by Mo'ne Davis
Then they brought us some soup, and then another scoop of sherbet ice cream. The sherbet was really good. I liked it a lot.
Then they brought us our entrée—we could choose between chicken and beef.
Then more sherbet.
In the back of the room, there was this big ice sculpture of my mom’s new last name and they had these fountains of liquid chocolate. They also had fruit, and all sorts of brownies and desserts. You could dip your fruit in the chocolate fountain.
And there was this big old dance floor. People started dancing. Of course, I taught ’em how to dougie. And toward the end of the night, the kids started playing hide-and-seek.
While my family was growing, my teammates were becoming like family, too.
The more time I spent with my teammates, the more I learned about their lives and cared about them. Take Scott, for example. I learned that on top of being really friendly and making you feel at home when you’re new to the team, Scott is very intelligent and has a really high baseball IQ. He understands a lot about the game. In soccer, he’s really smart with the ball. Basketball? Well, even he would tell you it’s not his best sport. But he’s one of the fastest on the team and takes pride in how much he’s improved.
After a while Scott became like another brother to me. He knows that I don’t like scary movies. He’s seen me be goofy and we share funny Instagrams and Vines. He knows that I’m clumsy and that I like to walk around in my socks. He has seen me play basketball in the gym in my socks and slip and fall down on my butt.
“One time I was with her and she had way too much sugar,” says Scott. “She kept running down the street and jumping around. We didn’t know what she was doing. It was funny.”
Sometimes I act kinda crazy at night.
“Then there was this time when we were playing football and she hit this little girl in the head with the ball,” says Scott.
I underthrew it.
“By, like, twenty feet,” says Scott. “The little girl had been running past, and then she stopped and the ball hit her in the head.”
I felt really bad about it. The little girl started crying and ran to tell her mom. Scott and a bunch of the other kids were laughing at me. Thank god her mom wasn’t mad.
Scott and I have played together for so long that when we’re on the baseball or soccer field or on the basketball court, we can just look at each other and know what the other one is thinking.
Then there’s Jahli. He was really nice to me when I first joined the team. Like, when I didn’t have a bat, he let me use his. If there’s one thing you should know about baseball players, they’re really picky about their bats. Jahli, he’s a lot like Scott—very smart. So let’s say you’re batting and you’re having problems hitting. He can look at your swing and tell you what’s wrong with it—like you’re swinging too late, or you’re taking your eye off the ball. If you swing the bat too late, you’ll only be able to hit a piece of the ball. Or you’ll be limited to hitting to just one side of the field. If you swing really late, the ball will already be past you and you’ll whiff—you’ll swing and you’ll miss. Jahli is also the kind of kid who, if something gets him upset, doesn’t need anyone to tell him that he needs to calm himself down.
Carter, he’s really nice and just super friendly—that’s just how his personality is. And he’s very funny. He has this thing he says, “Yeah, man,” in a certain voice, and it makes us laugh. So every time we see each other we say that, “Yeah, man.” And since Carter and I have the same last name, we’re always joking with each other about who’s the better Davis.
Even though we practice and play really hard, it’s fun. That’s why it’s important that we have goofballs on our team. Sami is a really good player, but he’s also the funniest person on our whole entire team. My mom has gotten really close to his mom, and now my family goes to the same church as his family. His grandfather is the pastor.
Myles has been on the team since he was three. Sometimes people call me Myles’s mom. Especially in soccer, some of the opposing players mess with Myles because he’s small, so he can get frustrated. When that happens, I always go over to help calm him down.
When I wasn’t at school, I was almost always at Anderson or with the twins, Qayyah and Yirah. I would sleep on the bus on my way home from school, and when I got home I would do my homework. When I was done my mom would drop me off for baseball, basketball, or soccer practice. Sometimes I would finish my homework in one of the classrooms at Anderson.
Usually about once a week after practice, I’d see Miss Martina to get my hair braided and curled. The refs said the beads and barrettes I was wearing were causing them problems.
One time I was pitching and the opposing coach complained that my beads were distracting them because they were white. That was kind of ridiculous, but my teammate Nasir gave me one of his wristbands and I pulled back my hair. The other team didn’t win.
Other times it was more embarrassing.
“They would make me take them out in the middle of the game,” says my mom. “Then her braids would be sticking all over her head. I would be so mad. I would think, ‘My daughter shouldn’t have to look like this!’”
When I was nine or ten my mom gave in to the pressure from the refs and took me to get a chemical relaxer to straighten my hair.
“We tried a kiddie perm, but my baby’s hair started breaking off and coming all out,” my mom says. “From then on, I kept her hair natural and in braids.”
Around that time Alicia Keys had the sides of her hair braided up toward the top of her head and a weave down the middle like a Mohawk. Miss Martina did my hair that way. We also tried other styles that I wouldn’t sweat out and that didn’t involve chemicals.
During the summer, I’d head over to Anderson, or sometimes the Christian Street YMCA or Chew Park, which are in South Philly, pretty much as soon as I rolled out of bed. Which can be in the middle of the afternoon.
“When Mo’ne stays with us, she gets up early,” says Yirah. “When she’s not with us, she wakes up at, like, two.”
Qayyah and Yirah play basketball with the boys at the Y with me.
“We play three-on-three,” says Yirah. “Me, Mo’ne, and my sister against the boys, like for ten games in a row.”
“Sometimes boys think only they can play basketball,” says Qayyah. “They say, ‘Girls can’t do that,’ and then we show them that girls can do moves, too.”
Qayyah, Yirah, and I dream of being in the WNBA. Every time we went to the gym together, we would say to each other, “One of us is going to be on TV and be famous.”
A lot of good people live in my neighborhood, South Philadelphia. There are people of all different backgrounds: Italian, Irish, African American, Mexican, Chinese, Vietnamese, and Cambodian. The Sports Complex, where Philly’s pro sports teams play, is there; so are two famous cheesesteak restaurants, Geno’s Steak’s and Pat’s King of Steaks; a lot of Asian restaurants on Washington Avenue; and my favorite pizzeria, Lazaro’s on South Street. Some famous celebrities come from South Philly, like Black Thought and Questlove from the hip-hop band the Roots; singers and songwriters like Patti LaBelle, Kenny Gamble, and Shawn Stockman and Nathan Morris from the group Boyz II Men; and Sylvester Stallone, who starred in the movie Rocky. My mom and Squirt were born here, too.
But not everyone can find a job, so a lot of people who live in South Philly struggle to have enough money. Sometimes there is a lot going on, and not all of it is good, so my mom is very protective. She never lets me walk to the Y or Anderson alone. I ride my bike with the twins, and lots of times Sami. Other times Squirt walks us over. Usually my mom, Squirt, or the twins’ mom picks us up.
My mom says that the fact that I basically live at Anderson has helped protect me from some bad things that you hear about on the news but don’t expect to happen near you.
“Mo’ne hasn’t been around any fighting and shooting,” my mother says.
I didn’t even know that someone had been murdered in front
of the store at the corner of my block.
This was my family and my town—my life. I woke up every morning and went to school. I practiced hard with my teammates. I played pickup games with my friends. Everything was so great, I didn’t imagine that soon even better days would come.
CHAPTER 7
FUNDAMENTALLY SPEAKING
IF YOU WANT TO GET BETTER AT SOMETHING OR FULFILL YOUR dreams, you have to work really hard, no matter whether it’s in school, at sports, or another kind of dream.
Even though people know me for sports, getting my education is more important to me. I have been on the honor roll since I was in first grade, and I have worked hard to stay on it. Doing well in school makes you smarter and makes you feel good about yourself. It also helps you to get into college.
My school day starts every morning at 5:50 a.m. when my mom wakes me up. Well, actually, it starts the night before, when I take a bath and lay out my clothes—usually a sweatshirt or a collared shirt with the Springside logo on it, and either a blue plaid skirt, khaki pants, a blue skort, or the blue pants that I wear that make it not look so much like a uniform. Then I lay my socks on top of everything.
When it’s time to wake up in the morning, I get right up.
“Well, it depends on who’s waking her,” says Qu’ran. “If I’m waking her up, she’ll act different than if it’s my mom waking her up. I wake her up on the weekends.”
Mostly, I pretty much get up when Qu’ran wakes me, too.
“Last Saturday, when I woke her up she said, ‘Why are you waking me up?’ So I told her Mom said to, but then she waited, like, three minutes to get up,” says Qu’ran.
Like I said, I get right up.
The school bus stops right in front of my house at 6:20, so I have to be ready when it gets here. By the time I get up, Squirt has already left for work. My mom, she works from four to midnight, so after she wakes me up, she goes back to sleep until she gets up with Qu’ran, Maurice, and Mahogany. Mahogany, she shares my bedroom. Thank god she sleeps hard, so when I get dressed she doesn’t wake up.
If I didn’t eat really late the night before, I go downstairs and make oatmeal or waffles. Waffles, they are my favorite breakfast—Eggo Homestyle Waffles with Aunt Jemima Butter Rich Syrup.
If there’s one thing about my neighborhood, it’s that it’s really, really quiet, except on holidays like the Fourth of July, when people are cooking out and playing music. In the mornings I can hear the bus coming down the street. So I throw my bright pink knapsack with my books in it over one shoulder, my other pink knapsack with my baseball cleats and Monarchs uniform over the other shoulder, and carry my blue knapsack with my soccer cleats and practice clothes in my hands. My mom, she calls me the bag lady.
I climb onto the yellow school bus and say hi to our driver, Miss Denise. Then I throw my bags onto one seat, and flop onto another. I put on my headphones and try to go back to sleep.
“Mo’ne has to ride through the whole city,” says Qu’ran. “It’s an hour and a half to two hours each way, depending on traffic.”
Miss Denise drives past the redbrick row houses on my street. There’s a vacant lot a few doors down, where they tore down an abandoned house, and this really big empty brick warehouse at the end of the block. Then we turn right, drive under the bridge where the train goes over, and wind our way through Philadelphia. We drive along the edge of my neighborhood, which is called Point Breeze, and near the museums along the edge of Center City—that’s what Philly calls downtown. When we cross over the Benjamin Franklin Parkway, if you look to the left you can see the Philadelphia Museum of Art, where Sylvester Stallone ran up the steps in Rocky. To the right you see City Hall, which has a statue of William Penn on top of it. William Penn was the founder of Pennsylvania. There are a lot of things in Philly that are named after him.
A few blocks on the other side of City Hall you can see the landmarks where our nation was founded. Places like Independence Hall, where the Declaration of Independence was signed; the Betsy Ross House, where she sewed our nation’s first flag; and stops along the Underground Railroad that helped black people escape from slavery.
Next, we drive over to Fairmount. After that we pick up my friend Senna, who’s in my grade. If I’m still awake, me and Senna will talk. Senna, she talks loud and is very funny. Then the bus goes up to North Philadelphia, where we pick up Zion, who’s on the Monarchs now. Then we cut over to Germantown.
“By the time I get on the bus, sometimes Mo’ne’s asleep, sometimes she’s up. I don’t know how she does it,” says Nahla. “Sometimes the bus is cold and she has her head against the window, her brother’s Diego blanket to keep warm, and one leg straight and one leg bent and that foot up on the seat. Lots of times I’m bored, so I count how many times her foot falls off the seat. It’s funny. Her foot falls off, and she just puts it back up on the seat, but she is dead asleep the whole time.”
School starts at eight o’clock. We have advisory group, then first and second period, and then we have a snack in the cafeteria. Abby, Alexia, Destiny, and Nahla are in a lot of my classes, and we’ve been close for a long time.
“We laugh a lot, so it’s good that we don’t have all our classes together,” says Nahla.
“Mo’ne laughs at everything,” says Abby.
Everybody knows that school gets boring and people are tired in the morning and don’t feel like going. That’s one reason why I think you should be friends with a lot of people. Because even if you’re bored, you’ve gotta think about the bigger picture, which is high school and college. Your friends will make the day go faster, you’ll have a lot of fun, and you can work together to prepare for your projects, tests, and quizzes.
Lots of times Nahla, she’s my work partner. I worry about my grades, but I’m not super worried. If I get, like, a B in a class that I should’ve gotten an A in, I know that I did something wrong. Most of the mistakes I make on tests, they’re very like, “Oh, I knew this”—one of those small ones, like I just read the question wrong so I put the wrong number, or I second-guessed myself. So I won’t be, like, super mad at myself because then I’ll just be stressed. I stay calm and ask a friend or my teacher for help.
“If she has a difficult time in math or on a test, she just talks it out,” says Abby. “Sometimes you can’t overthink it, just put a plus sign there.”
On top of taking math, I have classes like science and social studies. I really like English and art. In English, we do a lot of reading and writing and journal entries and peer editing and answering the teacher’s questions for homework.
In art class sometimes we work with clay. Like right now, I’m making a teapot. My teapot has the love sign and my name spelled out on the side, with the apostrophe on top. And for the handle, I’m going to sculpt myself out of clay.
Music is another one of my favorite classes. This year we studied Mozart and Beethoven and all those guys. It was interesting learning about how they wrote their music. And we watched this one movie about Mozart called Amadeus. It was probably one of the best old-time movies I’ve ever seen.
After school ends, I have a period of waiting till sports practice starts. So if I have a lot of homework, I might do some of it. I also do homework during extra help, which is like study hall.
When I practice sports, I work hard to master the fundamentals. Take basketball. Coach Brady, my basketball coach at Springside, teaches us that basketball is all about math. When you’re shooting from the free-throw line, the backboard runs at a ninety-degree angle from the ball when you shoot it.
“In order to throw a successful bounce pass, you have to bounce the ball two-thirds of the way between you and the person receiving the ball,” says Coach Brady. “So take that distance between the two of you, divide it by three, bounce the ball on the two-thirds part, and you will be successful.”
If you want to score a layup, the easiest way is to come in to the backboard at a forty-five-degree angle.
Basketball workouts make
me tired, and sometimes my legs hurt. After practice is over, I get on the bus, and we wind our way back through the city again.
“Sometimes on the five o’clock bus home with her, I would say, ‘Mo’ne, do you wanna stop sports? Are you tired? When do you breathe?’” says Nahla. “It just seemed impossible to me to do all that, but here’s a girl that does it so easily and you can tell that she loves it.”
Two hours later the bus drops me off at my house.
“Mo’ne is the first one on the bus in the morning and the last one off at night,” says Qu’ran.
When I get home I eat and do some more homework, then go over to Anderson to practice.
Between games, we work very hard on learning what Coach calls the fundamentals—the basic skills that each sport is based upon.
In basketball, Coach sets up bright orange cones in the gym and we zigzag through them, dribbling the ball with our right hand first. When we reach the end of the cones, we spin around. Then we zigzag through the cones, dribbling the ball with our left hand. In soccer, it’s sort of the same thing, but you dribble with your feet. So we dribble around the cones, then stop the ball and spin around so the ball rolls with us. Then we practice passing with our right foot, then passing with our left.
In baseball, we stand in front of the mirror in the batting cage with our feet planted wide, so that the V of our legs makes a triangle with the floor. We pick up the bat, then pull our arms straight back so that our front elbows are stretched but flexed in what we call the “rubber-band pose,” and we put our hands near our back shoulder. Our head is on one side of our arm and our face on the other. Then we practice our swing.
I kept practicing my pitching, and it got better and better. When you’re pitching, your goal is simple: to get the batter out. You can do that a lot of ways. One way is to make the batter swing and miss. To make that happen you can keep the batter off balance by mixing up your pitches.
The main pitch is a fastball. To throw one, you grip the ball with your pointer and middle fingers a natural width apart, but perpendicular across the seams of the ball. The seams are the red stitches around the ball, where the ball, which is made of leather, is sewn together. (The inside of a ball is made of cork or rubber and has so much string wrapped around it that if you opened it and stretched it, it could reach almost a mile.) Your thumb goes underneath the ball across the opposite seam. Then you just reach back and let it rip.