State

by Melissa Isaacson

  How our nickname, Earl’s Girls, started, no one really knew, though it was so painfully obvious, it probably occurred to someone within minutes of his hiring. One of Earl’s friends on the faculty may have uttered it first, and before long, it seemed, we were no longer the Niles West Indians but Earl’s Girls. Even though I was the one to write it, I couldn’t stand the Earl’s Girls song. Neither could Peggy.

  I mean, how could a man who had barely begun coaching us be given ownership of the team? It bugged me. Then there would be the occasional comments in articles, like one in the Chicago Sun-Times in which Earl said he did the school “a favor” by accepting the job. He tried to praise us for our work ethic when he was quoted as saying, “The girls approach practice with a high degree of intensity. The boys would say: ‘Do we have to practice?’ But the girls say: ‘Can we practice longer and more often?’”

  But then he would still put his foot in his mouth, as he did with comments like, “I think they’ve made me a better person and a better coach, too. For example, the boys could complain and I wouldn’t take enough time to understand their problems. Now I take time to listen. I try to be more understanding. The girls are more emotional and seem to have more problems than the boys.”

  I brought the Sun-Times to school the next morning and shoved it at Peg in case she may have missed it.

  “That’s great,” she said. “So now we’re mental cases.”

  Peg was not particularly big on authority. It wasn’t that she was disrespectful. Not with Mrs. Mulder, anyway. She was, in fact, in utter awe of our former coach from the first day she met her, hoping only to have the chance to play for her one day.

  But she didn’t trust Gene Earl.

  Pretty quickly, we both had our doubts about him, resenting, in particular, the relationship Connie seemed to be developing with him. There was no tangible evidence, but to Peggy and me, Connie was being way too chummy with this man whom we still did not know enough about, and he seemed to have already identified her as the star of our team.

  Common sense should have told us that Connie was the star of our team. Though she was not the leading or even the second-leading scorer or rebounder (Peggy was), she led us in steals and assists and was our captain, our undisputed leader, and our best all-around player. Anyone could see that. But it bothered us that this team was already losing its egalitarian ways, and the harder Earl tried to bring Peggy into the fold, the more suspicious she became.

  At first, it began as a joke. Earl, who possessed the belly of most middle-aged men, would tell us to run laps around the gym, and Peggy would mutter, just under her breath but loud enough for him to hear, “How about we just run around you?” I encouraged it because as the season started and Barb was officially made a starting guard—a move that was justified and one I had seen coming for a long time—I had a pretty good feeling that for the first time in my high school career, I would no longer be a key contributor to the team.

  I was not wrong. Early in the season, Earl pulled Becky aside and told her, “If the game is on the line and I need a sub, I’m going to use you. If the game is not close, I’m going to use Missy.” I did not know this at the time, but I did know, not so deep down, that my coach had little faith in me, that he could not see into my heart the way Arlene Mulder had, that he could not tell that with every fiber in my body, I was invested in this team, and that before he had even known who we were, I had wanted to win a state championship more than I had wanted anything in my life.

  Peggy knew all of this and she felt for me, even as we both should have been celebrating her own two-year ascent from a kid who was scared to even try out for basketball to the starting forward on one of the best teams in the state.

  When Earl tried to be nice to Peggy, she read it as phony, that he was trying too hard, that he just didn’t get it. And when he lost his temper, he was just like most men she knew, maybe even the one she really didn’t. Either way, she was suspicious. And you could hardly blame her.

  When she was in sixth grade, Peggy and her little brother went to court with their mom to tell a judge that they wanted nothing more to do with their father. When her brother refused to go into the judge’s chambers, Peggy was sent in his place to talk to him. She told the judge that Al King scared her, that he broke their windows and knocked down their doors and beat them up. She told the judge she was terrified of her father and did not want to see him anymore.

  “And you call yourself a Christian?” the judge bellowed at her.

  “I am a Christian,” Peggy stammered.

  “Christ forgave. Why can’t you?” he responded.

  Peggy ran out of the courtroom and straight into her mother’s arms, sobbing.

  “You son of a bitch!” her mother yelled at the judge.

  Her father had recently survived a fire, and Peggy’s family heard he had received a large settlement from the insurance company.

  Apparently, the family concluded, Al King had put the money to good use.

  CHAPTER 18

  Dreidl, Dreidl, Dreidl

  WHILE SOME OF THE WONDER we had experienced at receiving our first uniforms and real leather basketball shoes may have abated by this season, we still appreciated any strides we made that brought us closer to total equality with the boys.

  We had finally discarded the plain, dark red jerseys we wore for home and away games and got brand-new road uniforms—red shirts with white short sleeves and red stripes and INDIANS emblazoned across the chest. We also had matching shorts that were miraculously and mercifully looser-fitting. If those weren’t cool enough, we had bestowed upon us actual practice jerseys—reversible, just like the boys’. Unlike the boys’ shirts, however, which were sleeveless mesh, ours were short-sleeved and two layers—white on one side, red on the other—of heavy cotton jersey material.

  But they just couldn’t quite get it right. The heaviness we could tolerate. And we were thrilled they were cotton and not polyester. But because they were cotton, it was not humanly possible to wash the shirt without the red side bleeding onto the white side. Even for my mother, who prided herself on flawless laundering, there was literally no way to avoid what none of us saw coming. After years of trying and coming pretty close to making people forget we were girls when it came to athletics, there we were, on the brink of greatness, wearing pink practice jerseys.

  Of course, each of us thought our mother was the only one to make this heinous mistake, and so none of us could bear to tell anyone else what had happened the first time we washed them. We all came out of the locker room with the red sides out, hoping against hope that maybe Earl would let us all keep them that way. When he didn’t, and the white team retreated back into the locker room for a quick change, one by one we realized we were now all part of this embarrassing pink sorority. We laughed, but not much.

  There was always the sense that as far as being treated equally with the boys, there was something just out of our grasp, as mystical and magical as the spacious varsity boys’ locker room we always heard about but obviously never got to see. Same with the boys’ weight room, the school’s only weight room, though we could at least pass by and peer into the large smelly cave just off the gym. It wasn’t as if any of us were dying to walk into a place so acutely male-dominated that it literally reeked of testosterone, or at least really bad BO. Nor did we want to develop huge muscles like men, which was the only option we saw.

  Though the first national powerlifting competition for women had taken place the year before, girl high school athletes did not do strength training. It did occur to us in a vague way, however, how lifting weights might be beneficial. We realized that one reason we found it so difficult to hoist jump shots like the boys was that we were simply not strong enough. Sure, we found our own ways to build up our legs, sitting against whatever wall we could find until our quads burned and tears sprang to our eyes. And we took great pride in our vertical jumps, though we saw only barely perceptible improvement in that area. There were also the early-morn
ing stair circuits and lateral slides. But those were intended to develop endurance and agility, and we did almost nothing to build upper-body strength.

  And so we’d glance at the boys’ weight room and walk on by, no real clue of the benefits that many of us would find in our 40s and 50s but that were so elusive to us now. For the time being anyway, we had business to attend to. On December 16, we opened the season at home with Crystal Lake South, a team we had never played, seen play, or heard of because the school had recently opened. Not that we were particularly nervous.

  Earl, however, was beside himself.

  Not in his entire life dating back to his own high school career could he remember butterflies the magnitude of which he experienced before the Niles West–Crystal Lake South game. He had not scouted our opponent and did not possess our confidence that unfamiliarity was probably a good thing. More than anything, he was afraid that we would come out looking awful and sloppy, that other teams, coaches, teachers, students, townspeople, and lord knew who else would take one look at this stumbling, bumbling group and wonder what the new coach had been doing for the last month.

  “I don’t know what’s going to happen tomorrow,” he told his wife the night before the game. “But I hope I don’t get run out of town when it’s all over.”

  Good thing he never let us know what little faith he had.

  After three trips up and down the floor, he calmed down. For one thing, we were playing a sagging man defense and the Crystal Lake coach yelled out, “They’re playing a matchup zone,” so Earl knew he wasn’t going to be outcoached at least. We led 19–11 at the end of the first quarter. In the second quarter, our defense held Crystal Lake to three points to take a 38–14 lead at the half, despite a twisted ankle and early foul trouble for Connie.

  It was 65–20 after three quarters, and we ended up winning 83–30.

  OK, thought Earl, so maybe all that singing isn’t such a bad thing.

  Addressing us after the game, he couldn’t hold back. This was really fun, and he didn’t mind telling us so. “Gang,” he said in his parting remarks, his voice rising to the level he used to get our attention in the gym, “it’s GREAT to be a winner.”

  We all jumped in alarm. Then laughed.

  I had fully expected to see Mrs. Mulder at our game, and if anyone would have asked her eight months earlier, she’d have thought she would have been there as well. But she began having second thoughts after Gene Earl took over. For starters, he never called once to ask for her input or to invite her to attend a game, and she took that as a sign that she should stay away.

  It was not her style to stand on ceremony, but that is not how she viewed it. Instead, she told her husband, she felt sincerely that she had to let the new coach bond with his team. And she feared that in light of the fact that none of us had called her either, her presence could be a distraction. No, she determined, it was best if she stayed home. And we went on without her.

  Next up was Hoffman Estates, and Earl again started Karen at the wing spot. He had intended to start Tina in the last game, but unfortunately for her, though happily for the Conti family, her brother was getting married in Florida that weekend, and hard as she actually tried to convince her parents that her presence was not necessary, she could not get out of it.

  If Earl considered getting nervous again, it took even less time to reassure him in a game we led 23–0 after the first quarter and won 74–40.

  Almost on a daily basis, however, he was still confronted with plenty of other things to make him uncomfortable. With a wife and 12-year-old daughter at home, there was reason to believe he had been desensitized to certain things. But it was with great horror, during the Hoffman Estates game, that he opened our first aid kit looking for tape and instead found a half dozen tampons spilling out. For several seconds, our coach kept his head buried, unsure of where to look and not look. No one had told him about this when they were trying to get him to take the job. What other surprises, he shuddered, were hidden around the next corner?

  For now, it was only Maine South, and for that he had to be relieved, though it was a team that always shook us a little. Maybe it was that, more than any other team, Maine South reminded us of ourselves. In the early days, their team had arguably better talent, was more experienced, and possessed the same type of intensity and hunger we had. Their players were also cocky with their striped socks and their flashy warm-up routines, and it was just that way they had of acting as if they could beat us any time they really put their minds to it—especially on their home court—that threw us.

  Trouble was, they were right.

  The Hawks had packed their gym on this night, the biggest regular-season crowd we had ever seen, and they were getting to Connie, which meant they were getting to us. By halftime, she had picked up three fouls, all drawn on blind picks at midcourt that sent her and her defender flying as she backpedaled on defense. Earl shouted at us to warn Connie that the picks were coming, and he was getting madder by the minute.

  Although he was adjusting to the differences between coaching girls and boys, we had not adjusted to the level of his voice. It could best be described as something between bellowing and screaming, and was generally preceded by an ear-piercing whistle he accomplished with thumb and pinkie inserted between his teeth, causing pain to every person in the gym and, quite possibly, small animals in parts of rural Illinois. He told himself that he needed to be heard. And, as players had done to their coaches since the beginning of time, we often made him crazy.

  On one series, Holly saw a pick coming and attempted to call it out, but Connie didn’t hear her over the din of the crowd and got creamed. Under the basket on the next play, a Maine South player went over Holly’s back on the defensive rebound, and as Holly walked back downcourt to shoot her free throws, Earl let her have it.

  “Holly!” he yelled as loud as we had ever heard him. “I told you to call out the pick! You have a tongue in your head? Well, you use it!”

  Holly turned a few shades darker than the color of our uniforms, marched to the free-throw line, and in her anger, missed the front end of the one-and-one. At halftime, all 5-11 of her cornered Earl. “If you scream at me,” she scolded, looking him squarely in the eye, “I’m going to get my Norwegian dander up, and I’m not going to play any better.”

  “Uh, OK,” said our startled coach, who dialed his screaming down several notches after that.

  In the end, we escaped Maine South with a 75–73 victory. Despite their picks and their flopping—which resulted in Connie picking up four fouls and playing just nine minutes, and Barb picking up her fourth foul late in the game—we established a 14-point lead early in the fourth quarter and held on. Toward the end of regulation, we went into a semi-stall offensively, packed in our zone defensively, and per our coach’s instruction, did not foul and stop the clock. Maine South’s outside shooters scored over the zone, but it was one of those games that was not as close as the final score indicated.

  Just the same, Peggy was apoplectic and disgusted with Earl’s celebration of our win.

  “What are you so happy about?” she snapped at him.

  It was only our third game, but already we were having the kinds of problems winning teams avoid, the minor griping we had never had before with Mrs. Mulder. While she would not allow individual statistics into either the newspapers or our collective consciousness, that was apparently of no concern to Earl. He didn’t care if stars emerged or if one girl was getting more attention than another. If it bugged some of us, Peggy, as usual, would be the one to express herself. And more often than not, her frustration would be taken out on our new coach, who did not quite know what to make of his players standing up to him.

  Connie knew she was the cause of some of the conflict and suspected that her developing relationship with Earl was the root of it. She had taken to calling him “Coach,” which was standard stuff on boys’ teams, and if we had thought it through, it was probably not especially egregious to refer to your c
oach as “Coach.” But it seemed, to Peggy and me anyway, that it represented a special bond forming between the two of them that the rest of us didn’t have and, frankly, that Peggy and I weren’t ready to have with him yet. At the same time, Earl recognized that the leader on his team was Connie, and whether real or imagined, subtle or not, we felt he was starting to treat her preferentially as well.

  Connie was no dummy, had picked up on the vibe, and tried making fun of him like Peggy did, telling him he was “going to the home” when he was forgetful or said something that struck her as senior citizen–like. But coming from Connie, it came off as cute and not disrespectful, and soon it became a team thing to yell, “Going to the home!” at our coach, just as it had become his routine to yell after each victory, “It’s great to be a winner.”

  But finally, she had a talk with him. “You’ve got to do something,” she told him during one of her free periods. “Everyone thinks you’re favoring me. Maybe you can ream me out once in a while.”

  Earl did not wait long. The next practice, at Connie’s first minor transgression, he barked, “Erickson, go run a lap,” as we looked at one another in shock. He had never called her “Erickson” before, much less made her run a lap, and as she passed him, she mouthed, “Thank you,” in his direction.

  That problem apparently solved, Coach Earl moved on to his lineup. That week after the Maine South game, he reviewed our stats and noticed that while Karen had scored eight points in the first three games combined, Tina, who was playing behind her, had scored nine against Maine South alone. He also decided that while Karen gave us a little more height inside and potentially better rebounding, Tina brought a little more quickness and ability to help break a press. He envisioned Tina quickly inbounding the ball after an opponent’s basket, rather than Peggy, who currently handled that duty. If the opponent was employing a full-court press, Tina’s first option would be to get the ball to Barb in the middle, who would quickly shovel it off to Connie, streaking downcourt. Peggy, a great defensive player herself and also fast, was then available at the other end.