by Mo'ne Davis
I heard Squirt’s voice behind me. “You ready, Mo?”
“Okay.”
As we were walking out of the recreation center, I realized that the big painting on the outside wall by the front door was the face of the same lady, singing. This picture was different—it was just the woman’s head. There was a white circle around her, and flowers, birds, and blue skies behind her. She looked serious and like she knew what she was doing. I felt like the lady was looking at me like she was expecting something. A few years later I would learn we had a lot in common.
CHAPTER 3
NO EXCUSES, JUST RESULTS
THE OPPOSING PLAYER RAN INTO ME HARD, AND I FELL ON THE court and landed right on my knee. I grabbed it and started crying.
“You okay, Mo’ne?” Jahli asked as my teammates all huddled around me.
Coach Steve ran onto the court. “You all right, Mo?”
I could hardly answer him because I was crying.
Next thing I knew, my mom was standing beside us. “Are you okay, baby? Did you skin it?”
She must have run onto the court from the stands. But not everyone cared about how I was doing as much as my mom and my team did.
“Get off the court, Mom,” I heard one of the fathers of the kids on the other team holler.
“You can’t just run onto the court every time she gets hurt,” another man shouted in a loud voice.
Now, my mom, she’s not the kind of person you yell at. She can be feisty.
“Oh yes I can,” my mom yelled back. “These boys are not gonna hurt my daughter.”
Truth be told, my knee hurt a lot. But this had happened before—I played basketball with Qu’ran and his friends.
“I would tell her, ‘You can’t play with us. It’s too hard and rough in this game,’” says Qu’ran. “She used to get mad and cry and stuff. So, finally, one day we let her play with us. She was out there playing rough, falling, scraping her knees. She’d get up, wipe it off, and keep playing.”
“It isn’t bleeding; you just have a bruise,” my mom said.
I wiped my tears and stood up, and checked to see if I could walk okay.
“What do you think?” Coach asked. “You wanna sit on the bench and rest for a minute?”
“I’m okay,” I said.
“I think you should go sit down,” my mom said.
“No, I’m okay.” I sniffled.
“You don’t have to play,” Coach said.
I didn’t think twice about it.
“I want to stay in,” I told them, and Mom went back to the stands and Coach Steve went to the bench.
Scott and all of my teammates gave me five. “You’re gonna be okay,” Scott said.
I was officially an Anderson Monarch. I had felt like a regular member of the Monarchs from the start of my very first practice, and now I was an important part of their games. When the team practiced, I practiced. When the team played, I played. When the team won or lost, so did I. Coach had taught my teammates to make new people feel welcome, and that included me.
There are a lot of different activities at Anderson: baseball, basketball, football, soccer, boxing, swimming, dance. Some of the kids who were really good athletes got to play on the Monarchs. The Monarchs are a travel team that plays baseball, basketball, and indoor and outdoor soccer.
Coach Steve has been running the Monarchs since way back when my mom was in high school. He wanted to give inner-city children whose parents didn’t have a lot of money the chance to compete on travel teams just like children with more money do. Coach, he really has a passion for baseball. For some reason, a lot of people think that African American kids don’t want to play baseball. This doesn’t make any sense to Coach, and he likes to prove them wrong.
A lot of my teammates on the Monarchs had known each other since they were three or four because their older siblings played on Coach’s T-ball teams. By the time I met him, Coach Steve knew or had coached almost everyone in the neighborhood, including my cousin Mark. Everybody knew Coach Steve and everybody trusted him.
To play on the Monarchs you had to play all three sports, even if you weren’t that good at all of them.
“If we had tryouts for each sport, we might win more games,” Coach says. “But I think we’re a better team because we’re like a family.”
The Monarchs also have to practice good sportsmanship and take pride in being on the team. I liked doing those things. The Monarchs were my team now, for as long as I wanted to be part of it.
I practiced basketball with the Monarchs three days a week, plus had games on top of that. Lots of times my mom brought me, but Squirt grew up playing football and basketball, and he would bring me, too. My mom had mixed feelings about me playing sports. On one hand, she didn’t have a problem with me playing, or even playing with the boys. On the other hand, she didn’t like the fact that I played sports with so much physical contact. When she was in junior high school, she had run track, which doesn’t have any physical contact at all.
My mom also had a problem with sports because of my hair. In case you don’t know this, hair care is a major dilemma that keeps a lot of African American girls from playing sports. Most black girls’ hair is naturally very thick and curly. When we sweat or our hair gets wet, it gets even curlier and can be very hard to manage.
“I didn’t want her hair to look messed up, and I didn’t want to use chemicals to straighten it,” says my mom. So she braided my hair and put colored beads and barrettes in it, and sometimes Miss Martina, her hairdresser, would braid it and curl the ends. Calling adult friends of the family “Miss” or “Mr.,” or “Uncle” or “Aunt”—that’s how a lot of African American children show their love and respect.
A few weeks after basketball started, we started learning baseball, so my mom bought me a brand-new pink-and-purple glove. I had never worn a baseball glove before, so Coach Steve had to explain how to put it on. I had played with a tennis ball, but I had never thrown or caught a baseball. Or maybe I had, but I hadn’t really been paying attention.
One day, Coach opened a door in the wall with the picture of Marian Anderson painted on it and we went into this big room on the first floor that I had never been in before. Coach called it the indoor pitching and batting cage. The room was really big, and all these nets were hanging down from the ceiling. There were mirrors on the walls, with lines of red and black tape on them. And on the wall were little posters about ideas that Coach would always talk to us about: Attitude is everything. Work hard, good things will happen. No excuses, just results.
Coach Steve told us to get in line, then he handed me the ball, backed up, and told me how to throw. No sweat. Then he threw the ball back at me. To hear him tell it, me catching the ball for the first time was a big deal.
He says, “Just as the ball was leaving my hand, I thought, ‘Oh no, she’s never worn a glove before!’”
Most kids who have never worn a glove try to catch the ball with their wrist facing up and the web of the glove facing down. If the ball is coming straight at them, it will hit the glove and bounce right up into their face.
“I was cringing because I threw it next to her head,” he says.
But I reached for the ball with the web of my mitt up and caught it. Then I turned and got in the back of the line.
“It was like she had been wearing a glove her entire life. It was unbelievable,” Coach says.
In the indoor cages, we moved from station to station. The boys had all played T-ball before, so they already knew how to hit and throw.
There was this machine that threw balls at you. It would throw twenty to your right-hand side, twenty to your left, twenty up high, and twenty below. We would practice fielding the ball.
Then we would practice batting off of a hitting tee. Coach Steve showed me how to set my feet, lower my left shoulder, and drive my hips through as I swung. It took me a minute to get it, but I started being able to hit the ball. The nets hanging from the ceiling kept everyone from hitt
ing each other with the ball and getting hit.
Coach taught every kid how to play every position in every sport. So I learned how to catch. I also learned to pitch and play first base, shortstop, and third base. In basketball, I usually play point guard, but I can also play center. Later that year, when we learned how to play soccer, I learned to play forward, midfielder, defender, and goalie. In the beginning, soccer wasn’t my favorite sport, but when I got older, I started liking it a lot more.
When I was pitching, sometimes Coach would film me. Then he would show me how major league players threw, and have me compare my motion to a major league player’s motion.
“Lift your elbow up, Mo’ne,” he would tell me.
I’d lift it. Strike!
Coach says that he started noticing little things about me. Things like how quickly I would pick up something new, like fielding ground balls from every position; that I had a natural whip in my shoulder when I pitched; how things that were usually hard to learn seemed effortless to me.
I don’t remember a lot about when I first started competing in games, but Scott and Jahli say they remember.
“When you looked around, you would see everybody’s eyes pop open really big,” Jahli says. “I even saw some fans’ jaws drop looking at her.”
“And they would stare,” says Scott. “They would kind of whisper to each other and point, and ask each other, ‘Do you think that’s a girl?’”
“Then once we got on the court or on the field and she played how she does, it was even more shocking to everyone, how she became basically one of us,” says Jahli.
Other than seeing people look surprised, I didn’t really notice their reactions. Qayyah and her identical twin sister—her name is Yirah—had always played with the boys with me.
“There were a lot of boys in our neighborhood, so we had no choice,” says Qayyah. “We were the only three girls.”
Also, I don’t know if it was always on purpose—sometimes I think they were just little kids and weren’t that good—but my mom and Squirt say that some of the boys on opposing teams played rough against me on purpose because I was a girl.
“It was one of those things like, you can’t believe this girl is better than you,” Squirt tells me. “I’m gonna throw an elbow; I’m gonna knock her down; I’m gonna try to scare her away from this sport.”
Basketball and soccer were the hardest sports for my mom to watch.
“Every time I turned around, Mo’ne was on the ground,” she says. “The boys didn’t care that she was a girl. They used to beat up my baby—throw elbows, knock her down—all the time. But soccer was the worst—they used to kick her in the shins.”
“I think they roughed her up to get back at her for being a step ahead of them,” Squirt says. “They tried to scare her away, but she would jump right back in the game.”
I guess not every boy on the other teams we played thought that girls should play sports with them, and some of them felt embarrassed if I scored on them or if they got outplayed. The boys in my neighborhood have always treated me nicely, but they don’t always like being beaten by a girl, either.
“In basketball, if we make a move and they fall or stumble, sometimes they will get mad or embarrassed and just stop playing,” says Yirah.
But I’m not out to embarrass anyone.
Coach Steve told us he didn’t want us to play dirty. It was more important to him that we show good character and sportsmanship than it was that we win. Thankfully, my teammates were very protective of me, and most of the kids and teams were fair.
But not all of them.
With certain teams, elbowing was the least of our problems. Just so they could win, some of the kids would purposely kick our shins and knock us down on the ground when the ref wasn’t looking—even when we were far away from the ball, way on the other side of the field.
Eventually, Coach taught us that we should expect dirty tricks from a handful of teams and kids. When those things happened, he would tell us to be physical right back. But when we started being more physical, we could tell that the other teams would get scared and become less aggressive. After we beat a couple of teams, the kids would refuse to shake our hands.
That’s one of the most important things about sports. Everyone hates to lose, and everyone wants to win, but sometimes you’re gonna lose—it happens to everybody, and it’s just part of the game. So Coach teaches us to always have fun and not let our moods get too far up or down.
CHAPTER 4
THE RIGHT FIT
DURING THE WINTER OF 2008, JUST A FEW MONTHS AFTER I’D started playing for the Monarchs, Coach Steve had a conversation with my mom about school.
“Have you ever thought about putting Mo in a private school?” he asked her. Mo—that’s what he calls me. People who know me call me Mo.
“No, I’ve never thought about it,” she said.
Coach Steve had gotten my mother’s attention. He didn’t know it, but she had dropped out of high school when she was sixteen, when she got pregnant with Qu’ran. After Qu’ran was born, she worked at Taco Bell during the day and went to “twilight school” at night, to finish her high school education and get her diploma.
Because of her own experience, she thought it was especially important for her children to get a good education.
“I’ve been watching her and I think she really has a gift,” Coach told her. “She’s really good athletically, but she also has this ability to analyze what’s happening on the basketball court, in a way that I’ve never seen before.”
“Thank you,” my mom told him. “I’ve always thought Mo’ne was really smart. She was on the honor roll in first grade and has been on it so far all through second grade.”
“There’s this great school that I think might be interested in her,” Coach said, and he told my mom about the school that his daughter, Stephanie, went to. I had met Stephanie at the courts. “It’s called Springside, and it is one of the top schools in the city. It’s a girls’ school—no boys would be in her classes.”
Coach went on to tell her that the school’s goal is to provide girls with a super education, but also to make them into strong people—girls with great ideas, great character, and great relationships with each other. A lot of other girls of color went there, and he thought it would be a great school for me and would prepare me to go on to college.
It turns out that Coach Steve was trying to make sure that all of the Monarchs went to good schools. In case you don’t already know this, in a lot of cities—and especially in neighborhoods where people are poor—the schools aren’t always as good as they are in many suburbs and parts of the city where people have more money. In the neighborhood I lived in, the teachers were nice, but the schools don’t have enough money to give children the education they deserve. Some kids don’t graduate from high school.
“Scott goes to Chestnut Hill Academy, the boys’ school next door,” Coach told my mom.
“I have never even heard of that school,” my mother told him. Between working and raising me, my brothers, and my sister, my mom didn’t start college until she was twenty-nine. She’s been a certified nurses’ aide since about the time that I was born, and now she’s going to school to become a nurse. She’s worked two jobs for her entire life. “I definitely want her to get a good education.”
“We would have to get her tested to see if she can get in. IQ tests and other tests that prove that she can do the work—the school is very hard,” he said.
“That sounds good to me,” my mom said. “Just tell me what I have to do.”
So Coach Steve and my mom took me to take these tests. I remember this friendly woman with blond hair, who looked like she had just graduated from college, had me play with some pop blocks.
Not too long after that, my mom told me that she and Coach were going to take me to visit this new school.
I liked the school from the minute we got there.
There were not a lot of trees in my neighborhood,
but this school was located on the edge of a forest. It was April, and I remember that all the trees were super green. There were all these bushes around there with yellow flowers and bright pink flowers. And lots of grass—these really big sports fields were across the street. My school, Francis Scott Key Elementary School, was surrounded by concrete and brick row houses.
When we went inside, it surprised me that the floors were carpet. In my school, the floors were old and wooden, and if you stepped on certain parts the floor would creak. And this school was very spread out and on one level. My school had three different floors and you had to walk up and down the stairs.
I spent the whole day at Springside School going to second grade just like I would have in my regular school. Everyone I met treated me super nice. I remember that lots of adults and girls came up to me and introduced themselves and told me something about themselves. That’s when I met my friends Abby, Allegra, Destiny, Nahla, and a lot of my other classmates. Then they asked me to tell them something about myself.
“My name is Mo’ne.”
“Monique?”
“No, Mo’ne.”
Then I told them where I went to school, and that I liked to play sports, and that I played on a team with the boys. Everyone seemed surprised almost every time I said that. I had a really fun day.
I thought I was going to go home that night and back to my regular school the next day. But after school was over, I found out that I was going to visit at Springside for one more day. My mom told me that she and Squirt had to go to work, so I would have to spend the night at Coach Steve’s house, since Coach lives pretty close to the school.