State

by Melissa Isaacson

  When he saw Arlene Mulder at a ’79 team get-together for pizza after I began writing the book, the two greeted each other warmly, with Coach Earl exclaiming in his booming voice upon seeing her, “I want to thank you, Arlene. If you hadn’t gotten pregnant, I wouldn’t be here right now.”

  It was clumsy, to say the least, but I fought back the impulse to spit out my Diet Coke because I knew what he was trying to say and that it was sincere.

  “I had the utmost respect for Arlene and the way she worked at trying to learn to coach girls’ basketball,” he said. “The few times I saw her, she never acted toward me as though I got all [the] credit and she didn’t get any. She left me in a very good position.”

  When he is introduced to someone new—particularly by another coach or to another coach—there still isn’t a single time, he said, that the person doesn’t preface it with, “Gene won a state championship.” But, he emphasized, “I never used it as a tool to salve my own wounds. And I never brought it up to my other teams. Never.”

  But that doesn’t mean he didn’t think about it. Asked if he ever caught himself glancing at our state championship trophy in the glass case outside the gym in the years after we won the title, Earl did not hesitate.

  “Every day,” he said. “Unless I was in a real big hurry. But if I was just casually walking by, yeah, I gave it a look. I gave it a good look.”

  Shirley Cohen

  SHIRLEY DID GET HER CHANCE to play on the Assembly Hall court. Competing in a one-on-one intramural tournament her freshman year at Illinois, she reached the finals and got to play at halftime of an Illini men’s game. Not surprisingly, she actually won the thing, a distinction that would occasionally be mentioned at a party when someone remembered seeing her. But it was no substitute for making it there with us, and for all intents and purposes, it was the official end to her basketball career.

  Still, college was a great time for Shirley. She majored in occupational therapy, joined a sorority, dated. After college, she moved back to Chicago and began a career specializing in treating patients with hand injuries.

  The athletic drive never left her; she just channeled it differently. She decided she’d like to try bungee jumping and then did it on a trip to New Zealand. She traveled the world on outdoor adventure trips, parasailing, white water rafting, and skiing. She ran two marathons after the age of 40.

  And every once in a while, her true competitive instincts would bubble forth. She’d make a diving catch in a flag football game or clobber a home run in a softball game, leaving men gawking. Once, Shirley visited me when I lived in Florida and, playing in a pickup basketball game at a local park in which we were the only women, we competed with all the intensity of a state championship game, recalling later the men looking on in shock.

  In her early 40s and unmarried, she began thinking seriously of having a child on her own. Training with her friend Debbie for one of her marathons, Shirley confided in her, “Deb, if I don’t do it now, I’m never going to do it.”

  “Finishing the marathon,” Shirley told me, “was part of my impetus. I thought, if I can do this, I can do anything.” After five unsuccessful tries at pregnancy and one miscarriage, Jocelyn Emily was born on July 9, 2003.

  Nine and a half months later, Shirley and Jocelyn met Gregg Katz. On their third date, Gregg gave Shirley her first-ever Mother’s Day card. On their fourth date, he brought dinner over for the two of them, and for Jocelyn, a toy and a box of Cheerios. One day after they had been seeing each other for about six months, Shirley came home and there was a huge printed banner hanging above Jocelyn’s crib. It read: GREGG AND I HAVE BEEN TALKING … AND I SAID, YES. NOW IT’S YOUR TURN … WILL WE MARRY HIM?

  When Jocelyn walked down the aisle pushing a tiny pink shopping cart of roses, I thought I would lose it. When Shirley’s parents followed, beaming, with Shirley between them, I did. I was far from the only one. Stealing glances at Shirley’s closest friends, I saw we were all weeping.

  It was not the way she had ever planned, but then whose life ever comes out exactly as planned? As Mrs. Mulder told her on the bus following that last loss to Dundee in Shirley’s senior year, life would often be unfair, and it was how she responded that was the important thing. It was but one of the many lessons we learned from Mrs. Mulder, and one that Shirley carried with her, as near impossible as that would prove to be.

  Gregg and Shirley thought they had their fairy tale. But in June of 2017, when they were then the parents of Jocelyn, 13, and twins Ethan and Jordyn, 10, Gregg complained of flu-like symptoms. A microscopic malignant growth he had had removed from behind his eye early in their marriage had metastasized to his liver, and less than three months later, Gregg was gone.

  Once again, her friends wept, but we also knew Shirley. While there was no moral to the story and no consolation, there was Shirley’s inner strength and ever-present spirit, and we continue, as always, to follow her lead.

  Connie Erickson

  AFTER TRANSFERRING FROM Southern Illinois to Northwestern her sophomore year in college, Connie continued her success on the court, as Northwestern advanced to their first NCAA tournament and Connie achieved all–Big Ten status at guard, her name still standing among the top 10 in single-season assists, as well as career assists and steals after just three seasons.

  But nagging injuries plagued her. She was redshirted her senior year, held out due to a combination of injuries she felt she could overcome, and for the first time in a long time, she struggled with her self-image. “It was heart-wrenching,” she described, “but it also ended up changing my life.”

  Only another athlete can truly relate to the feelings of isolation that an injury can create. “You feel like your relationships are out on the playing field,” she explained. “It’s the way you relate to others. I felt my personality was out on the floor, so I couldn’t be who I was.”

  A guy on the football team with whom she had become friends, Kelby Brown, had graduated. She was struggling in an anatomy class. A close friend on the team seemed to be withdrawing from her and becoming better friends with another player. “I felt like the world was coming down on me,” she said, “which is how it is in college. Everything is intense.”

  Her parents were there for her, driving their motor home to every game, even when she wasn’t playing. The girls on the team called them “Mom” and “Dad.” Still, Connie missed being involved, missed basketball, missed competing, missed the person she had been.

  Finally, the team manager, a friend of Connie’s, persuaded her to go to a Bible study meeting with her. Connie saw other athletes there. “And they showed me this unconditional love,” she recalled. “They taught me who God is. It was a life-changing experience.”

  She and Kelby Brown had never dated. He was a card-carrying member of the Fellowship of Christian Athletes and straight-laced. “That’s why we never dated,” she laughed. But when they met again after college, they were on the same page. And soon, they were in love.

  After coming excruciatingly close to making the 1984 Olympic team the summer after she left Northwestern, Connie joined Athletes in Action and traveled to China. She also made plans to go to Barbados and play in a women’s pro league that was just starting, but she blew out her knee playing in a rec league game the night before she was to leave.

  Reconstructive surgery followed, and Connie accepted a graduate assistant coaching position at the University of Utah, where Kelby was the strength and conditioning coach. The two were engaged in October of 1984 and planning a July wedding but decided not to wait when a trip to Ohio State brought them to Kelby’s hometown of Montpelier, Ohio, that winter. They called their parents at the last minute, found a church and country club, and were married there in December of 1984 before family and friends. Over the next eight years, their daughter and two sons followed.

  To talk to Connie is to be inspired. She has coached on every level, from church league to AAU. She was a Division I assistant and coached her kids’ prep scho
ol, Charlotte Christian, the alma mater of NBA star Stephen Curry, which Connie built into a state contender.

  Connie went back to school herself, earning an associate’s degree in computer integrations, began her own web design company, and laughed at the enormity of the task. “The confidence to be able to do that was probably based on being an athlete, just the whole experience,” she said. “I was like, ‘OK, sure, I can try this.’”

  For 20 years, beginning in 1989, she and Kelby did missionary work all over the world but consistently in Ukraine, where they started a faith-based sports camp that continues today. Connie also volunteered in Charlotte-area schools, creating an after-school program for underserved kids that has seen tangible results in school performance.

  “It has turned into such a great thing,” Connie said. “It has just become part of who I am.”

  All the Brown kids played soccer and basketball and ran track. And her little boys grew to be exceptionally big and strong young men and, no surprise, extraordinarily athletic, both playing football and becoming academic all-Americans at Duke.

  Torn cartilage and subsequent surgeries in both knees curtailed Connie’s running and tennis playing. But she continued to ski, spin, hike, do Pilates, and, with Kelby, go white water rafting on a regular basis. And she doesn’t discount some revolutionary future therapy for her knees that might allow her to play tennis again.

  When I last saw our teammate and captain in the fall of 2017, it wasn’t hard to picture her on the court again. And I remember a conversation we once had when she talked about coaching. “I would rather be out there on the court any day,” she said. “I just enjoyed the game. I loved running down the floor, passing off, making something good happen.”

  Clearly, she’s still a natural at it.

  Becky Schnell

  WINNING THE STATE TITLE the year she was probably least able to appreciate it represented the high point of Becky’s basketball career. The season after our state championship win, Becky started on varsity, and the team lost by one point in the regional final. The next year, the team would return to the Elite Eight but would have to settle for fourth place, which felt like failure to someone who knew how it felt to win it all.

  Becky’s senior year, she blew out her knee in the third game of the season at Evanston. That team lost to New Trier in the sectional final, a game in which Becky—still not fully recovered from her injury—was able to play only a couple of minutes, marking the final appearance of her high school career.

  “I was spoiled,” she told me. “I thought, ‘I’m going to do this the next three years,’ and I learned the hard way it doesn’t work like that.”

  Becky played basketball and softball at Mississippi College, but her heart wasn’t in it, she said. And the summer after her sophomore year, she would lose her mother to pancreatic cancer at age 50. A decade later, as Becky was trying on her wedding dress, she thought of her mom. Phyllis Schnell was always horrified that her youngest daughter had no interest in going to prom or homecoming, that dresses were completely foreign to her.

  When Becky’s wedding dress came in before the big day, it was a good inch too small, and as she pulled it on for the final fitting, she was sure they weren’t going to be able to let it out enough. “But somehow,” Becky recalled with a smile, “the damn zipper just went up and I swear it was my mother.”

  Becky thought she had found her life’s calling as a teacher and coach. She received her master’s in education in 1988, coached at an elementary school in Skokie, helped Coach Earl with his Niles West team and his basketball camps, and took over for him as the girls’ varsity coach following his retirement in 1990. She still coaches and teaches at our old high school.

  “I always wanted to coach; it was always in me,” she told me. “But I found out coaching is more than x’s and o’s and teaching. That was the part I loved about it. I loved practices, but all the other extracurricular stuff wore me down.”

  What also wore her down was the realization that even high school girls’ basketball had become a year-round business. She lost some players who were recruited by private schools. She lost others to burnout.

  “The teaching part of it was getting lost,” she said. “The whole game had changed. We played for the fun of it. We were a team…. But kids now don’t accept their roles, and they don’t go out for teams if they think they might sit on a bench. And there’s a lot more parental involvement—and not necessarily in a positive way. Now it’s a job for kids.”

  I felt bad for Becky during our 25th championship reunion. Everyone who was married had kids, and Becky confided that she and her husband, Jeff, had been trying, going through “hard-core” fertility treatments for two years. “Having an athletic frame of mind, competitiveness was huge through this,” she said. “It’s just a never-give-up attitude. You’re dealt something, and it becomes, ‘OK, what’s the next goal?’ It felt good because sometimes I wondered if I still had it. To me, it became a game.”

  And when her doctor’s office called on December 21, 2004, to tell her she was pregnant, she felt as if she had won. Becky and Jeff Tuecke welcomed baby Addison in August, their daughter’s name an homage to Becky’s beloved Cubs, who play at Wrigley Field on the corner of Clark and Addison.

  “It was definitely the biggest success of my life,” Becky said.

  More often than not, it has been Becky who has played the den mother of our state championship team, doing the planning and organizing and encouraging when we have gotten together over the last few years. And as I worked on the book, it was Becky, perhaps more than any other former teammate, who seemed to be the most interested, the most encouraging. Part of it, I’d joke with her, was that she has the best memory of all of us because she’s the youngest. She’s also a helluva quote.

  “When I look back, it’s not the trophy,” she told me once, “it’s right now, you and me talking again. We have a reason to get back together. Looking at my other three years in high school, that’s what makes it so special. Because of the state championship, we’ll always have that bond.”

  It was impossible to disagree.

  Holly, Judy, Tina, Barb, Karen, Nancy, Pam, Lynn, and Debbie

  OF ALL THE BENEFITS girls and women have gained through participation in athletics, dozens and dozens revealed through surveys and studies, there is this: on the 2017 Fortune list of Most Powerful Women, 65 percent played sports competitively in high school, college, or both. And a 2015 study by espnW and Ernst & Young found that 80 percent of female Fortune 500 executives played competitive sports at one point in their lives.

  Of the 13 members of the 1979 state championship team, 12 of us went on to either teach, coach, or have some direct involvement in sports in our careers or in addition to our regular jobs. And all of us remain competitive.

  “People accuse me of being competitive sometimes, like it’s a bad thing,” said Holly Andersen Blanchette, now a highly successful real estate broker, laughing when she spoke of how being an athlete has affected her. “But it doesn’t mean I’m a sore loser; it means that sports has empowered me. It gives you self-confidence and makes you more determined. Like running a few more suicides than you think you can.”

  Holly played basketball at the University of Iowa and coached junior high and high school basketball and volleyball, as well as her son’s youth soccer team. She also coached a soccer program for kids with special needs for 10 years, and for more than 30, she has been a ski pro at resorts near her home in northern Illinois.

  Judy Becker coached the freshman girls’ basketball team at Niles West for a short time. After a Hall of Fame career at Division III Elmhurst College, Tina Conti Grusecki did basketball promotions for an athletic apparel company, and her daughter Jacqui was a standout for the DePaul women’s basketball team.

  Barb Atsaves Pabst, a self-proclaimed “5-6 slowish guard” graduated as DePaul’s all-time leader in scoring, assists, and steals and later was named to the university’s Hall of Fame. In her first
few years out of college, she was a grad assistant for the DePaul women’s basketball and softball teams, did color commentary on women’s college basketball for a local sports cable network, and coached and coordinated the Niles West basketball feeder program.

  The Atsaves family has been a feeder program of its own with Barb and siblings Toni, Cindy, and Louis producing 14 children who went on to star at Niles West in a variety of sports and activities, several advancing to the collegiate level.

  When Barb’s dad, Pete, passed away in the fall of 2017, Barb said the family was offered the option of holding the wake on a Friday night, which would have interfered with a critical football game and kept the team’s three standouts—the quarterback (Barb’s son) and star receivers (her sisters’ boys)—out of action. The family, including the boys’ grandmother Pat, wouldn’t hear of it, and the wake was delayed.

  “My dad went to all the games,” Barb laughed. “He would have insisted they played.”

  Professionally, Barb followed her stints coaching and commentating with a sales assistant position at WGN Radio in Chicago, and she rose through the ranks to manager of network operations.

  Karen Wikstrom, who coached and officiated middle school volleyball, worked in clinical research for a major pharmaceutical lab in the Chicago area, conducting trials for the prostate cancer diagnostics test that is today considered the mammogram for men, and helped develop drugs that suppress HIV. Nancy Eck coached park district softball and became an emergency room nurse in the Chicago area.

  Pam Hintz Duda earned a doctorate in special education and has devoted 30-plus years to working with deaf and blind children as a clinical assistant professor at Illinois State University. And Lynn Carlsen Nichols became a physical therapist assistant working with severely disabled children in Camas, Washington.

  Debbie Durso, who coached basketball, softball, and volleyball at three separate high schools, was dean at Plainfield (Illinois) Central High School from 1999 until October 22, 2018, when, to the shock of her teammates and heartbreak of all who knew her, Deb died of unknown causes. We cherish the memory of her wonderful giggle and sweet, unselfish nature.