She thought she needed to be the next Oprah. Then, an epiphany: She’d rather be Ohavia.

Ohavia Phillips would rather not send text messages to people.

In fact, that’s putting it too mildly. Her eyes widen and her voice rises as the 31-year-old declares her truth: “I actually hate texting!”

No, if she absolutely has to send a message over her phone, she’s far more likely to tap the little microphone icon and record an audio message, one that almost always opens with her bellowing your name and stretching out a key vowel — as if she’s a P.A. announcer at an NBA game and you just swished a 3-pointer through the net.

Which is fitting, considering that Ohavia made her debut as a P.A. announcer at an NBA event last Sunday during the Charlotte Hornets’ preseason home opener against the Oklahoma City Thunder. She took over on the mic to call out names of scorers, fouls, possession changes and more throughout the second quarter while training alongside longtime announcer Patrick “Big Pat” Doughty, so she can be a fill-in option if Doughty ever has to miss a game.

And when LaMelo Ball swished a 3-pointer through the net to widen the Hornets lead, she called out the star guard’s name and elongated the “oooooooooooo” in LaMelo for effect.

But compared to the wildly exuberant audio messages she likes to record for people, her calls over the intercom sounded a little restrained. Similarly, when she returned in the second half of the game to her “regular” job with the team — as an in-arena co-host responsible for hyping up everything from T-shirt tosses to tic-tac-toe contests — she came off as loose and bubbly, as opposed to how she comes off in much of the rest of her life: like an outsized supernova.

Ohavia will be the first to admit that she hadn’t always been the greatest when it comes to toning down her personality. “I’m big on being myself,” and she knows, “for some people, it’s like, ‘That’s bright!,’” she says, squinting and pretending to shield her eyes.

As it turns out, though, if you want to get Ohavia Phillips to focus her big, big energy, there’s an effective way — and a not-so-effective way.

A struggle for stability at home

Ohavia was born in New York and raised in various parts of Brooklyn, from Crown Heights to Canarsie to East New York.

She was the oldest of a growing collection of siblings (a sister, then a brother, then another brother and still counting by the time she was in middle school), and recalls idolizing a celebrity who just so happened to have both a big personality and an “O” name herself: Oprah Winfrey, then the biggest talk-show star on the planet.

But as she grew up, the communities her family lived in were getting more violent, causing Ohavia’s mother, Mahalia Hanson, to begin fearing for her children’s safety. Eventually, after becoming pregnant with her fifth child, Mahalia began looking to move.

In 2005 — after a close friend of Mahalia’s who already lived there turned her on to it — the family moved to Charlotte, where Mahalia, a nurse, took a job with what was then called Carolinas Medical Center (now Atrium Health).

It didn’t go as planned.

Just a few months later, after a turbulent relationship ended and Mahalia found herself with nowhere else to turn, she packed as much of her and her five kids’ stuff into garbage bags as she could and headed to a shelter run by Safe Alliance, which provides housing for victims of domestic violence in Charlotte.

They lived there for more than three months, and “that,” Ohavia says now, “is kind of where life began for me.”

‘You have a really great personality’

During their time in the townhouse they first moved to in Dilworth, Ohavia had started gravitating toward more extracurricular activities. After her family moved into the shelter, she threw herself into them completely.

Ohavia volunteered to do the morning announcements at Sedgefield Middle School, and would come in early to prepare. She joined the debate team, signed up for intramural volleyball, got involved with dance and talent shows, often was the last one to leave activities.

Any excuse to not have to be in that place, which — as much as it saved them — was an unpleasant place for a girl to be.

“That was her way of escaping,” Mahalia says.

Adds Ohavia: “The way that I could still kind of be, like, a teenager. The way that I could hold onto my faith. The way that I could tell myself every day, Oh, we’re getting out tomorrow. Now, of course, I didn’t know ‘tomorrow’ would be three months. But it was a way to kind of keep my hope, because I’m gonna be honest … if I didn’t have those creative outlets, very candidly, I don’t know if I would have made it.”

But she wasn’t really that focused. After moving on to Myers Park High School, she continued with almost all of those activities and added a couple more to the list, including becoming a competitor at pageants like Ms. Black Teen Mecklenburg County.

She was taking a throw-everything-at-the-wall-and-see-what-sticks approach. Until one day when a local TV news reporter came to school to do a story about Adderall abuse among Myers Park students and persuaded her to share her perspective with him on camera.

Whatever Ohavia said clearly impressed him. Or maybe not so much what she said, but how she said it. “You have a really great personality,” she recalls the reporter telling him. “Have you ever thought about working in the media? You should think about it.”

It resonated with her. She was someone who would roll up paper and pretend it was a microphone at family functions, going around and interviewing siblings, aunts, uncles — anyone who would humor her. This interaction with the reporter made her realize she could actually get paid to do that.

Ohavia had him and his recommendation in her mind when she enrolled in 2011 as a freshman at UNC Charlotte, where she selected mass media as her major and journalism as a minor. Finally, she was focused.

In time, though, she would come to realize that she didn’t want that guy’s job after all.

A sudden change in direction

Initially, her plan seemed to be working out perfectly: Ohavia interned at a local TV station in Charlotte as a senior at UNC Charlotte, then was hired by the station full-time as a producer-reporter shortly after earning her degree in 2015.

Within less than two years, she was covering major national events — from the Carolina Panthers in the Super Bowl to the Orlando nightclub shooting to the 2016 presidential election. But Ohavia missed having a truly creative outlet, so in her free time she quietly launched a vlog on YouTube in which she basically would recap the day in her life.

She was generally pretty happy. Then during the final months of her contract in 2018, she says, things in the newsroom got strange.

Ohavia’s big personality, she says, started to work against her. She says from roughly August to October, she was first warned and then formally disciplined by managers multiple times for reasons ranging from hugging co-workers to simply saying things like “Hey! Good morning!” to colleagues at a volume deemed “too loud.”

She says at one point one of those managers told her: “You will never be Oprah. You will never have a syndicated talk show.”

The basic message, Ohavia says, was that she needed to tone down her personality. She believed she was just being herself and that it was behavior that wasn’t hurting anyone; that, in fact, she was exuding positive energy.

“Oh, I felt worthless,” she says. “... because (it was a rejection of) the very thing that makes me who I am.”

Ultimately, in October 2018, Ohavia says she decided to quit.

The following morning, she says, she went to a coffee shop with her laptop and no plan — just sat down and said to herself, OK, I’ve got to figure this out. And she quickly realized the thing she should be leveraging was that excess of energy.

In the coming days, she flooded local businesses with emails that all said something along the lines of this: “Hey, if you ever need an emcee for an event — I love people, I have a big personality, maybe you know me from being on the local TV news, but I’m doing this new thing now — give me a chance.”

It worked. Her very first gig was emceeing an event for a local cancer support group. From there, word spread, and speaking opportunities began to stream in.

But even though she didn’t know it at the time, Ohavia was still struggling to figure out who she was really supposed to be.

‘I was manufactured happy’

In addition to building a business based on being an emcee, she launched a brand called “The Oh Show” that a part of her thought might catapult her to the type of success Oprah had at her peak.

And for the next few years, she tried to do ... well, everything she could, basically. She continued creating content for YouTube that included one-on-one interviews with local creatives, thinkers and activists. She compiled a book of inspirational quotes. She started a podcast titled “Beautiful People.” She made radio appearances.

But she found herself without any real focus again.

Ohavia was — very much like she had done when she was a girl — just trying everything to see what stuck. In large part because she had a big old chip on her shoulder.

“Here I was thinking, OK, I quit. … We’re good. We’re gonna make it. (Forget) what (my old boss) says, we’re gonna do this,” Ohavia recalls. And by “do this,” she was determined: “‘It has to be a talk show, and it has to be this grandiose TV thing, because I have to prove (naysayers) wrong. ... I was carrying around those words like a Louis Vuitton bag, and I was like, Well, I’mma just stuff it with more things, more things, when I should have just emptied it, started from scratch.”

This attitude drove her actions and her career decisions for years. Then around the beginning of 2023, she suddenly realized her folly.

She realized, she says, that “I was manufactured happy. I was doing all the things, but I don’t think I ever asked myself if I wanted to do all the things.” She realized she didn’t. She’d always been inspired by Oprah, but the whole notion of trying to be the next Oprah? “People spoke that over me,” she says.

She realized that what made her happiest wasn’t podcasts, or books, or being a YouTuber, or bantering with radio hosts.

What made her happiest was being in front of a live audience.

Settling into her happy place

Jason Simon, vice president of fan experience for the Hornets, admits that — back in 2021 — when they first considered adding Ohavia to the mix with longtime in-arena co-hosts Jacinda Garabito and Derrick “Fly Ty” Jacobs, he had concerns. “This is almost too much energy,” he recalls thinking. “It’s hard to teach energy, but are we gonna be able to rein it in enough to fit within our existing program?”

The Hornets ultimately went with someone else.

Before the beginning of the 2022-23 season, though, they were looking for someone new to team with Fly Ty and Jacinda again, and this time they took a chance on Ohavia. As it turns out, the answer to Simon’s own question was yes.

Says Jacinda: “(When Ohavia started), I was like, ‘OK, there are a couple things that we can do to smooth around the edges. ... If you tone this down, if you tone this up, if you switch this around, you’re gonna kill it.’ ... Within a game, she did all of it and was like, ‘Give me some more tips.’ I was like, ‘Well, I don’t have anything! Those are the only ones I had, and you aced them!’”

This season, not only did the team invite her back, but Simon says “we’re looking at what are some other opportunities where we can harness that positive energy that she just gives off.”

The Hornets have tapped her to host events away from the arena, with corporate partners and schools. She recently moderated a conversation tied to the launch of LaMelo Ball’s new sneaker. Now she’s getting her feet wet as a P.A. announcer; when she made her brief debut during her preseason game training session with Big Pat last Sunday, she became the first woman to work in that role for Charlotte’s NBA team since at least 2009, says Simon (who started in his current role that year).

She’s still doing plenty of non-Hornets stuff, too, ranging from being on a panel in January about Martin Luther King Jr.’s legacy at an event put on by her alma mater, UNC Charlotte; to hosting a dance competition sponsored by Red Bull at Blackbox Theater on Sugar Creek Road in May; to interviewing her mom on stage about learning how to thrive in the face of adversity during a fundraising breakfast for Safe Alliance at Camp North End.

She’s also still doing fun stuff in studios. Just last week, for instance, she interviewed reality-TV star Bobby Lytes for VH1 for Latinx Heritage Month.

She’s not Oprah. She’s Ohavia. And she’s more than happy with that.

“I finally feel like I know who Ohavia is. I finally feel settled,” she says. “I think that as awesome of an idea as a talk show is, there’s so much more to me than a talk show.” She cocks her head back, looking a little surprised. “Damn, I never said that out loud.”

She smiles. “But seriously, when I let go of that, and what I wanted it to be —” and here she pauses, before finishing the sentence as matter-of-factly — and as uncharacteristically quietly — as anything else she’s said yet:

“Everything just got better.”