Mulder wishes this season was like last year when her Indians played their ‘mystery team’ role to the hilt—winning the Central Suburban League South Division title and advancing to the supersectionals before losing to Hinsdale South. The Indians were able to sneak up on a lot of teams last year.
Mrs. Mulder joked in the article that maybe it would have been smarter to lose at the Evanston Invitational. But now the secret was out. We were still small, as Sternberg pointed out, and we still didn’t boast great shooters or a finely tuned offense. But we put up one of the most furious defenses around, we had depth as Mrs. Mulder still used our entire roster, and we were experienced. And clearly, whether our coach liked it or not, there was no turning back now.
Our first game back after winter vacation and our Evanston triumph was our conference opener against Waukegan East on January 11, and our momentum carried us as we blew past Waukegan at home, 75–38. We were on our way, and that week this letter appeared in the West Word.
Dear Editor,
There is a team here at Niles West that has been highly overlooked. This team is the girls’ varsity basketball team. The most unfortunate part about this is that they are most overlooked by their own student body. Already this year the girls have gone 6–0, capturing the first-place trophy in the prestigious Evanston Invitational Tournament (their first tourney ever, we might add).
During this tourney, the cagerettes managed to knock off Fremd (third in state last year and this year, basically the same team). Even Channel 2 News had to sit up and take notice of this powerhouse team.
Every team the girls have played thus far has greatly outnumbered Niles West in fan support. This is one of the first times in history that Niles West has been shown up in the spirit department. Of course, we can’t expect the bleachers to be filled as they are at the boys’ games (god knows why!) but there are barely enough fans to fill a mini-bus.
How about it Niles West? Are you ready to let a potential state championship team slip through your fingers? Come out and back the Indian girls. You’ll probably be pleasantly surprised.
Names withheld upon request
Shirley and I figured the “cagerettes” mention was an especially clever touch, given that we would sooner wear ball gowns to school than call ourselves that. Anyone who knew me, however, could see right through the sarcastic shot at the boys’ team, which was in the midst of a horrendous season, and know we wrote it.
We were still performing our game-day duty of lining up and pulling out the bleachers ourselves before each of our games, and it annoyed us that we were still stopping at about five or six rows. But we were making small strides. On our own, we each found teachers who either already knew about our success thus far or were at least interested—Mrs. Gordon and Mr. Klebba from the English department; Mr. Brennan, who taught Spanish; Mr. Karbusicky, who taught history; and Mr. Kettleborough, the driver’s ed teacher. Guidance counselors Mr. Sortal, Mr. Hoosline, and Dr. Cocking, who were participants in the men’s morning scrimmages and refereed high school boys’ games, were also supporters of ours.
Shirley was taking auto mechanics as an elective—I could only guess that maybe she thought she could learn how to make the Gremlin a little quieter—and struck up a great rapport with her cute young teacher, Mr. Anderson. He liked Shirley because she was the only girl in his class and because it was hard not to like Shirley. And he joined forces with her to get fans out to support us, even offering extra credit to any of his students who attended a girls’ basketball game. After that, we could look up and there on the top row of bleachers was a healthy representation of fifth-period autos, mostly slumped over and disinterested and before long, sneaking out to the parking lot for a smoke, but actual fans just the same.
In the midst of our campaign to rally support, it was announced that McDonald’s would be filming a new commercial in our gym and needed extras to shoot a crowd scene. Hundreds of kids showed up, including us, but we watched in disgust as the same people we could not drag into the place to root us on in a real game cheered maniacally on cue for the director, all for the price of a gift certificate for a free hamburger.
“That’s great. Maybe we need to give out hamburgers at our games,” I shouted into Peggy’s ear.
“Losers,” she said, surveying the comical scene.
Mr. Schnurr continued to be a huge influence on our team. He helped Bridget refine her free-throw shooting technique, expanded our defensive repertoire to a half-dozen different sets, and worked with the forwards and center to improve their rebounding and shooting. He patiently urged Peggy to make the release point of her shot higher above her head, rather than under her chin, which she had done out of necessity when she began playing a year earlier because, like most of us, she didn’t possess the arm strength to shoot like the boys.
He was no longer officially coaching but found that we still needed and wanted him around, and Mrs. Mulder continued to lean on him heavily for advice and guidance. Lunches and coffee breaks were reserved for daily sessions, and lately, Schnurr had been preaching how important it was to be composed and confident on the sidelines while demanding total intensity of the team.
“You’re like a doctor in an emergency room, Arlene,” he told her. “Even while all around you is chaos, you have to convey total calm.”
She hung on his every word. She was getting a lifetime’s worth of advice from someone who wasn’t known to open up to just anyone. Schnurr had been at Niles West since it first opened as a four-year high school in 1961, the same year most of our junior class was born, arriving in Skokie from the small Wisconsin towns of Whitewater and Stoughton, where he’d coached football, basketball, baseball, and golf.
When the opportunity presented itself to go to Niles East in 1956 while construction on West was being completed, Schnurr passed up two other jobs in Wisconsin because the Chicago suburbs seemed a more prosperous place to raise a growing family. It was also a more expensive place to live on one teacher’s salary, even with the $350 coaching stipend he received for coaching freshman football and the two $275 stipends he was paid for being the assistant basketball and assistant baseball coach.
But then, Billy Schnurr never coached or taught for the money. And he didn’t come by coaching the conventional way.
During his sophomore year at the University of Wisconsin, while coaching high school baseball, the selective service was reinstituted and Billy, like many of his classmates, enrolled in ROTC. That way, he reasoned, he would be able to stay in school and not be drafted immediately, though upon graduation, he would be commissioned as a second lieutenant and eligible to be called to active duty for five years.
It was during his second semester in graduate school that he was called to duty and, in April 1952, sent to Korea. He had been there only two months when the war made a mark that would remain with him forever. While he was on a mandatory five-day R & R, the Chinese launched a surprise attack on T-Bone Hill, among the most bitter ground fighting in the war, and two of Billy’s fellow officers were killed while another was seriously wounded. A squad leader and four other men in his platoon died as well. And in his heart, Billy knew he had escaped almost certain death.
A little more than nine months after he arrived in Korea, he was sent home, carrying the relief and guilt with him. Within the next three years, he married, his wife had twin boys, and he was coaching at Niles East. Over the next six years, a daughter and another son were born, and he became the head basketball coach at Niles West, where he would remain for the next 16 seasons.
When he retired the previous year, Billy Schnurr was the only varsity boys’ basketball coach the school had ever known. His teams’ record over that 16-season span was 222–154, which hardly did him justice until you considered that in six of the eight years from 1969 through 1976, Niles West won at least 19 games. Under Schnurr, West also won four conference titles and three regional championships, and made two trips to the Sweet 16, both ending in close defeats.
Neve
r blessed with great size or the talent of so many of their foes, Schnurr’s teams beat schools they often had no business competing against. And when he stepped down, he was hailed as one of the great tacticians in Illinois high school basketball.
Yet, despite his accomplishments and the regard with which he was held, he was starting to look enviously at Arlene Mulder and the way she coached. Sitting in the corner of the faculty lounge, scraps of paper and napkins with diagrammed plays sitting in a tidy pile in front of them, Schnurr and Mulder talked until their conversation, as it sometimes did, turned to us, her players. It was where everything started and stopped with her coaching, and as he listened to her speak about our various personalities and the life lessons she wanted to instill in us, he began thinking about what he could have learned from her in terms of motivation, about teaching sports in a way that had nothing to do with winning basketball games.
Mulder rested her hand on her stomach. They had developed both a mutual respect for and trust in one another, and Billy Schnurr was one of the few colleagues she had told about her pregnancy.
She had begun wearing baggy velour warm-ups pulled down low, which we all took note of, as we took note of virtually everything our coach wore and every new hairstyle she attempted. But she was largely devoid of morning sickness and as active as ever, and not one of us theorized she might be pregnant. We just figured her fashion taste was slipping.
After our conference-opening win over Waukegan East, next up on our schedule was Evanston, and we handled them easily, 63–44. We were getting a little cocky, and Mrs. Mulder was worried. Glenbrook North was up next, and she knew they were not pushovers.
It was an away game, the gym, as usual, more heavily populated than our own, and it was obvious at the start that we had taken them too lightly. Slowly, they chipped away at our lead and overtook us in the second half. We were so confident that we could reel off points whenever we chose to increase our defensive pressure that we hardly worried. Until, that is, we looked up at the scoreboard and saw that we trailed by 10 with just under two minutes remaining.
Then we panicked.
Not Shirley, though. “Hey listen!” she screamed at us in the huddle. “I just read about this college team that scored 10 points in the final minute of the game to win.”
Mulder stayed quiet, letting Shirley take over. Despite the fact that our coach was a control freak about what we wore, what we ate, and how we behaved, if someone had something meaningful to say, she stepped back and let us talk.
“We have two minutes,” Shirley continued. “There’s no problem. Now, come on.”
We looked at each other and nodded.
“Intensity!” Connie shouted. “We can do this.”
Mulder merely told us to execute. We ran a motion offense based on the one Bobby Knight taught at Indiana, and we had few set plays. Ours was based on constant movement, on setting screens for one another, and on finding the open man. We knew what we had to do; we had just neglected to do it. With Shirley’s pep talk still buzzing in our ears, we scored on two consecutive possessions, then turned two steals off our press into two more scores and a free throw. With six seconds remaining, Diana grabbed the rebound off a missed Glenbrook North free throw and called a timeout. We were trailing by one.
On the inbounds play that Mrs. Mulder had diagrammed, Judy took more than the five seconds allowed to find an open man, but fortunately for us, the official gave us an extra second. It was just enough time for Judy to find Shirley, who posted up her defender before scoring on a turnaround bank shot to put us ahead by one, 59–58, as time expired.
We looked at each other in amazement for a split second before letting loose in celebration. It was an incredible comeback, but Connie quickly settled down a whooping Judy and a jumping Bridget and quieted us with a look we knew well, not unlike the way a mother might glare at her kids for being too wild in the grocery store. We had been to the state supersectionals, for crying out loud. We should have beaten Glenbrook North, even as close as we had come to losing. And cheering in wild celebration was not the attitude we wanted to convey.
Still, that was the game, Mrs. Mulder figured. She knew a letdown was coming—and it came. And now she had our renewed attention. We were beatable. It was exactly what she had wanted to happen. And it hardly even mattered that Shirley had made up the entire story of the college team she used to motivate us in the huddle. Our minds were clear now. Each obstacle was another step toward the goal in front of us. We knew what we had to do the remainder of the season. But we also knew there was something else we had to do first.
Several of us were warming up before our next practice when Connie paused and took a look around. We knew what, or rather whom, she was looking for.
“Has anyone seen DD?” she asked.
Peggy glanced up from tying her shoe. “She’s not in the locker room,” she said. “I just came from there.”
Connie, Shirley, and I exchanged looks. DD had been a minor distraction for weeks and on this morning, it looked like she was a no-show.
“You know I like her,” said Connie, who sometimes treated DD like a little sister, “but this has got to stop.”
“We almost lost that last game,” I added. “We can’t risk any more mistakes.”
Shirley sighed. “Let’s go,” she said, and a bunch of us followed her into the PE office.
“We need to talk,” Shirley told Mrs. Mulder.
“What’s up?” Mulder said, peeking out the office door into the gym. “Where’s Diane?” She rarely called her DD.
We stared at each other.
“It’s not working,” Connie said.
“We can’t do this anymore,” I piped in.
“We have to do something,” said Shirley.
Mrs. Mulder wouldn’t have known a joint if she smelled one, and it didn’t seem worth it to explain why DD’s eyes were often glazed over during practice or why she was one step behind most days. But somehow our coach still knew.
“I’ll take it from here,” she said.
The decision was obvious, and by the end of practice it was final, though not one our coach had come to easily, nor one we took lightly. Being a member of the Niles West basketball team was sacred to us, and the very thought of any of us being kicked off the team made us almost physically ill. Plus, we liked DD.
Connie should have been the most conflicted. Just weeks earlier, the two of them were sitting in the stands at a boys’ game when DD said she was going out to the parking lot to smoke. Connie knew she wasn’t talking about cigarettes and tried to talk her out of it. It was a losing battle. And it angered her that DD would take her responsibility to the team so lightly.
Mrs. Mulder had talked to DD, as we all had. She had also cut back on DD’s minutes, which hurt us at times. DD and Barb, along with Connie, had the quickest hands on our defense, and at 5-6, DD was one of the tallest of all the guards we faced and could be a strong presence inside, which we always needed. But for all of her gifts on the basketball court, DD’s presence had become counterproductive to our mission.
Mrs. Mulder walked with leaden feet to DD’s front door that afternoon, not sure exactly what reaction she would get. It was, she knew for sure, the single hardest thing she had ever had to do in her years of coaching.
She knocked at the door and Mr. Defrancesco answered. He was an especially dear man who had been the team’s scorekeeper since girls’ basketball had come to Niles West. He invited her inside. “DD,” he called, “your coach is here!”
Mrs. Mulder chose her words carefully. She would never say she “kicked” DD off the team. Not to the Defrancescos, nor to anyone else. “It’s so unfortunate,” she said to the family, “because there’s so much talent in this girl. But it’s unfair to the other members of the team, and unfair to the school, and I have to ask you to turn in your uniform.”
There was no argument from the Defrancescos or from DD, only a strange sense of relief. Emotionally, she was reeling between the hardship
s of living with an alcoholic parent, the intense feelings of her up-and-down relationship with Chris Erickson, and the social pressures we were all experiencing. Good, she thought defiantly, still remembering the love letter she’d received from another girl the year before. Now I don’t have to worry about looking like some dykey girl.
Deep down, however, she wondered if one day she would regret it. Mr. D. remained our scorekeeper. And we simply moved on.
By now, playing against the boys was no longer a novelty but an integral part of our practice sessions and one that was paying off in ways we could actually start to detect.
It was gradual at first. We’d score on a well-executed offensive possession against the boys and congratulate ourselves. Then we’d score again, only this time we made a point not to make a big deal out of it because this is what we were supposed to do. We were a team with regular practices and set plays and coaches making sure we did it right. They were a group of boys who were good athletes, but they were not a team. They tried harder, but we kept improving.
And so it went until one particular day, when Connie fed Shirley perfectly for an open shot underneath as time expired on our half-court scrimmage, giving us an easy victory. The boys’ faces were red and sweaty, and they were more than a little annoyed. I think we all heard the Rocky theme song in our heads. But this time, Connie didn’t have to calm us down. There was no celebration.
The following week, we annihilated Maine West 76–26 and readied ourselves for our first meeting of the season against our rival, Maine South. The game was at Maine South and the Hawks were ready.
Why we would pick this night of all nights to act like teenagers is anyone’s guess, but we did. Well, Bridget did anyway. We were all in the locker room before the game when Bridget spotted a Maine South Hawk mascot costume on top of one of the lockers.
“Hey, Holly,” Bridget said, “put this on.”
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