State

by Melissa Isaacson

  There was a long pause. “You didn’t know?” she replied.

  “No,” I said. “What?”

  She leaned across the table, and I met her in the middle.

  “Miss,” she told me, “basketball saved me.”

  And there was our story and my start to this book. Some of it I knew, some I would find out, and some still comes to me in waves.

  Over the next several months, I would pore over news clippings and whatever video and cassette tapes I could get my hands on; comb through our yearbooks; and talk to Niles West teachers, students, coaches, and administrators as well as our opponents. I would badger my teammates for their recollections, and without hesitation, they complied, handing over treasured scrapbooks held together by useless strips of Scotch tape, the very act of turning each page putting them at risk of crumbling completely. But that was just the beginning.

  For the next decade, I worked and reworked the manuscript, picking it up for months and putting it down for years, struggling with doing justice to our story before ultimately falling in love with it all over again.

  This story is about one group of girls sitting innocently at a monumental place in our nation’s history. But it is not a history lesson, nor a treatise on Title IX, as significant and responsible as that piece of legislation was for our being there in the first place. Rather, it is about the sheer joy of getting our first uniforms, packing the same school gym where we were once not allowed to practice, and gaining access to life lessons previously only available to boys.

  It is about Arlene Mulder, who taught us how to believe; Billy Schnurr, who taught us how to fight; and our last coach, Gene Earl, who took a crash course in the world of girls and would never be quite the same again.

  It is about a hunger so insatiable, setbacks so painful, and a triumph so sweet that they altered the courses of our lives.

  In the process, basketball removed us from troubled homes and sad circumstances and transformed us. It instilled confidence and gave us our very identities. We were no longer tomboys or outcasts or even normal girls with unusual interests. Suddenly and forever more, we were athletes, driven by one common goal, united for one solitary purpose.

  To say that basketball changed us wouldn’t be fully accurate. In truth, I would find out, it saved us all.

  CHAPTER 1

  Our Coach

  SOMETIMES, WHEN WORK RAN UNTIL DARK and fatigue simply won out, she would spend the night in our locker room rather than drive the 17 miles home. We never knew that, of course. Just like we didn’t know a lot of things.

  Maybe we should have guessed that about our coach, Arlene Mulder, who evidently developed her work ethic as an infant, no doubt putting all the other babies to shame. The youngest of Anna and Joseph Borges’s four children, the future Mrs. Mulder was born at harvest time in the fall of 1944 and routinely plopped atop a six-foot-long heavy canvas sack, the strap secured around her mother’s waist and over one shoulder, and dragged up and down the rows of white-speckled crops as Anna picked cotton on the family’s 40-acre farm in Tulare, California.

  Arlene described her mother as a housewife who raised the kids, picked the cotton, and milked the cows when she wasn’t driving the grade-school bus. She called her father a “bona fide cowboy” who roped steers and competed in rodeos.

  As a child, our coach wore jeans and climbed trees and supposed that made her a tomboy, but no one called her that. Mostly, she was like every other farm girl whose daily chores included feeding the chickens, collecting their eggs, and mowing the grass. It’s just what was expected. And Arlene usually did what was expected.

  By the early 1950s, Tulare was recognized as the home of Bob Mathias, the two-time gold medal–winning Olympic decathlete. His father, Charles, was the Borges family doctor, and Arlene babysat for Mathias’s brother’s kids. And if it wasn’t the Mathias influence that inspired her to run track, it did not hurt that Tulare was also the site of the 1952 Olympic decathlon trials.

  As a teenager, Arlene set an Amateur Athletic Union (AAU) record in the 50-yard shuttle hurdle four-girl relay and had the scarred knees to show for it. She also played six-girl basketball and summer softball in a women’s league, games that always attracted large crowds of boys, which she eventually figured out had not as much to do with the women’s abilities as with their propensity to bounce up and down as they ran.

  When it came time to think about college, Anna and Joseph discouraged Arlene from becoming the first in their family to attend, reasoning she would “just get married and have babies anyway.” Joseph went so far as to offer his daughter a Corvette as incentive to stay home. But determined to major in education, she fearlessly set off for San Francisco State, a teachers college 230 miles north of the family farm, in the fall of 1963.

  It was there that she took up field hockey, considered becoming a nun, and fell in love with Al Mulder, none of which had much to do with the others except that it was during field hockey practice her freshman year when she first spotted Al playing soccer on an adjacent field. And while contemplating the sisterhood had her thinking of moving to a convent in Chicago, her courtship with Al moved her even more.

  After the two married and completed graduate school, Al’s job eventually landed them in the Chicago suburb of Arlington Heights in 1970 and in the same apartment complex as Judi Sloan and Tish Meyers, two physical education teachers from Niles West High School in nearby Skokie who instantly befriended Mrs. Mulder. Two years later, when a job teaching girls’ PE opened up at the school, Mrs. Mulder, now 27 and a mother of two little girls, Michelle and Alison, applied and was hired.

  It was 1972. And like most Americans outside the state of Indiana, Arlene Mulder was not overly familiar with the work of Birch Bayh. But she would find out soon enough about Title IX, a bill that was cosponsored by the 42-year-old US senator from Indiana, along with fellow Democrat and Oregon congresswoman Edith Green, and signed into law by President Richard Nixon on June 23. Title IX prohibited sex discrimination in any educational program or activity receiving any type of federal financial aid. Bayh wanted to grant the same rights and protections to girls and women that were guaranteed to ethnic minorities in the 1964 Civil Rights Act. What he had in mind was both academic and athletic equality.

  For Niles West, it was a painfully slow process to turn Title IX into something tangible. In 1907, Illinois had become the first state to ban interscholastic competition for girls. And for the next 60 years, high school sports were the boys’ domain. Even by the early ’70s, after Title IX passed, members of the Illinois High School Association (IHSA) were still preaching the old line that sports like basketball weren’t ladylike, and only seemingly genteel, noncontact activities like tennis, badminton, and golf had interscholastic competition for girls. If a girl had physical coordination, she would often be steered toward cheerleading. And the concept of athleticism was a fairly vague notion, used only in reference to girls who could keep up with the neighborhood boys, if it was used at all.

  High school girls in Illinois who were interested in working up a sweat had to be content with twice-a-week intramurals and “play days,” in which they might have a two-day softball tournament with other schools that passed for a season. They also had something called “postal tournaments,” which Mrs. Mulder and the other woman PE teachers grudgingly acknowledged as progress. These were girls’ sporting events—in swimming, bowling, and “basket-shooting”—run via the US Postal Service. In a sport like swimming, a morning announcement would be made over the PA system informing all girls interested in being timed in various events to show up at the pool after school. Those times would then be written on postcards and sent to the IHSA, and if the participants were lucky, they’d find out the results, or who “won,” a month or two later.

  This kind of cut down on the thrill of competition, but it was a start. Girls could be athletic, maybe even athletes, but definitely not yet jocks, that term commonly associated with boys who were obsessed with sports, sometimes t
o the exclusion of all else, and a label suggesting a certain toughness to which other kids aspired. Still, girls were starting to develop a mentality entirely different from what they were brought up to possess, and after the passage of Title IX, tennis and badminton were clearly not enough.

  “The time is ripe for more,” Leanne Heeren, coordinator of the Niles West girls’ PE department, told the school’s principal, Nicholas Mannos, that first fall of Mrs. Mulder’s Niles West career, writing proposals for him to take to the IHSA to include other sports like volleyball, swimming, and softball.

  They rejected every one.

  “I can’t reason with those crew cuts,” Mannos, an IHSA executive board member, grumbled to family and colleagues after fruitless weekend trips downstate, each dismissal making him more determined than ever to get through to them.

  The original proposals purposely left out basketball, a strategy Mannos adopted after being told in no uncertain terms by the downstaters that girls would not be allowed to take up valuable gym space in the winter months and, God forbid, on Friday nights, a sacred time for boys’ basketball. And furthermore, basketball was too rough for girls anyway. “I keep telling them, ‘Boys, the times are catching up with you. Get on the train here,’” Mannos told Heeren and other Niles West administrators.

  Like the other woman teachers, Mrs. Mulder had already identified the girls in her classes who had athletic skills, girls like Char Defrancesco. “This kid is unbelievable,” she told her friends in the PE department. “It’s a shame she doesn’t have an opportunity to use her natural gifts.”

  But by the fall of ’74, things were looking up. Mrs. Mulder started a girls’ bowling team and was named girls’ tennis coach when her friend Tish Meyers went on maternity leave. And that winter, the school’s athletic director, Harold “Bud” Trapp, named Mulder the girls’ basketball coach for the inaugural 10-game season, not long after the IHSA finally voted to allow girls to compete in interscholastic play. Mrs. Mulder was happy to take the job, beating out the only other applicant, locker-room matron Lucille Swift. There was only one problem—Arlene Mulder didn’t know how to coach basketball. Although she had played those six-girl games as a kid, coaching the five-man version and understanding strategy were quite a different story.

  Trapp suggested that she seek help from Billy Schnurr, the Niles West boys’ basketball coach. Though Trapp never actually asked Schnurr if he would mind, Schnurr saw an eager, interested subject in Mulder, and soon they were hunched over cups of coffee in a secluded corner of the teachers’ lounge, covering paper napkins with x’s and o’s and quietly arranging their free periods together so that he could tutor her in the game.

  At Niles West, Billy Schnurr had developed a reputation as one of the most respected basketball coaches in the state, but where it concerned Arlene Mulder, he thought it best they keep their arrangement to themselves. Mrs. Mulder shrugged and soaked it up, always one step ahead of her players as she passed on what she learned from Schnurr—the motion offense and full-court defensive press, principles he learned from following coaches like UCLA’s John Wooden and Indiana’s Bob Knight—sometimes moments after he taught them to her.

  But she added some philosophies of her own, and as she repeated to her players over and over, it was not about winning. Rather, the message from Mrs. Mulder was to set goals, work hard, and play selflessly, remembering that the team came first. She talked to her players about being hungry to practice, to improve, to perform. Oh yes, and to always represent themselves well as both ladies and athletes.

  Mulder was determined to teach her girls that they could be aggressive and athletic as well as gracious and feminine. And so she had her rules, like the one that required her players to bounce the ball to the referees rather than throw a chest pass. “Sometimes you might be a little upset,” she explained, “and you will be less likely to throw it in their face.”

  She also hated the water bottles used by nearly every boys’ team at the time, the ones with the long plastic nozzles that squirted water into your mouth and onto most of your face. To the girls, the water bottles were very cool and a sure sign that you had finally arrived. To Mrs. Mulder, they were not ladylike and so her players used Dixie cups.

  This kind of etiquette was as ingrained in Mrs. Mulder as her religion. Certain thoughts she couldn’t shake and didn’t try. And she would never forget one of her students, a girl named Nancy who was a senior in the fall of 1972, Mrs. Mulder’s first year of teaching.

  Tall, athletic, and beautiful, Nancy had been running around the track in gym class one afternoon, trying to two-step between hurdles when she slammed her shin against the bar and split it wide open. Mrs. Mulder sent someone running to get the nurse as she fashioned a tourniquet out of the nearest sock to staunch the bleeding.

  And her first cogent thought as she tried to calm the girl?

  How terrible that this beautiful girl will be scarred forever. Girls should not be put in danger.

  CHAPTER 2

  “Well, I guess I’ll go try sports”

  IT WAS BARI ABRAMS’S FAULT.

  “OK, what are we wearing tomorrow?” I asked her the night before the first day of school. The first day of high school. Assuming there had been a committee meeting of some sort among the Lincolnwood girls and that Bari was a reliable source, a loyal friend, and the obvious point person for something so critical, I took her at her word.

  And so, the next morning, it was with only the expected level of nausea and anxiety that I stepped off the bus and walked through the doors of Niles West wearing sky-blue polyester bell bottoms with a polyester seascape-print blouse tucked in. And almost immediately, I spotted Bari and the other girls in their Gloria Vanderbilt designer jeans.

  “They called me this morning,” Bari pleaded as my stomach rolled once again.

  And yet, all that considered, the Lincolnwood girls did not make the biggest impression on me that day. It was Connie Erickson.

  Connie was one of those kids everyone noticed. It wasn’t that she was necessarily the most beautiful or wore the best clothes or even had a flamboyant personality. Granted, she was a blonde-haired, blue-eyed kind of adorable that was an inescapable fact. But it was more this self-assured, positive energy that seemed to radiate from her, almost shockingly so given that she, too, was a 14-year-old just starting her first year of high school that fall of 1975.

  But then, Connie was not your ordinary freshman. No less than 8 of 11 Erickson children had passed through the halls of Niles West before her—all five of her sisters either cheerleaders, homecoming queens, or, in the case of Jeanne and Marilee, all of the above—paving a soft and comfortable path for Connie, not unlike brand-new shag carpeting.

  It wasn’t just that all the most popular upperclassmen knew Connie when she got to high school. Niles West knew Connie before she got there. And she knew Niles West. The Ericksons lived down the street from the school in Morton Grove, and Connie attended the football and basketball games, pep rallies and bonfires, variety shows and graduations from the time she was a toddler. The Niles West gym was as familiar to her as her family’s living room, the coaches like uncles, and the athletes like dozens more big brothers and sisters.

  And so it should not have been shocking at all that there was Connie that first day of high school, sitting on—not at—a table in the cafeteria amid football players and cheerleaders, laughing and joking with these people as if it were the most natural thing in the world, while 98 percent of the other freshmen either hovered in nervous clumps by the pop machine, had their noses pressed up against their combination locks, or, like me, shuttled frenetically up and down the halls agonizing over the decision to wear polyester bell bottoms rather than Gloria Vanderbilt designer jeans.

  If all that wasn’t nerve-wracking enough, there were clubs to join and tryouts to attend, and first on the agenda, for Connie anyway, were cheerleading tryouts.

  In her heart, Connie knew she was no more cheerleading material than her twin brot
her, Chris. But she also knew she was an Erickson girl and so, almost subconsciously, she found herself making her way to the gym after school.

  “You’re going to make cheerleader,” whispered Kenny Beider, a gorgeous senior, star baseball player, and friend of Connie’s older brother Mark, as she passed him in the hall. “All your sisters did,” he added. Connie tried not to blush.

  The assumption was there. Connie was supposed to follow in her sisters’ footsteps. But footsteps seldom follow a direct path, and in this case, due to the simple math of family birth order, Connie had spent most of her time as a kid with her brothers Mark, Chris, and Dave. Because of the slight gap between them and the older Erickson siblings, the four youngest were dubbed the “little kids” by the family, and if Connie was going to hang with the little kids, she had to play football and baseball and basketball—and she had to keep up.

  Of course, this did not occur to her as she joined the other cheerleading hopefuls while they stretched, gossiped, and otherwise prepared for tryouts. For three days, they were told by the freshman coach, they would practice the same routine, then perform before the judges.

  It took Connie approximately four seconds to figure out she was not a cheerleader.

  As girls leaped and twirled all around her, Connie jumped and stomped before telling no one in particular, “Well, I guess I’ll go try sports.”

  It wasn’t that she necessarily considered herself an athlete, much less a jock. She simply had no point of reference for that identity, no feeling of real belonging. The closest most of us had come to being athletes was being labeled “tomboys” for most of our childhoods. And that never had a positive connotation. You weren’t a boy. And you surely were not a girl in the way girls were supposed to be. The word tom referred to a male animal, like a cat or a turkey—not exactly flattering or something to aspire to.

  As a kid, Connie had been fairly satisfied serving as water girl for her brothers’ Pop Warner football teams. She was even more thrilled when the coach actually gave her a jersey to wear on the sidelines. But what she really wanted was to be on the field, on a real team, playing with the boys.