In a matter of just 20 seconds, Barb hit a jumper and Diana and Barb scored off steals. Wheeling tied the score at 29 just before intermission, but the momentum was clearly ours. In the first three minutes of the third quarter, we kept the pressure on and rattled Wheeling’s backcourt, forcing multiple turnovers and outscoring them in runs of 10–0 and 18–4. Where there was a basketball, there were Niles West double- and triple-teams.
While an ultimately exhausted Wheeling team substituted just once the entire game, we used all 10 players as always and finished with four girls—Diana, Barb, Connie, and Peggy—in double figures, winning the sectional title 66–50.
“That’s just something the kids do because they want the ball,” Mrs. Mulder said to reporters of our defensive intensity after the game. “We play basketball from end line to end line. The only time you catch your breath on this team is on the bench.”
Once again, we had reached the supersectionals, the Sweet 16 of Illinois girls’ basketball. And less than 12 hours after accepting another trophy and snipping down another set of nets, we were back on the court.
Sitting in the stands before practice began the next afternoon, Connie casually folded up the newspaper.
“Sterling lost,” she muttered to our coach.
Mrs. Mulder was not surprised. Sterling was Illinois’ first-ever girls’ state champs, winning the title the year before, and she had admitted to Braun earlier in the season that she thought the school in northwestern Illinois was making a fatal mistake by trying to pad their record while not scheduling any quality opponents, despite numerous requests by several Chicago-area schools.
But we didn’t care about Sterling. At 24–2, the only thing that stood between us and a trip downstate was 26–2 Dundee from northwest Carpentersville. And no one was talking about our two losses anymore.
Dundee had beaten Central Suburban League North champion Waukegan West 76–72 in its sectional final, and unlike our games against Wheeling and other opponents of ours, this was not going to be a case of merely trying to subdue one key player.
In fact, though Dundee had two standouts in guards Pat Morency and Nancy Horgan, the Cardinals were a team not unlike us—small but quick, athletic, well-coached, and disciplined. Still, one of their losses during the season came at the hands of Elk Grove, a team we had beaten by 34, and that was hard to keep out of our minds.
We had several potential distractions leading up to the game. Two days after our sectional victory, the Suburban Trib announced its first all-star girls’ basketball team, and we were one of only two teams to place two players—Connie Erickson and Shirley Cohen—on the team. Connie and Shirley also made the all–Chicago area team and with Diana were named allconference as well.
Of course, Mrs. Mulder paid little attention to individual accomplishments and was not about to change now, and Connie and Shirley barely acknowledged the honors as it was not their style either. But there were five days between the sectional triumph and the supersectional game—too much time to think. Still confident we would be making the trip downstate, we allowed a niggling thought to reenter our consciousness.
We were confident in Mrs. Mulder. She had taken us this far. But soon the whispers of others, specifically some of the male teachers and coaches, became ours as well. Still reliant on Billy Schnurr for his help in practice, we wondered if we needed him on the bench for the Dundee game against Paul Judson, a coach who was, well, a man.
Judson was known for his ability to bully and intimidate officials. Gene Earl, the boys’ freshman basketball coach, had been scouting Dundee for Mrs. Mulder at the request of Mr. Schnurr and let both of them know that Judson could dictate the tempo of the game from the sidelines if we weren’t careful.
It was a full week before the game, which was to be played at Barrington High School, a suburb 30 miles northwest of our school, and Schnurr walked over to Mulder with two cups of coffee in his hands and sat at their usual corner table in the teachers’ lounge.
“Arlene, this guy is going to be trouble,” he said.
No explanation was necessary. She knew he was talking about Judson.
“You’re probably going to have to draw a technical early to get treated fairly,” Schnurr said.
She looked at him as if he were suggesting that she commit a felony, and she had the same sick feeling as she had had at the picket line.
“Billy, really?” she said. “You think that’s going to be necessary?”
“It’s basketball, Arlene,” he said. “And yes.”
The idea of Mr. Schnurr joining Mrs. Mulder on our bench had floated around before, and she never had an ego about accepting coaching help. In the early days of her coaching career, it was not uncommon for someone to walk through the gym, as Earl did one night, and point out something one of us was doing incorrectly.
Mrs. Mulder had stopped him as he walked away. “Any time you see us doing something wrong, feel free to correct it,” she told Earl. “I’m not proud. I can use any help I can get.”
She still felt that way. And the next day in the teachers’ lounge, she brought their coffee over to their usual table and looked Schnurr square in the eye.
“Billy, I can use your help on the bench,” she said as she sat down.
Schnurr was ambivalent. On the one hand, he was flattered that we felt we needed him. On the other, he did not want to undermine Mulder and did not want us to think his presence was necessary to get us downstate. “I’d love to, but you don’t need me, Arlene,” he said. “And I don’t want to confuse the issue.”
“But I bring you in to talk to them and it doesn’t confuse them,” Mulder insisted. “They know I’m their coach.”
Schnurr had enjoyed his interactions with us more than he would have ever imagined. Many nights he would go home after one of our sessions still shaking his head. “They’re so receptive and so hungry for basketball knowledge,” he’d tell his wife about us. “I wish I could see 10 percent of their desire in my players.” But he also respected his friendship with Mrs. Mulder and did not want to threaten her authority in any way. Besides, the decision had already been made for him.
Unbeknownst to Mrs. Mulder, our principal, Dr. Mannos, heard the scuttlebutt and went straight to Mr. Schnurr that week. “I know what people are saying, but this is Arlene’s team, Billy, not yours,” Dr. Mannos told him. “I won’t let you sit on the bench.”
“Arlene, I’ll watch from the stands,” Schnurr told her. “You’ll be fine.”
There would be no more discussion. Not from us and certainly not from Mr. Schnurr. Mrs. Mulder would coach as she always had. And we would walk into a frenzy the likes of which we could not have imagined.
CHAPTER 13
The Ultimate Slap
THE GYM WAS PACKED FOR THE GAME, a bigger crowd at 1,800-plus than we had ever played before by far, including more high school boys than you’d see at a typical homecoming dance. They had descended on Barrington High in carload after carload—football players, basketball players, band members, thespians, the gym rats not quite good enough to make their own varsity teams but who had helped make us better in scrimmages. These were boys I would not attempt to speak to in the hallway, but they were here for us, all of them.
We could tell by the noise alone how big the crowd was without taking a step out of the locker room. But the din outside the doors led to an ultimate sin inside.
Someone had handed Shirley a fake front page with a big bold headline reading NILES WEST GIRLS MAKE THE ELITE EIGHT, and we all cheered when she showed it to us, oblivious to the concept of jinxing ourselves.
Our parents apparently shared this lack of awareness.
Bridget excitedly explained that her dad had a few newspapers of his own and was passing them out to our fans. “When they announce Dundee’s lineup, everyone is going to pretend to read the paper,” Bridget told us in the locker room. “And then when we’re announced, they’re going to rip it up and fling it like confetti!”
Peg and I e
xchanged eye rolls, which was our fallback reaction to just about everything.
“Seriously?” I asked with just the right mix of “Really?” and “You’ve got to be kidding.”
It didn’t seem altogether cool, but we laughed along with the others, our adrenaline pretty much making anything seem funny and exciting. The locker room was loose, and that was a good thing.
But as we emerged from the locker room, Connie picked up on something immediately.
“Woman refs,” she whispered.
We all sighed. We hadn’t had female officials in regionals or sectionals, but we had occasionally run across some over the last three years, and it was rarely a good thing. Though we were all for equal rights, or at least we thought we were, it was painfully obvious that woman officials had a long way to go to catch up with their male colleagues. Refereeing was not just a skill but one that required instincts that could only be honed through experience, something these women just did not have yet. This, of course, was not their fault. It was a vicious cycle. They needed experience, just as we did, to get better. But in the process of gaining experience, they were setting the game back. Or, at least, we felt this way.
And it made little sense to Mrs. Mulder and to us that a game as important as the one that would determine who would advance downstate to the Elite Eight would be one in which they could afford to have woman officials gain experience.
Still, we felt we were more than ready. This was our fifth post season game en route to the eight-team state finals. One more victory and the one word locked into our collective consciousness, the chant ringing in our ears, would materialize. Downstate. Downstate.
For the first time, that meant traveling 180 miles south to Champaign and the University of Illinois—the 16,000-seat Assembly Hall, which was the crown jewel of Illinois high school basketball and, until the previous year, the exclusive goal of every red-blooded boy in the state.
Now it was our goal. Our state tournament. And at this point, it felt like we could simply will it to happen. Just one more victory.
The year before, in the supersectionals against Hinsdale South, the moment had clearly overwhelmed us. But not now, we told ourselves. We would not be intimidated. Not by the crowd and not by our opponent, even with its celebrity coach. This was where we were supposed to be. With every early-morning run up and down the circular stairwell, we were sure. With every bus ride punctuated by our cheers: Give me an R. Give me an A …
It was one of our standbys. We would spell “Ray Rayner,” the name of the host of a popular children’s morning show in Chicago. Win a high school state championship in Illinois, and the newly crowned victors could expect an invitation to appear on his show.
What other girls’ basketball team in the state was doing a Ray Rayner cheer? No one. So call us cocky. But then, what other girls’ basketball team practiced on its own at five in the morning before the season began, we asked ourselves. What other team scrimmaged like we did against boys who blocked our shots and bloodied our noses and sent Karen Wikstrom to the hospital? What other team was so fixated on going downstate that one player not sprinting through one drill would draw the wrath of all the rest? And what other group of girls had this one ambition burned into their souls the way we did? If there were others, then they weren’t as loud or as tough or as determined. Of this, we were certain.
And yet, at the moment, it was all slipping away.
We had swallowed up the Dundee Cardinals’ press and had clearly shaken them early with our full-court zone press. But by the end of the first quarter, Shirley and Connie had each picked up three fouls, and even I was in foul trouble, which was unheard of, picking up my third with three minutes still left in the first quarter.
The second quarter had scarcely begun when Bridget was whistled for her third foul, and with 6:07 left until halftime, Shirley was called for her fourth.
Mrs. Mulder stood up, smoothed her dress, and politely addressed one of the officials.
“Come on, ref, call it evenly,” our coach protested.
“Sit down,” the ref barked back at her as she slinked back to our bench.
Everything Mrs. Mulder had heard about Dundee coach Paul Judson intimidating officials was coming true as he sauntered up and down the sideline like some slick politician stumping for votes, keeping up a running dialogue with the refs and smirking in our general direction. But four months pregnant and already feeling very tight around the waistband, our coach was in a foul mood and not about to head off to her maternity leave without a fight.
At halftime, the score was tied at 36, and in the locker room, a hint of panic mixed with blind rage had begun to settle in. Mrs. Mulder, a paragon of decorum and femininity, was clearly about to blow.
She inhaled and exhaled like a bull getting ready to spear some poor matador, as angry as we had ever seen her, and it somehow picked up our spirits a bit to know that our coach was as frustrated as we were. She tried to keep her mind on the game as she gave her usual halftime admonitions and adjustments, but she was planning her next move. And what we did not see as we jogged back on court was our coach cornering both refs outside the locker room, just out of everyone’s sight.
This was not in her nature, and she knew it. She was not brought up to question authority, much less confront it. This was not the way she taught her players to behave. But she took a few cleansing breaths and launched in.
“This is against my principles,” she began, her voice trembling with barely controlled fury, “but I’m tired of watching this. My team is better, and you’re not giving us a chance. If you don’t start calling this fairly, I’m not going to be responsible for my behavior.”
Predictably, they said nothing, and Mrs. Mulder returned to the court. It was not the best speech she had ever delivered, but she was proud of herself for stepping out of character and defending her team. Still, she was shaken and so were we.
What aggravated us the most was that Connie’s third foul had been whistled by a ref standing so far away she’d have been lucky to read the number on Connie’s jersey. But we knew why she called it. She heard the slap. We all heard the slap. It was Connie’s way of getting into defensive position, of getting herself psyched. She’d slap her thighs or the floor or both as she bent her knees and glared at her opponent. The ref heard the slap and assumed it was a foul.
This, not just the foul but what it represented, absolutely infuriated us. Why couldn’t the woman refs raise the level of their game as we girls had raised ours? Why couldn’t they keep up with us as we sprinted up and down the court? And why, in the name of everything that was sacred, could they not tell a self-inflicted thigh slap from a foul?
Afraid that Shirley and Connie were going to foul out, Mrs. Mulder opted to sit them for the entire third quarter, a decision that dramatically shifted the momentum of the game and knocked the wind out of at least one row of Niles West supporters, specifically Billy Schnurr and Walt Cocking, a guidance counselor at the school and a long-time high school basketball official.
Cocking was apoplectic. “Billy, what is she doing?” he wailed as Dundee pulled out to an eight-point lead. Schnurr and Cocking agreed that Mulder should have kept Shirley on the bench in the second quarter after she had picked up her third foul. But not in the third quarter. Not when her team needed her most.
Shirley was equally aggravated. She could keep from fouling out, she thought. Why couldn’t Mrs. Mulder understand this? Not that she would ever put up a fight or, worse yet, pout on the bench. But sitting there next to Connie, it was all Shirley could do not to grab our coach by the shoulders and put herself back into the game.
Behind the unconscious shooting of Dundee’s guards, and without Shirley and Connie’s steady leadership, the Cardinals outscored us 20–12 in the third quarter to take a 56–48 lead into the fourth.
With Shirley still on the bench, Bridget fouled out 14 seconds into the fourth quarter. Diana hit two quick jumpers right after that to close the gap to six at 60–54, b
ut for the most part, Dundee sneered at our press, breaking through and scoring a pair of breakaway layups to push its lead back to 10.
With Shirley about to implode on the bench and just 4:44 remaining in regulation, Mrs. Mulder finally sent her back in following a timeout. Immediately, Shirley scored off a pick on our inbounds play. But with 3:32 left, our captain and leader and the heart of our team walked off the court with her fifth foul. Once again, it was a questionable call, and as she left the game, Shirley stopped and, with an expression that conveyed all of her anger and frustration, her passion and will to win, pointed to our bench to rally us as the ref tried to hustle her off the court.
“We are not giving in,” she shouted, “and we are not giving up.” We all silently nodded in agreement.
Connie grabbed Shirley by the wrist and gently guided her toward the sideline. We didn’t need a technical at that point.
Even trailing by 11 points as we were, with three and a half minutes left in regulation, this was not a situation that would have or should have made us panic. We all surely remembered pulling off a 10-point comeback in a game earlier in the season with less than a minute remaining. I knew for sure Connie was not thinking defeat as she squirted in on a patented drive. Diana followed with a steal off our full-court press and a layup, and Barb added another steal and a layup, cutting Dundee’s lead to five.
While Judson played all of his starters without a rest, we rotated all 10 of our players, and it looked as if it was going to pay off. When Judson called a timeout with 2:44 left in regulation, his players were bent over, sucking wind.
I found a seat on the bench next to Shirley after also fouling out, and we kept the sweat going while cheering on our teammates. “Intensity!” we screamed at each other in the huddle, our buzzword taking on even more urgency, and we promptly narrowed the deficit to three. But Dundee guard Nancy Horgan responded with a jumper, and Pat Morency answered a pair of free throws by Connie with two of her own to keep Dundee’s lead at five with 1:29 remaining.
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