A flower from Thursday
And a flower for today,
It’s because we think you’re special
In your own funny way.
Soon, they became inspirational in theme:
Spirit holds our team together,
United we’ll find success,
But if that bond is ever broken,
Our future is only a guess.
Other times, I was clearly desperate, and when Mrs. Mulder read this one, I got some unintentional laughs:
Our most important game is the next one,
In this case it’s Maine East,
We’ll concentrate and make them run,
Then we’ll go to IHOP and feast.
In practice, meanwhile, Mrs. Mulder introduced us to some unconventional techniques. One day, she had us lie on our backs while she turned off all the lights in the South Balcony Gym.
“Relax,” she instructed us. “Let every muscle sink into the floor. Start with your face, now your neck, your shoulders.” She worked her way down to our toes, then had us visualize what we were supposed to do on the court. Since Connie was working on improving her free throws, she visualized herself with perfect form, total concentration, good follow-through, and the ball swishing through the net. Shirley needed to box out on rebounds, so she pictured herself clearing out space under the basket, going up strong with shoulders squared and holding on to the ball with her elbows out.
We all giggled a little at first. None of us had ever heard of positive visualization, much less tried it. DD usually ended up snoring rather than visualizing. But Mrs. Mulder was always up for something new. And as with everything else she introduced, we accepted it without question.
During her first season, in the middle of a game at Highland Park that Niles West was losing, Mrs. Mulder had noticed her team was exhausted. She had never studied hypnosis before, didn’t necessarily believe in it. But in a fit of desperation during one timeout, she told her players to close their eyes, that they were falling asleep, having a good rest, and when they woke up they’d be suddenly energized.
The players bit their lips to keep from breaking up and shot each other glances that said, “Who is this woman and who put her in charge?” But when they ended up winning, nobody laughed at Mrs. Mulder again.
CHAPTER 7
Shirley’s Arm, Bridget’s Face, and Mighty Hinsdale South
I NEVER REALLY QUESTIONED where my athletic ability came from. It was just mysteriously there. Mysterious until the one day I was goofing around with my brothers on our backyard rim when I was still in grade school, and my mom came out to throw away the garbage.
“Come on, Mom. Take a shot. Take a shot!” we yelled, hardly able to contain ourselves.
My mother had eventually regained some use of her right arm in the years since her accident—actually amazing function given the severity of her original injuries and the medical limitations at the time. But she had never shot a basketball that we knew of.
“Come on, Mom. Shoot,” we giggled.
She looked at us with an expression of utter disdain that said if we were going to be that patronizing, we’d better be prepared to be very sorry for it. Then she demanded the ball, clutched it in her left hand, and released a hook shot so sweet that it weakened us at the knees and barely rippled the net as it went through.
The backyard erupted. And my mom, just as cool and smug as could be, turned on her heel and walked back into the house, her basketball career over. Perfect.
The point is, my mom was a great athlete. My brothers and I had to get it from somewhere, and we had deduced, after about the 12th time my dad broke his glasses playing catch with us, that it hadn’t come from him. It had just never occurred to us that my mom could have possessed those genes.
She later pointed to a small scar on her knee and told me it came from a bully’s shove during a neighborhood stickball game when she was a girl. For a chosen few during the early years of World War II, there was tennis, golf, and track and field, and for a very select group, the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League. But there were certainly no organized sports for girls like my mother.
I was already starting to take it for granted. But there were still some little, shall we say, nuances of the game we had not yet mastered. It seemed just as we started thinking we knew it all, something would happen to tell us we did not.
Hence, the ball-rolling incident.
I had seen it on TV, well at least once, and maybe in a varsity boys’ game as well, and couldn’t wait to try it myself. In an attempt to milk the clock at the end of a quarter in order to get off one last shot, the guard receiving the inbounds pass after the opposing team’s basket—provided he was unguarded on his end of the court—would let the ball bounce downcourt untouched (knowing the clock does not start until it is touched inbounds) before scooping it up and starting the offense.
It seemed to me that the ball hardly bounced at all as the guard galloped next to it but rather sort of skimmed along the floor. At least that’s how I had envisioned it. And I could not wait until I was in the featured role—that of the guard who let the ball bounce untouched. But wanting to hasten this brilliant play, I, as the person passing the ball inbounds, decided to roll the ball to Connie to get things started.
Surely I believed she would know what I was doing, as she was always up for innovation. Perhaps it was because I failed to warn her what I was about to do that my good intentions unraveled. Or more likely, it was because in my excitement, I rolled the basketball with the velocity of a bowling ball, which Connie, along with the eight other players on the court at the time, simply stared at in shock as it went whizzing by.
When it reached the other side of the court, it was promptly scooped up by an alert opposing player, who raced back upcourt and past a still-stunned Connie for an uncontested layup.
In a somewhat quieter fashion, Peggy Japely was also learning exactly how the game of basketball was played. Now that she had made the JV team, she was starting to gain some notice, though not always in ways she wanted. In her first game on JV, the first organized game of her life, Peggy was sitting on the bench when the coach motioned for her to enter the game and, like any obedient kid, she headed straight on court. Trouble was, she had failed to sign in at the scorers’ table—this entailed saying something like “10 in for 21”—where an official would then signal her to come into the game as both the rules required and most kids fully understood by seventh grade. The game was still in play when Peggy bounded onto the court, some obvious confusion ensuing, the whistle blowing, and Miss Majewski motioning her back off with the admonition that she needed to sign in.
“Where do I sign?” she asked, to the howls of the other players.
By the end of the season, Peggy was practicing with varsity.
We defeated Maine South 54–51 on March 11 in our last regular-season game of the 1977 season to clinch the Central Suburban League South title with a 13–4 record. That week, the first letter to the editor in the school paper began:
Dear Editor,
I would like to bring to the attention of the entire student body the apparent neglect of girls’ sports teams here at Niles West. There have been pep rallies for the football team and fan buses to the boys’ basketball games, but there is no attempt to get the students behind the girls’ teams.
The lack of support was starting to bug us a little, too. At first, we watched with pride as we had to pull out new rows of bleachers to accommodate the growing number of fans. But going from five rows to eight was not good enough. After the boys’ varsity team had gone to the Sweet 16 and finished with a 23–5 record the year before, they were now devoid of returning seniors and had finished 7–18, yet still had drawn better crowds than we had.
I thought about it a lot, so much so that for my seventh-period expository writing class, I turned in a paper entitled “Varsity: Girls vs. Boys,” in which I detailed the ways in which I felt girls’ teams were discriminated against.
I wrote about our lack of practice jerseys, leather basketballs (unlike the boys, we practiced with vinyl ones), and bags for the basketballs to be stored in (we gathered ours in an old shopping cart Mrs. Mulder found or stole), as well as the disparity in locker rooms, training equipment, and facilities. “Gym space for the boys’ varsity is always available. However, where the girls are concerned, much ‘bargaining’ has to be done before any gym space is acquired,” I wrote with indignation.
I detailed the differences in media coverage and attendance for girls’ versus boys’ games and the fact that referees were paid more for officiating boys’ games than girls’ “with no logical explanation.” I concluded hopefully, but with some resignation, that this was just the way it was.
I realize that boys’ varsity basketball has been in existence much longer than the girls’ and therefore not as much should be expected. The Niles West girls are even “lucky” in a sense because at other schools, the situation is worse.
In years to come, girls may be a lot closer in comparison to the boys. As I said before, we have progressed a long way already. For example, before this year there was one set of warm-up suits for all the girls’ teams. Last year, the contest gym was not available for any girls’ basketball games. Now, the situation is changing.
This year, the first annual girls’ state basketball tournament will be held and next year, the schedule of games will be doubled. I don’t expect that girls’ athletics will ever be equal to the boys’, which is sad because a lot of talent may pass unnoticed and, in a sense, be wasted.
I am grateful, however, that there are any athletics for girls to participate as well as to compete in. I only hope that in years to come, a female won’t find any setbacks in her quest to become an athlete.
I received a B-plus for that effort, which was probably a little generous on Mr. Klebba’s part. While we were jealous of the boys and their privileges, I would not say we resented them.
To prepare us for the postseason, Mr. Schnurr continued to help us, even handpicking a team of boys who, though not on his team, were good athletes and, more importantly, nice guys who were more than willing to scrimmage against us.
Again, however, Mrs. Mulder worried what our parents would think. Playing with boys? And not just with boys but against them? For those of us who grew up with older brothers, an occasional elbow to the nose was within reason. But she was concerned and so was Mr. Schnurr, who picked boys who were on the small side but quick and agile and, unbeknownst to us, cautioned them not to block our shots or play too rough. Shirley and Connie and I loved it. We wanted Mr. Schnurr to pick apart our games, to make us better, tougher. And we loved mixing it up with the boys, though we spent much of our first practice sessions with them just walking through plays.
It was a heady week after securing our conference title, but we were not the biggest news at Niles West. Citing fatigue, Billy Schnurr quietly resigned as the boys’ basketball coach after his 16th season ended, shocking the student body and staff. He would remain at the school as a PE instructor, he said, but at 49 he was worn out.
The fact that we were still receiving his words of wisdom, even as he made his announcement, made us feel privileged.
Our first postseason was just days away, but somehow we still did not quite grasp the responsibility that came with it. Or at least not when there was the possibility of a good laugh involved. One day after practice, we were talking in the parking lot when a sophomore on the JV team decided to suddenly peel out in her car. The only trouble was that at the time, Shirley was sitting on her hood. She fell off and immediately grabbed her elbow as we all yelled at the girl for being an idiot. Shortly after determining that Shirley was fine, we also decided that the girl had been just a little too flip in her reaction, driving off quickly when we started to give her a hard time.
And so a plan was quickly hatched.
The next day at practice, Shirley showed up wearing a fake cast on her arm as the rest of us feigned shock and devastation. Just as the sophomore’s face began to drain of color, Shirley pulled off the cast, clapped her hands for the ball and dribbled off, leaving the rest of us to roll on the court with laughter.
This was all, of course, planned carefully so as to occur before Mrs. Mulder came into the gym for the start of practice. She was not in a particularly humorous mood on the brink of her first postseason game, and we assumed she would not find it funny that her star forward had been bounced off the hood of a car the day before.
But we weren’t always so careful. After practice the day before our game, I picked up a wet towel and threw it at Shirley. She, of course, threw one back and soon it became an all-out water fight with most of the team involved. Before long, we were all sliding through puddles on the locker room floor, our towels now serving as effective towropes. It was all great fun until, as luck would have it, I whipped around a corner and slid directly into Mrs. Mulder, who had just walked in.
“I guess you don’t take tomorrow’s game seriously,” she said, her nostrils flaring and lips pursing, giving new meaning to our secret nickname for her: Mean Arlene. “Maybe with that attitude, you shouldn’t play,” she said as I struggled to get to my feet, instead slipping back down on the smooth, wet concrete floor while my teammates stifled laughter behind Mrs. Mulder’s back.
More damning words I could not have imagined, and I slunk home convinced my basketball career, and life as I knew it, was over. Too embarrassed to tell my mom or anyone else who hadn’t been there, I barely ate dinner and was staring at my homework when the phone rang that night. Though she had never before called my house, I knew it was her.
“Are you ready to play tomorrow?” our coach’s voice barked.
“Yes,” I trembled. “I’m sorry. That was not smart.”
“No, it wasn’t,” she said and hung up.
The first-ever Illinois girls’ state regional tournaments were played March 14–17, with Niles West hosting one of them. We needed the home-court advantage. After getting past a much taller Luther North team in the first game, 52–43, we were trailing St. Scholastica—a tough all-girls Catholic school with a particularly physical star player in six-footer JoAnn Feiereisel—by nine points at the half of the regional final.
Feiereisel’s father, Ron, had been an honorable mention all-American for Ray Meyer at DePaul in the early 1950s and had had a brief NBA career with the Minneapolis Lakers. His daughter was the tallest and most physical player we had ever faced, and our 5-10 center, Nancy Hohs, had her hands full.
As we filed into the locker room at halftime, more than one of us were thinking about our goals. On our index cards, there was the usual: make free throws, follow missed shots, no bad shots, get good rebounding position, play with intensity but with cool heads.
But Mrs. Mulder read a card from a new contributor.
Coach Mulder and every team member,
From now until nine o’clock, you must be totally possessed with just one thought—putting everything you can possibly muster into playing the fiercest, most intense basketball game of your young life. If you do that with good defense, strong rebounding, and no cheap scores for the opponent, you will win.
Best of luck.
B. Schnurr
As she read, we felt the hairs on our arms standing up. We remembered Mr. Schnurr’s pep talk at the start of the season. Why not us? We did not want to let him down.
We ended up beating St. Scholastica by five, and afterward, we spontaneously went over to the scorers’ table where Mr. Schnurr was the official scorekeeper, and one by one, each of us stepped up and gave him a hug. I sneaked in a kiss on the cheek as well. He was a shy man, and you could tell he was a little shocked at first, but you didn’t have to look too closely to see his eyes were twinkling.
Next, someone told us we should cut down the nets. Most of us had never heard of such a thing, but it was a celebratory ritual and sounded good to us. We weren’t exactly sure how we were supposed to get up there, nor what
to do exactly once we did, but someone grabbed a tape cutter and up we went—DD standing on Diana’s shoulders, me on Connie with Shirley steadying one of my legs, and Barb standing on Nancy and holding on to the rim for dear life.
Connie tried to tell me how to snip the net so that each one of us would get a strand; I tried, but I was pretty sure I wasn’t doing it right. My strand looked a little shorter than the rest. Mrs. Mulder looked up nervously, afraid that we would fall and break someone’s collarbone and, knowing her, sure we were violating some school rule by cutting up their basketball nets. Finally, we just tore down each net and draped one around Nancy’s neck and the other around Shirley’s.
We stood by the scorers’ table as our families and friends surged all around us, Connie grabbing at Nancy’s arm, me grabbing at Connie, Shirley holding up her index finger, and little Alison Mulder standing before her mother and trying to take it all in. They were cheering us, both students who knew us and many who did not, and I knew in this instant that there could be nothing finer than winning a basketball game for your school.
If we were not already thoroughly intoxicated by competition and the many joys of team sports, we were now. If this was what it felt like to win, we wanted more. The four-team state sectionals were next. The next round was at Maine South, where we would face another parochial school in Timothy Christian.
After clinging to a 21–19 lead at halftime, we finally shook Timothy Christian in the fourth quarter with our press, outscoring them 22–4 in the final eight minutes. But with 31 seconds left and the outcome no longer in doubt, Bridget took an elbow in the eye and had to be taken to the hospital for stitches. We beat Timothy 51–30, but we were worried about Bridget. Up until then, she had not exactly established herself as one of the toughest players on our team. At the first sight of blood, she screamed for her mom.
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