single child,” Quentin said, recalling his upbringing.

Three months after Quentin was born, Tyler moved to Calgary with his father, Paul, who was in the oil and gas business, and that’s where the hockey took hold. He had already started playing the sport in Texas — around age 7 — but the sport’s ubiquity in Canada helped him dive deeper into the game, which set him on a path to the NHL.

In the summers, and sometimes during spring break, Tyler would travel back to Texas to spend time with his mom and his little brother. Tonja would take them out to play tennis or basketball, swim or take ride bikes. They’d take annual 22-hour round-trip car rides to go see Tonja’s side of the family in Kansas. She did everything she could to make sure her sons had a relationship, even though they lived, essentially, a country away from one another.