State

by Melissa Isaacson

  Mrs. Mulder ran into practice on the first day as if she were in a race, whistle blazing as she grasped her note cards, pausing only to blow strands of her dark, wavy hair off her forehead as the varsity and JV teams gathered together briefly in the girls’ gym. The seniors on the varsity team looked like grown women. Maureen Mostacci was tall and quiet with long, dark hair, amazing red suede Converse shoes none of us had ever seen before, and a graceful quality about her on the court. She was also nice to the younger players, which made her somewhat rare among the upperclassmen.

  Pat Conklin, the dark-blonde-ponytailed point guard, gave all the short kids hope with her aggressive style and fearless shooting. And Sue Schroeder, a forward, was platinum blonde and pretty and possessed a figure the likes of which most of us could only dream of having. Maggie Heinz, we heard, was an unbelievable softball pitcher and, like Pat and Sue, mostly sneered at the freshmen.

  Karen Wikstrom was physically frightened of all of them. A freshman, Karen began having doubts as to her place on the varsity team about 10 minutes into the first practice, when Sue Schroeder boxed her out from under the basket and nearly bounced her out of the gym. Karen had never before experienced girls being so physical, and most of us had never before seen it.

  One thing became quickly apparent about most of the senior girls: they were confident. That was easy to tell just from listening to their boasts and from watching Pat hoist shots in practice from everywhere but the bleachers. But somehow the hustle wasn’t quite there, nor the team attitude that Mrs. Mulder was preaching.

  “Pat!” Mrs. Mulder would shout. “Shirley was wide open under the basket. Wide open. Look for your teammates.”

  It was subtle at first, but it did not take long for the real leaders on the varsity team to emerge, and one was a sophomore and the other a freshman. Shirley and Connie echoed Mrs. Mulder’s pass-first directives and team-first mind-set, their confidence, superior skill, fierce competitiveness, and humility allowing them to get away with it.

  Our JV coach, Nancy Majewski, was in her first year on the job, and we often found ourselves looking over to see what varsity was doing beyond the bifold door that split the girls’ gym in two, straining to hear what Mrs. Mulder was saying.

  One day early on, Mr. Schnurr brought in some of his players, who were already more than halfway through a very successful season, to show the girls’ JV and varsity teams the fundamentals of a full-court pressure defense, a strategy predicated on defending the length of the court after scoring a basket, and something that required lots of practice.

  Because Mr. Schnurr was in charge, the demonstration took place in the Boys’ Gym, a forbidden place for the girls’ teams. And even as future Olympic gold medal–winning gymnast and Niles West senior Bart Conner performed extraordinary routines on the balcony above the gym, our attention never wavered from Mr. Schnurr and the boys on court. To us, Mr. Schnurr was every bit the celebrity Bart was, and so were his players. And as Connie was called up to participate in the demonstration, she wanted only for all of us not to embarrass ourselves.

  Mr. Schnurr grabbed Connie around the shoulders and walked her up the sideline, showing her how to trap the man with the ball, his boys playing the parts of ball handler and co-trapper with Connie. Next, he put the ball in play, and we all watched, thrilled when Connie did exactly as she was told, racing over to the trap and cutting off the ball handler, but with a speed and fluidness that had Mr. Schnurr shooting Mrs. Mulder raised eyebrows and a subtle smile.

  Mr. Schnurr held our attention like no teacher ever could. It was as if a magician were suddenly tipping his hat and showing us how to perform his tricks. So this is what the boys were doing out there and this was how they did it. Slowly, entry to this wonderful and exclusive club became ours, and the world of basketball was opening up to us in a way we had never been exposed to before. Terms like traps and backdoor cuts, strong side and weak side, now made sense. Mr. Schnurr stressed that the full-court press was the weapon we would use to demoralize our opponents on defense and that on offense, the ball was “like a treasure chest filled with gold” and that we could not, under any circumstances, give it away.

  One afternoon, we worked on a type of full-court press called the diamond-and-one, or 1-2-1-1, an aggressive and sophisticated defense that was high-risk, high-reward. If the opponent broke the press, it would likely lead to an easy basket. But if the defensive team worked in sync, if everyone knew their roles and committed fully to them, it would lead to turnovers and easy scores in bunches. It took smarts and athleticism. And because it required so much effort, it not only exhausted the opposition but also improved team chemistry because it required fresh legs, which necessitated rotating more players in from the bench. It was perfect for us. Perfect for Mrs. Mulder, who encouraged her players every practice to think, act, and play like a team.

  Performed correctly, it could break games open, and the very fact that Mr. Schnurr was sharing this with us, that he entrusted us with this knowledge and had faith in our ability to pull it off, made it imperative that we not let him down—even if he had to raise his voice to make his point.

  “Shirley, move!” Mr. Schnurr implored at one point. “Cut off the sideline, cut off the sideline.”

  The move required quickness, perhaps the only skill Shirley was lacking. And she teared up in sheer frustration. Mr. Schnurr looked over sheepishly at Mrs. Mulder, grimacing at his miscalculation. Sure he had gone too far, he reminded himself that we were girls and that he might want to back off. What he did not know, because he did not yet know Shirley well enough, was that she was not upset by his yelling but by the fact he had to yell at all.

  Shirley gave me a ride home and on the way, she berated herself, infuriated she had not gotten to her spot in the press in time, hadn’t jumped on the trap with Connie and pressured the boy with the ball. She hadn’t cut off the sideline, which was a sure way for the offense to break the press. We were improving, but Shirley was afraid if she didn’t perform precisely as Mr. Schnurr wanted her to, if we all didn’t, he might stop coming around.

  “Shirl, it’s fine,” I said. “You were great.”

  “Miss, I was not great,” she moaned. “I need to be better. We all need to be better.”

  Like Connie, Shirley was always clearly gifted. She had powerful hands and a solidness that gave her awesome power as a hitter in softball and as a rebounder in basketball. Yet, she also possessed an agility and touch that made her a natural tennis player and blessed her with one of the softest jump shots we had ever seen.

  She was also blessed with a D cup, the subject of endless wonder to the rest of us, though an albatross to Shirley and her 5-foot-8 frame, which never seemed to move quickly enough for her.

  Shirley always seemed much older than the rest of us, smarter in that worldly way that did not necessarily reflect any more experience with boys or a genius much beyond pretty normal honor roll stuff, but there was just an air of common sense to her that the rest of us did not always demonstrate.

  Raised in a conservative Jewish home, Shirley was the third of four children born to Elie, known as “Al,” a native of Egypt, and Mimi, who was born in Lebanon. In the house, Shirley’s parents spoke a combination of Arabic, French, and English, all of which made a visit to the Cohens both an enlightening and somewhat dizzying experience. Shirley’s first language was laughter, a low giggle that began somewhere deep inside her soul and made you feel much funnier than you actually were. Shirley had a great sense of humor, but she was never silly, particularly when it came to basketball.

  Inherently, we all knew these sessions with Mr. Schnurr and the boys were something special, that we were special, and that this scene was probably not being played out in any other girls’ basketball practices around the state, and we hungered for more.

  Practice was almost always an education and an introduction to pain that we had never before experienced. Among other things, we began running “suicides,” the dreaded staple of every boys’
basketball practice in history and now of our domain as well. It was a drill in which you sprinted from the baseline to the closest free-throw line, then ran back to the baseline; to the center court line and back to the baseline; to the far free-throw line and back; and finally to the far baseline and back, touching each line with your hand.

  They were called suicides for obvious reasons, but I loved them. Maybe it was because at barely 5-2, I didn’t have to bend down very far to touch each line. Or maybe it was just because I was annoying as hell and always had been when it came to showing off my quickness.

  As a little kid at Jewish Community Center day camp, I would constantly challenge other kids to race me. In hindsight, I’m pretty sure they viewed me in the same way you might look at the kid in school who asks the teacher if there is any homework. But my challenges extended to pretty much anyone in my line of vision, including my father, who I only knew as having gray hair and an ever-present stash of Tums in his breast pocket. Nevertheless, I would often urge him to race me from the parking lot to the front doors of the bank on our weekly Saturday morning errands run.

  Carrying with him approximately $30 of excess change in each pants pocket, along with a fairly sizable belly, he would run with painful-sounding pants accompanying each step, the rattling coins providing the background soundtrack as I would make it to the bank with roughly enough time to eat lunch, read the paper, and possibly learn a foreign language before he got there.

  So eager was I to establish my speed that I even fell for the oldest gag in the big brother handbook: agreeing to do almost anything for my brothers—run upstairs to the kitchen to get them Cokes, run down the street to Dairy Queen to get them Mr. Mistys—if they said they would time me. “What was my time?” I’d ask breathlessly, sweat trickling down my forehead and Mr. Misty juice running down my arm.

  One of them would then look very officially at his watch and reply, “It was your best yet—6:32.05.” And off I would go, happy as can be and not the least bit aware that they had made up the time.

  To be challenged at basketball practice was fun, and I established myself as the best suicides participant on the JV team, something I’m sure no one else but I took note of or would lay claim to. There was very little scrimmaging in either the JV or varsity practices, just drills and more drills—dribbling around cones while switching hands, defensive slides, full-court two-on-ones. Our thighs burned, and most of us relished every minute of it.

  Or at least Connie and I did. Though she was on varsity and I was on JV, enough of our drills overlapped that we quickly detected in each other more than just a love of basketball but an obsession with competing and an almost unnatural attraction to virtually anything close to it. If the teams were doing wall sits, we’d eye each other, wordlessly trying to last longer even as everyone else moved on to the next drill. And when it came to anything involving quickness, I’d use Connie as my gauge, as I knew she was the quickest in the gym.

  The day before our season began, our parents received a letter in the mail from Mrs. Mulder congratulating them on our accomplishment of making the team and warning them:

  Our practices are long and strenuous and our games will be filled with the pressures of both excitement and disappointment, but the girls have enthusiasm.

  I need your understanding and support for all the girls at home and at our games. Girls’ sports are new and we are certainly no supershow. It means so much to the girls to know you are backing them.

  Few did. For some parents, it was no doubt a lack of interest. For most fathers, getting off from work early to attend games that began right after school was not an option. And so, for that first game, there was a modest sprinkling of moms, assorted friends, and a couple of teachers.

  I was so excited I had barely been able to sit still that day in class. My mom was coming, driven by my sister-in-law Alysa, and it wasn’t hard to scan the temporary bleachers set up in the girls’ gym and find them. Despite our scratchy red uniforms, I was in my comfort zone, harassing my opponents on defense and scoring mostly on layups off steals and on free throws off drives down the lane that I had no business attempting. If I made any impression, it was on hustle more than anything, frantically sprinting and jumping as if this were the one chance in my high school career to prove myself.

  The moms who came to our games quickly struck up friendships, huddled together in the bleachers while trying to decipher what they were watching. Often, they cheered at inappropriate times, like when one of us was called for a foul or traveling. When it became especially embarrassing, the offending mother’s daughter would have to glance up in the stands with a look that said, “Not now, not now,” and the moms would look sheepish and giggle and resume cheering for the wrong things.

  In other ways, we were forced to play catch-up.

  The previous year, in the girls’ first season, the Maine South coach threatened to protest the varsity game won by Niles West because they claimed it was not played on a regulation-size court. And since that’s where Niles West practiced, they claimed we had an unfair advantage. Of course, there was really no one to protest to except for the head of the Niles West girls’ PE department, Leanne Heeren, who could only shrug and apologize. Our girls’ court wasn’t regulation; Maine South was right. It had simply not occurred to Miss Heeren or any of the woman coaches that they could even ask to play in the Boys’ Gym.

  Whether we were, in fact, ready for it was a matter of some debate as we had still not quite mastered certain nuances of the game.

  For Connie, it was free throws. Before and after practice, she worked feverishly on her shooting, particularly on her form. Determined to learn a jump shot like the boys used rather than the set shot most girls settled for, she struggled—jumping and heaving, jumping and heaving. She had wonderful ballhandling skills, could zip a no-look pass with such aplomb that she routinely faked out her own teammates, and had the anticipation on defense of an accomplished pickpocket. But her shooting frustrated her, and that extended to the free-throw line. Looking desperately at Mrs. Mulder after each missed foul shot, Connie would routinely clank them off the rim and more than occasionally miss the basket and the rim completely.

  I might have been sympathetic if I didn’t have my own troubles. I was especially enamored of that point in the game, with time running out at the end of a quarter, when one player, usually a guard it seemed to me, would hoist up a half-court shot at the buzzer.

  For weeks, I bided my time, waiting and hoping for this scenario to occur when the ball was in my hands. When it finally did, I let a shot fly from about 45 feet and wondered why a member of the opposing team grabbed the rebound and headed back upcourt while my teammates stared at me in utter disbelief. Apparently, instead of three seconds left on the clock, there were 13, a miscue I blamed on my eyesight and even went so far as to get contacts the next week to prove my point.

  Despite that blunder, Mrs. Mulder must have seen a glimmer of potential, hustle, or sheer hyper quality to my effort because toward the middle of the season, I was asked to practice with varsity and sit on the bench for their games.

  For the first time, I started to see up close how she operated, and I was transfixed being that close to someone with such an intensity about her. She demanded our attention with a piercing stare alone, and like the teacher she was, her classroom was all business, no fooling around, no wasting time. Every second was accounted for, every water break carefully planned, and with quick glances at her index cards, every instruction was stated clearly and repeated to make sure we understood. Even the staccato blow of her whistle was efficient. She was all about organization, about being completely focused on the objective at hand. Accomplishing more than one task at a time was something she did every day as a full-time teacher, wife, and mother. But when it came to games, her coaching skills were coming along a little more slowly.

  During one game, she benched our center, Nancy Hohs, after early foul trouble. But it wasn’t until her husband, Al, sent a folded-u
p note down to the bench asking, “When are you going to put Nancy back in?” that Mrs. Mulder remembered she had taken her out. But she was getting better and so were we, our improvement showing with each practice session and each game. We wanted to learn as much as we wanted to win.

  We watched the boys’ games like the fans we were, and when Billy Schnurr’s team beat Gordon Tech in the ’76 boys’ sectional final at Niles West to reach the elusive Sweet 16—one victory shy of the state tournament—the coach was stoic in victory. Mrs. Mulder, however, was apparently not taking notes because Mr. Schnurr was standing quietly by the scorers’ table after his team’s victory when she came flying down from the stands and literally jumped into his arms.

  The following week, the Niles West boys lost in the supersectionals at Northwestern University’s McGaw Hall, and for those of us from the girls’ team who went to the game, we may as well have been watching the NBA playoffs. Even the concept that a high school sporting event was being played at a college arena was incomprehensible to us.

  The end of our season came so quickly—varsity finished 9–3 and the JV, 6–6—it was painful turning in our uniforms. For me, the highlight was being asked by Mrs. Mulder to sit on the bench for the varsity games, but it only made it harder for the season to be over, and only the lure of my first high school softball season consoled me.

  After basketball ended, Connie took a part-time job at Mister Donut, going to work at five in the morning and coming to school smelling like grease. She ate doughnuts until she was sick, made $2.30 an hour, and loved every minute of it. For one, she thought she was literally rolling in dough since minimum wage had just gone up from $2.10 the previous year. She also loved doughnuts, at least for the first month or so. And she and her friend Kitty, who also worked there, laughed their way through the grease.

  When we got our yearbooks that spring, I worked up the courage to ask Mrs. Mulder to sign mine:

  Missy—What a freshman year! You couldn’t be happier! You’re quite an athlete and have so much potential—the challenge now lies in how you use and develop that gift of coordination. With a lot of hard work—lots of jumping, etc.—you should have a lot to offer varsity basketball. Have a great summer! Look forward to seeing you next year.