Long before <i>Dancing with the Stars,</i> Brooks Nader grew up on Baton Rouge restaurants and LSU football

Sports Illustrated model Brooks Nader made her Dancing with the Stars debut earlier this month. Though she now spends her days competing on the reality competition show or jetting around the world for photo shoots, there’s one place that will always be home: Baton Rouge.

Back in 2017, only six months after she’d moved to Manhattan to pursue her modeling career, Nader linked up with 225 for a profile and style shoot. (Later, she was also one of 225‘s People to Watch in 2020.)

By then, she was already paparazzi material, a star on the rise whose face had appeared in magazines and beauty campaigns and who had “public figure”-status on Instagram.

But back home in Louisiana with her family, she’s “Brooksy.” She is still the same girl who graduated from Episcopal High School and used to babysit the neighborhood kids.

“She was always a driven little thing,” says her mom, Holland Nader. “She’s one of those kids who, when she decides she’s going to do something, she is just going to do it. There is no stopping her.”

Read the full interview from the 225 archives, where Nader dished on everything from her life in the Big Apple to her very specific Louisiana cravings.