If we could have played for the state championship right then, we would have. Since we could not, we wordlessly agreed that we would win today’s title for the most hardworking and determined team in Illinois. And we would do it tomorrow and the next day and the next.
Charging out of the airless little gym like we were about to play in the Super Bowl, it did not occur to us that we could very well have been one of the smallest, least athletic teams in the state. It was the advantage of ignorance. Mr. Schnurr was the best-known, most highly qualified basketball coach any of us knew, and if he told us we could do it, then so be it.
State champions.
Why not us?
CHAPTER 6
New Beginnings, New Rituals
WE THREW OURSELVES INTO THE 1977 SEASON. There were 12 days until the opening game against Fremd, a team from Palatine, only about a half hour from Niles West. But they were not in our conference—the Central Suburban League—and most of us had never heard of them.
Mrs. Mulder knew about them, however. Fremd’s girls’ basketball program was older than ours, if only by a couple of years, was better established, and already had a reputation as perhaps the best team in the state, having gone 42–0 over the previous four seasons. And so, she decided, scheduling the second game against an equally strong Libertyville team, she would see right away what she had and how we stacked up against the best competition. Maybe someday, she reasoned, this would pay off in state tournament play.
There was to be a new level of dedication on our part, and that week, Mrs. Mulder sent a note home to our parents, congratulating them on our place on the girls’ varsity team and urging their support.
You must be wondering what kind of a “crazy lady” is in charge here at the high school, because I know I have demanded long hours, extremely hard work, concentration, and dedication because although we start with talent, we must then work to build a team.
She concluded by encouraging our parents to come to our games and saying that she looked forward to meeting them personally.
Perhaps then you will realize I’m not really mean and cruel for working your daughter so hard. We’re all interested in reaching our goal of being the best and strongest team we can be.
This was not the first time we heard her talk about reaching for a goal. Striving for goals became a mantra Arlene Mulder drilled into us daily. Before each game, she told us, she would be giving us each an index card on which to write down our team objectives and individual goals. As much as she learned about the game of basketball from Mr. Schnurr, he had nothing on her as a teacher and motivator. This came naturally. But she still worried. “What if their parents think I’m pushing them into this boys’ world?” she asked her husband, Al. “Into this dark hole?” The image of the girl with the bloody shin in her gym class never really left her, even as she was blowing her whistle, demanding intensity, and urging Bridget and Diana to “be mean” when they were fighting for rebounds.
Intensity was Mrs. Mulder’s favorite word, and it became ours as well. We shouted it at each other during practice if one of us was letting down in any way, and soon we incorporated it with our coach’s other favorite theme. Thus, PGI, or Play for your Goals with Intensity, was born, and we decided we’d yell, “PGI!” when we broke our huddle before games and at the end of timeouts. Instead of practicing our best autographs or fantasizing about prospective married names, we would doodle PGI in the margins of class notes. It might not have been that clever, but it was sort of a secret code. Our code.
What we knew early on was that something was already much different about this season. After camp at William Penn, we realized we could be pushed physically and, what’s more, that we wanted to be. As for the overall commitment, every day was a new lesson. It was not as if we had not been pushed before, but this idea that we could achieve anything with the proper amount of discipline and determination was on a new level most of us had never experienced. While our parents might have expected greatness from us, Mrs. Mulder demanded it.
It was all new terrain. Before basketball, team unity had seemed to be the domain of boys and men, as unfamiliar to us as a pair of shoulder pads, and we had had little access to the lessons of teamwork, understanding roles, and sacrificing for the good of the group. We began to bond in a way the previous year’s squad had not. We were becoming more than just better basketball players; we were becoming a team, and all the clichés we had learned in Iowa applied.
Mrs. Mulder would not have it any other way. The first time a reporter called her to write a story on us, she decided that she would never single out any one of her players. Similarly, there was no mention of how many points any of us scored, and all of us knew better than to ever get caught asking about or paying attention to such things, for she believed that detracted from what we were trying to accomplish together.
“I want you dressing nicely for game days, to look like ladies,” she told us in our first meeting that season. That meant dressing better than any of us ever did for school normally. That also meant no jeans. Connie was a little nervous about that rule. Most of her clothes were hand-me-down jeans from her brothers, and the only Erickson girl still living at home besides her was her sister Laurie, who Connie feared would kill her if she tried to borrow any of her nicer outfits. But by begging from her parents and scrounging up enough from her own meager savings, Connie was able to buy a couple of new things for our game days.
Oddly, none of us was at all embarrassed by the fact that we were pretty much the only girls in school not wearing jeans. It was, in fact, a source of pride. We felt important. It set us apart. Who are those girls and why are they dressed up? It was sort of cool, though nowhere close to as cool as the brand-new varsity warm-up suits.
I was every bit as excited to finally wear the warm-ups as I was for the basketball season to start. They did not look like girls’ warm-ups, which was a huge plus, and yet they were not made for boys either. The fronts of the jacket and pants were white and the backs were red, with red and white stripes down the sides, red collars, wristbands, and waistbands, and—over our hearts—a red script, ironed-on vinyl NW that I ran my fingers over. But undoubtedly the best parts of our new ensembles were our numbers—one on the lower right of the jacket and the other on the lower left pants leg.
Our numbers were a big deal, and they soon became as much a part of our identities as our names. But it was still new to us. The year before, another team had actually scouted Niles West games, a concept even Mrs. Mulder had barely heard of, and to counter this, she came up with the cunning plan that she would have us switch jerseys so that the team scouting us would not know who we were.
This might have worked, too, except that one of our best players, Maureen Mostacci, wanted no part of it because her No. 23 was chosen to honor her late mother, whose birthday was February 3. There was also the little matter of the official scorebook, which listed our names and numbers for each game. Unless we were going to dye our hair or wear false mustaches, Mrs. Mulder’s plot was foiled.
I was so nervous about getting my new warm-up suit dirty that my father came home with a vinyl suit bag from the dry cleaner, and it seemed like such a great idea that he went back and got 13 more for the rest of the team. After games, the warmups were to be put right back in the bags until the next game. No washing them, and God forbid, no throwing them on the floor during the game. Our team managers, Terri and Marcy, would be in charge of scurrying about when one of us went into the game, folding the warm-ups and laying them nicely on the bleachers. Mrs. Mulder’s rules.
Almost as thrilling as the warm-ups was a clause we almost missed in the new IHSA executive order, which required light and dark uniforms for the 1977 inaugural girls’ basketball state tournament series. The disco look was sweeping the country, but the only fashion we cared about came in the form of red jerseys for away games and new white jerseys for home games, with NILES WEST in, yes, real satin lettering on the tops, though still with ribbed short sleeves that p
inched our arms, which we wore with our same tight shorts. People were actually going to know which school we represented. Sort of just like the boys.
Connie and DD decided that with our new warm-ups, our regular old gym shoes looked shabby, and they had the idea of painting over the black stripes on their Adidas with red nail polish. Actually, at a glance, they did look neat, and we figured if we looked sharp, we’d play sharp—or at least look like we played sharp. Either way, it was official now. We were a team. And without having played a single game yet, we at least felt like one of the best in the state.
This was the first year the Niles West girls’ teams practiced and played all our games in the Boys’ Gym, and we still had to occasionally pinch ourselves that we were really there. The first several practices exhausted us even more than usual because the court had bigger dimensions, but it was, perhaps more than anything else, the sign that we had finally arrived. And if there was any doubt, we were reminded that first game of the season as we shuffled in before the JV game started.
I noticed right away and had to catch my breath. I pointed wordlessly, my mouth opening but nothing actually coming out. The others had seen it as well. Right there, in black and gleaming white, were our names on the scoreboard. Actually, it was our names and numbers in four-inch-high white block letters glued onto two-and-a-half-foot black strips of cardboard slotted into the scoreboard. For years we had grown accustomed to looking up during gym class or while attending the boys’ games and seeing their names up there: Zyburt, Bruner, Fabian, Arns. It gave them a celebrity status no less than if they had been in Sports Illustrated. And now our names were up there, and we couldn’t take our eyes off of them—21 ERICKSON, 10 ISAACSON. Walking off the court and into the locker room, we looked back blinking and refocusing, practically tripping over each other as we did.
In the locker room, we filled out our individual goal cards and practically missed warm-ups we took it so seriously, each of us composing lengthy lists and some of us even adding stick-figure illustrations, using the backs and fronts of our cards as if it were an essay test. I wrote “NO turnovers” at the top of mine, while Connie began her list with “MAKE my free throws,” and for Shirley, “BOX OUT for rebounds.”
The only thing left after that was the season. And a quick letdown.
We lost to Fremd 63–50 at home, and at Libertyville 47–46 to start the season 0–2. Mrs. Mulder insisted that she did not care about our win-loss record but only that we work hard, improve, and, of course, meet our goals. And we believed her.
We pretty much believed anything she told us. Even when Connie went down hard with a severely sprained ankle and was taken off the court by ambulance in the third quarter of our third game of the season against New Trier West, we didn’t really think of the effect it had on our state championship aspirations because Mrs. Mulder had ingrained in us that we were all equal components of the total team effort. No one of us was any more important than another.
Another reason we were distracted from any potential panic over losing one of our best players was that even as she was writhing in pain, Connie was beside herself with embarrassment at the sight of the ambulance, a situation we fully exploited by making fun of her even as she was being carted off on a stretcher. When our student newspaper, the West Word, reported in its next edition that she was out for the season, we simply laughed at the misinformation. After all, this was the same paper that still used the ancient expression “cagers” in its headlines for basketball teams. It didn’t know Connie like we did. And we didn’t know pessimism like seemingly everyone else did.
With Connie sidelined by her sprained ankle, we defeated New Trier West and went on to annihilate Deerfield, Waukegan East, and Niles East before losing 44–41 to Glenbrook South. By the Maine West game on February 25, two weeks and one day after she got hurt, Connie was back on the court, helping us to a 70–41 victory. We would not lose again until the end of March, nine games later.
In general, our starting lineup was Connie and me at guard, Shirley and Diana at forward, and Nancy Hohs at center. But Mrs. Mulder was a big believer in utilizing her entire bench and occasionally rotated a newcomer who had worked especially hard in practice into the starting lineup.
In her effort to instill team play in one of our midseason games, Mrs. Mulder kept Connie on the bench until halfway through the second quarter, at which point she reinserted her, with our team trailing by 19 points. We ended up putting on our full-court press and winning, but the next day Dr. Mannos confronted Mrs. Mulder in the hall.
“Arlene, I don’t understand your coaching style. You almost gave me a heart attack,” Mannos told her, shaking his head. “But I guess I can’t complain because you keep winning.”
Among Mrs. Mulder’s requirements was that we attend all the JV games. It was fun sitting in the stands all dressed up, getting psyched up for our game, which started after theirs. Then, in the third quarter, we’d all get up and file into the locker room to change into our uniforms. We felt important, as the JV players and their parents would sneak glances at us as if everyone, not just us, was looking forward to the main event.
But we learned how important this team ritual—and rules in general—was to Mrs. Mulder one day when Toni and Barb Atsaves arrived well after the JV game had started because they were attending their piano recital. The Atsaves girls had told the coach that their mother would not permit them to miss the recital, and they also told her they would not be late for our varsity game. But Mrs. Mulder stood firm. This was their main commitment, she told them, and a piano recital was not an adequate excuse.
We all figured Mrs. Mulder would relent. The Atsaves sisters were terrific students, both cheerleaders, extremely well-mannered, and good team players. While Toni, a junior, was an above-average athlete, it was clear that Barb was going to be something special when she made varsity as a freshman—and she did not disappoint in practice.
But when they walked into the gym, late as they had warned, Mrs. Mulder did not care about their grades or their manners. She told both of them they would be benched for the game.
The rest of us were astonished. Since Mrs. Mulder believed in playing her whole bench, this left us two players down. But more surprising, these were the Atsaves girls, who had probably never gotten in trouble in their whole lives. Toni appeared quietly furious while Barb looked as if she might cry, convinced her basketball career, like the mythical permanent record we all had had hanging over our heads since kindergarten, had been unalterably tainted. But none of us consoled them much beyond a pat on the back. For the first time, it wasn’t us versus authority. We had conformed to Mrs. Mulder’s army and we followed her every command. If she thought Toni and Barb should be benched, then we did, too.
“They have to make a decision,” Connie and I whispered like the newly indoctrinated members of a cult that we were. “They need to get more serious about basketball. They can’t have it both ways.” Toni and Barb were also trying to balance cheerleading with basketball, and though Connie and I both knew and liked some of the cheerleaders, we clearly considered our pursuit to be eminently more serious and more important. The Atsaves girls had better realize this and climb aboard.
One way or another, we were coming together just as Mrs. Mulder had planned.
As the season progressed, we developed other rules and rituals as important as the games themselves. Mrs. Mulder had us eating and brushing our teeth with our nondominant hands and even sleeping with a basketball because she had read it could cut down on turnovers. She also insisted that we load up on carbs like pancakes and pasta on nights before games.
Connie and I constantly tried to outdo one another with a new ballhandling drill—behind our backs or between our legs—that we had learned in camp or had seen the boys do. And someone commandeered an old record player so that we could listen to The Beach Boys, Queen, Styx, and, only because of my insistence, Barry Manilow singing “It’s a Miracle” while we shot free throws before and after practice.
We particularly loved “Be True to Your School” by The Beach Boys and all sang in unison to the lyrics, “Now what’s the matter buddy, ain’t you heard of my school?” We would then shout the next line: “It’s number one in the state!”
The male coaches, including Mr. Schnurr, rolled their eyes as the music blared, probably another sign to some of them that girls were not as serious about sports as their boys. But to us, it was just another way to enhance team spirit and to infuse a little added excitement. And we wondered, as the boys trudged out of their practices, sweaty and exhausted, if their coaches weren’t just a little envious of our energy and enthusiasm.
Everything was lyrical to us. We adopted Helen Reddy’s “I Am Woman” as our unofficial anthem, playing it as we ran onto the court each game through a paper sign as we had seen done before football games. Of course, since there were never many people in the stands, only a handful of parents ever saw this elaborate routine, but it hardly mattered.
Hours before each game, we would line up at the wall of folded-up lacquered wooden bleachers, and as a team—mostly because it took the collective strength of all of us—we would pull them out. And each game we would optimistically pull out one or two more rows in the hope they would actually be necessary.
We also each drew a secret PGI partner from a hat, sort of like a secret Santa for each game, and decorated posters for our PGI partner’s locker and brought her little gifts, like candy bars. Bridget’s boyfriend, Scott, made Bridget PGI signs for her locker himself, which we snickered about, but it made us all privately jealous and proud we actually had a boy interested enough to buy into our rituals.
In our constant effort to make game days special, we also began the practice of secretly delivering a rose to Mrs. Mulder before each game, which I thought would be nice to accompany with a poem. Except that no one else really wanted to write the poems and I had nothing else to do all day but go to class, so I volunteered. The first one, delivered before the Libertyville game, was not my best, but Mrs. Mulder read it aloud to the team:
State Page 7