State

by Melissa Isaacson

  Earl was Niles West’s assistant golf coach, and in practice one day soon after school started again, Trapp told him that Dr. Mannos wanted to see him. “We’re going to name you the girls’ basketball coach,” Mannos told him, apparently not interested in discussing the matter. Earl accepted, but what he did not tell his boss was that he planned to follow his wife’s advice: take it for one year and then resign the post after the season. He did not advertise his new position or really say anything at all until two weeks after school had started, when he saw Connie and me running breathlessly toward him.

  “You’re going to be our basketball coach?” Connie asked. “Why didn’t you tell us?”

  “I can see you’re happy about it,” I added. “I see that twinkle in your eye.”

  Earl sized me up, unsure if I was being serious or merely a smartass. Of course, the latter was true, and he gave us a crooked smile and walked away.

  He was starting to come around to the idea. After starting his coaching career at Niles West in 1964 with a $250 stipend for sophomore boys’ basketball, he was slated to earn $1,500 for coaching us, the same salary Mrs. Mulder had received. But it was not the money that would permanently change his mind about girls and sports.

  CHAPTER 16

  Safe Haven

  NO ONE KNEW THAT Karen Wikstrom’s father was dying. But then, neither did Karen.

  Eric Wikstrom was a conservative man, loving and gentle but not overly emotional or demonstrative. He was born in Sweden and had met Karen’s mother, Marianne, who was German-born, when the two were attending night classes—Eric to learn English and Marianne to learn bookkeeping and typing.

  Mr. Wikstrom was a contractor, and soon after the couple married and he started a construction company, they adopted a two-week-old baby boy, Brian. Two and a half years later, they added a two-week-old daughter, Karen, to their family. Her mother would tell Karen how joyous they were to bring her home, and she grew up healthy and happy. She was a daddy’s girl just as sure as she was anything, and she shared her father’s soft-spoken manner.

  Mr. Wikstrom was not an athlete, but he played catch with his son, taught his daughter how to shoot a basketball at the net he put up, and taught both kids how to drive a boat and water ski. He showed interest in our team but, like many of our dads, could only be so involved. “That’s good, honey,” he would say to Karen when she told him we had won again, but he could rarely attend our games because of work.

  He suffered his first heart attack when Karen was in fifth grade, and it seemed to her like he always had to watch himself. Her mom had had him on a special diet for as long as she could remember, but Marianne would make it a family affair with everyone eating healthy foods and watching their salt intake together. Her dad would take twice-daily walks, and Karen never thought much about it. It was just what Dad did. After breakfast and after dinner, Dad went walking.

  I had gone to Karen’s house a few times during our sophomore and junior years, and she had been over to mine. Her parents were sweet and her father seemed fine, but midway through our junior year, unbeknownst to most of her friends, he had another heart attack and a stroke, and for the next year, he spiraled downward.

  Karen and her brother still did not realize the severity of their father’s condition. Their mom sheltered them from the details by telling them simply that he was in the hospital, that he was going to be fine. Kids weren’t allowed to visit the cardiac unit, and so Karen accepted what her mom told her. And when her father came home, she assumed he was back to normal. Her mother even encouraged Karen and her brother to continue their regular activities. When her dad had his first heart attack, Karen’s mom had her give up ice-skating and horseback-riding lessons, as she was afraid to leave her husband to drive Karen. This time, Karen continued to practice with us, not mentioning anything about her dad.

  But he was far from normal. He had arteriosclerosis and congestive heart failure and was growing weaker all the time. He became frail and eventually had problems with coordination, losing his balance occasionally, and struggled to put sentences together. Karen would occasionally become frustrated because he never seemed to finish a thought, and her mom would admonish her to be more patient.

  One night in October, however, Karen did not want to go out as she had planned. She sat on the edge of her dad’s easy chair, threw her arm around him, and told her parents she thought maybe she should stay home.

  “No, no, Karen, go out with your friends,” her mother told her. “Give your dad a kiss good night and go on out.”

  Marianne did not summon anyone until one in the morning. She stayed with her husband in their bedroom and waited until she heard Karen come home and go to bed. Then she called an ambulance and asked them to come in quietly, without sirens, so as not to disturb her daughter. Just as they were putting Eric into the ambulance, she woke up Karen and together they watched through the window as it drove away. She did not want Karen to see her father on a stretcher, leaving home for the final time.

  Eric Wikstrom was 59 when he died on October 13.

  Karen cried herself to sleep, and the next day, her mother told her she should play in her volleyball game that night. Karen did not tell a soul all day what had happened, but before the game, she quietly informed the coach. After the team won, she stepped to the side with her mom while the coach told her teammates about Mr. Wikstrom. Later that week, many of us from both the volleyball and basketball teams attended the wake at Simkins Funeral Home in Morton Grove.

  I had never been to a wake before, much less looked into a casket, and I knew only one other father of a friend who had died. My friend Jane Segal’s dad was just 40 when he died suddenly of a heart attack, less than an hour after we all watched Marcus Welby together when I was 10 and Jane 11.

  My own father was just a couple of years younger than Mr. Wikstrom. And I remembered when I was little how I would lie on the couch with my dad, my head on his chest as I listened to his heartbeat, the steady lub-dub eventually freaking me out as I thought it might stop. It would invariably lead to the same storyline I had been privy to ever since I could remember, the one where my dad would wink and say to whomever was smiling at the little girl with the gray-haired father, “We had Missy to take care of us in our old age.”

  Everyone thought this was pretty funny, and I had no problem with it. I was the baby and, as far as I was concerned, both parents were going to live with me until all three of us were old and gray. “Will I still be your baby when I’m 40 and you’re 80?” I’d ask my father. “How about when I’m 50 and you’re 90?” calculating and recalculating until I was 100 and he was 140.

  I was thinking of that more and more lately.

  When Karen and her mom returned to their empty house, Karen’s mother encouraged her to go to volleyball practice the next day and again the next, knowing it would be therapeutic. Basketball season was coming, and Karen had been looking forward to it. Sports would be her escape.

  Gene Earl still wasn’t sure quite what to expect, but his buddies on the faculty were giving him the business.

  “Earl, you’re a lousy coach if you don’t take this team downstate,” Otto Karbusicky whistled at him every few days that fall.

  But that wasn’t all they would tease him about.

  “Earl,” said Walt Cocking, “you’re going to have to coach with your hands in your pockets.”

  He was more than a little nervous about that one.

  Earl was a habitual fanny-slapper, like most male coaches were with their male players, but he knew enough to realize that was one behavior he would have to change when he started coaching girls. Would he forget and accidentally pat one of us, only to get slapped himself or worse, punched out by one of our fathers or hauled off to prison? He shuddered at the possibilities.

  As for the coaching itself, the more he thought about it, the more he was looking forward to the season. He had not watched a lot of girls’ basketball and assumed it would be boring the first time he watched our team
play in our first-round sectional game last season. But as he watched that night, he found himself surprised that we handled the ball as well as we did and that the game was played at such a quick pace that it was actually exciting.

  He had no plans to ask for anyone’s help once the season began, but he consulted Billy Schnurr about our team before tryouts. Schnurr ticked off the top seniors and juniors and then dropped a bombshell. “You know,” Schnurr said, “maybe the best athlete in the school is walking the halls.”

  He was talking about Diane Defrancesco. DD had not even thought about basketball since she was removed from the team. She had broken up with Connie’s brother Chris, but we didn’t know much else about what she was up to and neither did Earl.

  He did not have to look far to find her. She happened to be in his PE class, and Earl asked her the day after he spoke to Mr. Schnurr if she was going to come out for the team. She told him no and rattled off a few excuses, and Earl didn’t pursue it. He had learned years before that if you had to beg someone to play, you were inviting trouble and that was the last thing he needed.

  Mr. Schnurr also told Earl about Becky Schnell, another player Earl had not heard of. Mr. Schnurr had her in camp that summer and, though she was an incoming freshman, felt she was good enough to play on varsity. Becky had just graduated from a class of 11 students at her parochial school and was enrolled at Niles East for the fall. Her older sister, Pam, attended Niles East and the Schnells lived in the East district. But Rich Schnell, Becky’s father, wanted his youngest daughter to attend Niles West. A PE teacher and junior high coach, Rich believed Becky would not be able to flourish as an athlete at Niles East, a school with a girls’ athletic program well behind West’s, and that it would hinder her chances for a college scholarship.

  Furthermore, he had been taking Becky to Niles West games since she was four, when the family lived in Morton Grove, and through his teaching job at Old Orchard had developed friendships with many of the coaches, including Billy Schnurr. Rich Schnell also knew Wes Gibbs, who for years had been the superintendent of District 68, which included Old Orchard, and was now the superintendent of District 219, Niles Township. Rich Schnell hoped that because Niles East was scheduled to close after the 1980 school year and because up until ’78, parochial grade-school students had been able to select which high school they would attend, the school board would allow Becky to attend West.

  So Rich sent a letter to Gibbs in which he listed all of these factors, including maybe the most important one. He told Gibbs that because of her unstable situation at home, Becky desperately needed basketball and that going to West would be crucial to her welfare.

  Rich was thrilled when Gibbs granted her permission to switch to Niles West. Though Becky’s grade school was small, her athletic résumé was already far more extensive than most high school girls who had come from the public school system. Becky began competing in track and field in second grade and, by fifth grade, had added softball, volleyball, and basketball. She had also played a rugged 20-game basketball schedule in eighth grade against other parochial schools.

  Athletically, she had it. She had fluid mechanics on her shot and a veteran demeanor on the court. Off the court, however, she was a 14-year-old freshman from a class size smaller than that of the average basketball team. She walked into Niles West with its enrollment of 2,222 on that first day of school and could not, for the very life of her, find her locker.

  After struggling with that, she wandered into the cafeteria and sat down at the first empty table she saw. “You don’t want to sit there,” said an upperclassman, informing Becky that she had just plopped herself down at the unofficially designated “burnout table” and that was probably not where she wanted to be. In class, she struggled to find her way as well; especially daunting was freshman English, where on one paper, she received a —32 on the usual scale of 100.

  But, like so many of us, sports would be her salvation.

  She immediately found a home on the JV volleyball team, and one day that fall, even before basketball tryouts began, she was sought out by Earl, who told her she would be practicing with varsity when the season began.

  I spent the fall learning how to drive and, like so many autumns previous, waiting for basketball season to begin. Connie and I played half-court games with the boys during 10th period before she had to leave for volleyball practice. That is, until one day when the volleyball coach, Mr. Beeftink, told her she would have to stop. Connie was nothing if not obedient to her coaches, but she told Mr. Beeftink she would quit volleyball if he did not allow her to continue playing pickup basketball. Next, she had a heart-to-heart talk with her father, who then had a talk with the coach, who told her the next day, “Fine, just don’t get hurt.”

  That was actually not such an unreasonable request, as Connie had already developed recurring ankle problems. But just how she would go about avoiding getting hurt was a question we were not smart enough to answer. She just shrugged, and we kept playing.

  We kept Shirley updated with a steady stream of calls and letters to the University of Illinois, where she had begun her freshman term. Shirley made one last run at the Illinois women’s basketball team after meeting with her academic counselor and telling her about being stood up by the women’s coach the previous fall. “I know Carla,” the counselor told her. “I’ll set up a meeting.”

  And so she did. And Shirley finally met Carla Thompson.

  The coach claimed she had been there that day of the ill-fated meeting when Shirley and her parents waited for hours before going home without seeing her. Then she slapped Shirley on the back in a gesture of encouragement to try out for a walk-on position. Shirley nearly fell over from the force of the slap, and that was pretty much that for Shirley’s basketball career. While she never expressed it in so many words, nor did any of us voice it out loud very often, the masculine image, in our minds, of women’s intercollegiate athletics scared some of us off. Shirley had already joined a sorority, was taking a ballroom dancing class, and was ready to begin a new phase in her life. Playing for a coach who didn’t want her—and who slapped her on the back like she was a linebacker—was something she decided she did not need that badly.

  One weekend, Connie and I visited Shirley in Champaign, and she told us that Mrs. Mulder had written to her and sent her a birth announcement—Michael Albert Mulder (not “Westley”) had been born August 4. Mrs. Mulder told Shirley that she planned to go to some of Niles West’s tennis meets that fall.

  Of the six returning varsity basketball players, I think I probably missed Mrs. Mulder the most, and even I hadn’t thought enough to call and see how she was doing. Connie was focused solely on the task at hand, and that did not include reminiscing about our old coach. Barb was convinced Mrs. Mulder never liked her after the piano recital incident. Karen obviously had her mind on other things so soon after losing her father, and Judy was busy with volleyball and we rarely talked about our former coach. Like me, Peg didn’t think of it and hadn’t known Mrs. Mulder as long as the rest of us.

  By the time the tryouts rolled around, some of us were convinced that Earl was going to be a typical male coach—a taskmaster short on sensitivity. We knew he’d be tough and probably insensitive to all of our little idiosyncrasies and rituals, but we kind of craved a tough approach, thinking maybe this was what we needed to push us over the top. After all, Peggy loved Jerry Sloan, and he was tough. But we also wondered how capable Earl was, having only his previous losing records with the freshman and sophomore boys’ teams to go by. And if that wasn’t bad enough, that fall Earl walked around with a scruffy beard, which we couldn’t stand.

  Connie and I were also apprehensive about how this season’s team was going to look. We wondered if Holly was going to be a younger version of the nonaggressive Bridget. And who could possibly replace Shirley’s scoring punch and savvy at the wing spot? Karen was slated to start but another candidate who was emerging was junior Tina Conti.

  I knew Tina from L
incolnwood. We played a little softball and her dad was a sweetheart who sometimes drove Shirley, Barb, and me to our morning practice sessions and had become a big fan of the varsity team. Like most of our parents, Mr. Conti was as far from a stage parent as one could get. Tina had initially made varsity her freshman year and was even given one of our cool new warm-up suits, only to be sent back down to JV after two games by Mrs. Mulder, who told her she needed to change from a two-handed to a one-handed shot. Tina didn’t make varsity her sophomore year either, watching her good friend Barb make the team and contribute both years.

  Tina was devastated both times. She had two older brothers, Rich and Dave, 7 and 10 years older than her, respectively, and Rich had played football and basketball for Gene Earl. But her father would not allow her to sulk, telling her that she should listen to the coach, do her best, and if she really deserved it, she would play.

  Tina ended up as a standout on the JV team, and Mr. Schnurr helped her refine her shot so that by the ’78–’79 season, she was ready. The seniors, however, still weren’t sure what to make of Tina. Invariably, while we would be scrimmaging against some of the boys on one half of the court, Tina would be flirting with the others on the opposite side of the gym.

  Earl settled on a final varsity roster of 13. Underclassmen Tina Conti, Holly Andersen, Becky Schnell, Pam Hintz, and Lynn Carlsen made the varsity squad for the first time along with returning junior Barb Atsaves. The five seniors—Connie, Peggy, Judy, Karen, and me—were back, and unlike Mrs. Mulder, who saw no problem with having a senior or two play on the JV, Earl elected to put the only other seniors who tried out—Nancy Eck and Debbie Durso—on varsity.

  It would not be the only situation in which Earl differed from Mrs. Mulder philosophically.

  In fact, soon the 44-year-old coach made it clear that we would be leaving almost all of Mrs. Mulder’s imprint behind. He did not believe in allowing seniors to take up JV roster spots that could be given to underclassmen who might one day help varsity. But he pulled Nancy and Debbie aside during our first practice and told them what they should expect.