In These Girls, Hope Is a Muscle

by Madeleine Blais

  The majority of the Hurricanes were from families in which the original parents had divorced, or some other major stress meant they’d never be called “the Waltons,” the team’s nickname for Emily (“Jonesbones”) Jones’s family.

  As the head pediatrician for the local health maintenance organization, Emlen Jones enjoyed a limited local fame similar to Coach Moyer’s, but instead of knowing all the scores and all the upcoming games, he knew about your child’s immunizations and scoliosis and ear infections. Because of his height and heft, it was widely assumed that Emily’s prowess on the court had come from him in a direct genetic transmission. While he was not bad at volleyball, the legacy that created in Emily a formidable stamina as well as a daunting under-the-basket presence actually came from her mother, Bernadette. Of all the mothers of the Hurricanes, she was the only one who had played basketball in high school and in college with any degree of seriousness.

  Coach Moyer paced the gym, clipboard in hand. He had his starters, Jen and Jamila and Kathleen and Kristin and Gumby. He had his height in Jonesbones. He had dependability and desire in Kim Warner.

  At the end of the second day of tryouts each girl was called up and given her own conference with Coach Moyer and with the others, such as Trish Lea, coach of the junior varsity, who helped make the selection. One by one the players approached the grown-ups, who appeared diminutive as they sat huddled over their ever-present clipboards in chairs at a table in the middle of the large gym. It was easy this year. Most of the kids cut themselves, and the few who didn’t were shifted over to managers.

  Lucia approached the table with wide eyes.

  Coach Moyer thought that Lucia looked as if the summer had been good to her. She’d gotten bigger, stronger-looking. Something was driving that kid.

  He had good news for her.

  “Sophie King.”

  A blond girl walked up to the table and after a brief huddle broke into a big smile. Sophie was another quiet kid willing to work hard. Her parents had met in the Peace Corps in Tibet, and they had a FREE TIBET sticker on their car now. For a while they had tried farming out in Hardwick, but they gave that up to move to “town” partly for the schools and the after-school activities. Her mother was an acupuncturist and her father sold lumber. The family maintained its activist streak. Sophia had spent the summer in Worcester working for Habitat for Humanity. It was, if memory served Coach Moyer right, Jen who had been responsible for getting Sophie to try out for the Hurricanes back when she was in the ninth grade and Jen was in the tenth. Instead of saying hello in the hallways at school, Jen would ask, “You trying out?” Sophie had been eager for a new activity. She had just given up the ballet she’d studied since the age of five, first as physical therapy and then for fun and finally, during the best times, as art.

  Her family had attended a concert at a church in Boston’s Back Bay when she was four and a half. Growing tired of the music, Sophie and the other children ran outside to play on the sidewalk. But because she had grown up on a remote farm at the end of a dead-end street, she had no sense of city traffic. The driver of the truck that crushed her leg was not to blame for failing to see her. Gangrene had almost claimed the limb; she’d undergone so many skin grafts that the injured leg from the knee down remained marbled and misshapen and discolored, paler than the rest. She said that people who noticed it for the first time had one of two reactions: “Did something bite you?” or “Gross. What’s wrong with your leg?” She’d decided to give up ballet at the end of eighth grade when her teacher told her there was no point in continuing: Sophie was too tall, and her head was too big.

  Then Jen had given her an approving slap on the back: “Forget ballet. You’re a Hurricane.”

  Jade Sharpe was picked for her promise.

  Her portfolio was slim. She had never touched a basketball until, as a lark, she’d decided to try out for the seventh-grade team. Despite the absence of early training, Jade had great style on the court; the other Hurricanes called her “Octopus arms.” She had great style off the court as well. She often wore her hair in extensions; with it swept off her face, the emphasis was on her large wide-set eyes. She was famous on team bus rides for her imitations of, among others, Aretha Franklin.

  She was also local. Her parents were from the city of Springfield, but they settled out in the country after her father had gotten his degree at U Mass. Her mother, Cheryl, worked as a nurse, and Avery Sharpe was a jazz musician mentored when he was young by no less an eminence than Archie Schepp.

  Jade was the oldest in a family with two boys and two girls. For a while the family had lived in one of those nearly all-white towns that border Amherst, but when it became clear that Jade would be only the second black child in a school system with 527 children, the Sharpes moved to the Amherst district. Still, it wasn’t as if the minority population of Amherst was so large that it was easy to get lost. Jade hoped to go to college in a city like Atlanta, where it would be a relief not to know every black person walking down the street by name.

  Her family had settled in a house surrounded by trees.

  “When you live in the woods,” her mother always said, “you can stop buying toys. The children can use a stick for a flagpole to wave a banner, a bow and arrow, a staff for walking.”

  The Amherst area was, she said, “not a fairy tale, but at least there aren’t as many kids lost by the wayside here as in other places.”

  Jade was the only Hurricane who’d attended the Common School in Amherst, a private progressive elementary school filled with gentle rituals: a Halloween parade in which the costumes were awarded a prize that was not licorice or fireballs but instead an adjective (a child dressed as milkmaid, for instance, once received “most lacteal”); a May Day celebration to which grandparents were invited, with everyone making baskets full of origami flowers; and Friday Sing, in which someone had once led the entire school in a song he’d written, with the refrain “There’s nothing wrong with right field.”

  Jan Klenowski, a frail but fierce tenth-grade guard, would be on the varsity, but to get more game experience, she would play JV during the first part of the season. She had missed most of her ninth-grade season because of a broken collarbone suffered during a game.

  Coach Moyer added up the names on the roster: Jen, Jamila, Kristin, Kathleen, Gumby, Kim, Jonesbones, Lucia, Sophie, Jade, Jan.

  There was one more opening.

  Patri Abad wanted that space.

  Patri was back in town.

  Patri had managed to leave out in the open Lucia Maraniss’s letter with its ornate decorations and sentiments, the avowals of admiration and that spray of verys.

  Patri’s mother later told people that her daughter would sometimes walk outside the family’s apartment, combining piety with desperation, reciting the Rosary to the Holy Mother, but that was not how it went according to Patri.

  “I’m not a nun. My mother likes to exaggerate.”

  Neither Patri nor her mother argued about the moment when, caught in thick urban traffic, Patri had seen a bumper sticker that she pointed out with a great gesticulating commotion. “See, Mommy, read what it says. GOD ALLOWS U-TURNS.”

  Whether it was Lucia’s fourteenth very, or divine intercession from the Virgin, or a miracle bumper sticker, Patri’s mother had relented. The family moved back during the summer before Patri’s senior year.

  From Coach Moyer’s point of view, Patri had missed a crucial year in her development as a basketball player. But she was eager, and the other kids adored her. It was optimistic of her to even try out.

  “Hey, does anyone know my definition of an optimist?” asked Coach Moyer. “That’s a guy who rides to his appointment for a vasectomy on a bike.”

  When the shakedown was complete, like the Macs at Atkins Orchards blowing off a tree in a storm, eleven girls stood together: the 1992–93 Hurricanes, minus one.

  As for the tw
elfth and final member of the team, Coach Moyer made a special announcement.

  “Okay,” he said, a big grin creasing his face. “You can all clap. Patri made it.”

  The whoops that followed were pure and uninhibited, and yet a mere hint of the kind of adrenaline that would kick in during the good times in the upcoming season.

  “Tryouts are over. We start regular practices tomorrow.”

  School ended at two-fifteen, and Coach Moyer expected his players to be on the floor right away, stretching, shooting, loosening up.

  At two-thirty he blew the whistle.

  Then he went through his short announcements, filling the kids in on league developments, standings, changes in the schedule, little bits of news that they might need. The purpose of this was to get them focused. He scheduled a minimum of four practices a week. A two-hour practice on Sunday was left optional.

  “Hey, what’s wrong with you guys, just standing around acting calmatose?” Calmatose was one of Coach Moyer’s special made-up words; it meant calm to the point of coma.

  “Let’s do some stretching exercises before we get stretch marks. What’s the matter, Patri? You don’t think I’m funny?”

  Coach Moyer was in typical form.

  “I’ll never forget last year, down in Agawam, one of their fans turns to my wife, Betsy, and says, ‘Your husband’s a horse’s ass.’ So she defended me by replying, ‘Whose isn’t?’”

  “Mr. Moyer, I’m only laughing because if I don’t, you’ll kick me off the team,” said Jen.

  “Did you hear about my great-grandmother, she had Lou ­Gehrig’s disease and Alzheimer’s? Yeah, she knows she hit a hundred home runs but can’t remember when.”

  Jen motioned to her teammate as if she were a conductor trying to get an orchestra to sing louder. “Everyone, quick, act like you get it. If you don’t, he’ll make us run suicides.”

  “Okay, enough fun and games. I know you think I’m dain-­bramaged. Did I ever teach you guys about the principle of verticality?”

  “That means you’re supposed to stick your arms in the other guy’s face, right?” said Jen.

  “Your humor’s beginning to grow on me.’’

  “Yeah. Like warts.’’

  “Time to practice our layups. This isn’t humanities camp. This isn’t a typical Amherst gathering where everyone forms a committee and stands in a circle and discusses their feelings. This is basketball! We get in lines for basketball. Use the backboard for an easy two. Lunge for the ball. If you’re out of breath, that’s cool. Just never buy a VCR from someone who’s out of breath. There are two things in this world that don’t last long. Dogs that chase cars and tournament teams that don’t make foul shots.”

  Then he would announce either “Three lines!” (which would be met with groans) or “Dribble series” (a selection of drills that were much more popular).

  The famed dribble series was invented by UCLA Coach John Wooden to increase his players’ ball-handling skills. They would play dribble tag or make obstacle courses or dribble while lying down on the floor.

  This series often ended with what Jen and Jamila called the “catch of the day,’’ in which one or both guards would come up with some outlandish dribble-pass-catch combination (dribble left-handed, bounce the ball off the head of your partner, who had to catch the ball behind her back . . .).

  That was easy compared to the “Three lines!” call.

  Designed to teach quickness and balance, these exercises required the Hurricanes to run weaves from basket to basket. Then Coach Moyer had them go zigzagging up the court, using defensive slides. They would practice shuffle steps and foot fires, a special torture in which the player goes into a crouch, one hand down, one up. On the whistle they began jabbing their feet against the floor. The tap, tap, tap sounded like drumsticks on the skin of a snare drum. Then the coach would point—forward, backwards, sideways—and the team would move instantly in shuffle steps, then resume their foot fires.

  He also had a series of drills in the half-court, designed to improve man-to-man defense. (He offered to change the term to person-to-person, but the girls preferred not to.)

  The defensive player would have to play with her hands behind her back. The goal was to force the ball handler to change direction three times, simply by positioning her body, and more important, her feet. There were other one-on-one drills. Over the years, Coach Moyer had discovered that the traditional defensive style, semicrouch, left hand low to prevent the right­handed dribble, right hand high to prevent the shot, wasn’t totally right for girls. So he taught them to move their left leg forward (in effect, preventing the dribble with their thigh) and to keep their left hand raised; that way they would automatically have a hand up in the face of their rivals. Most prefer a set shot to a jump shot.

  All of Coach Moyer’s drills—and as opposed to other coaches, he liked to limit drills—were designed to aid the “transition offense” that he was installing this season, in large part in response to what he’d seen that losing night during the previous March at Cathedral. In his endless ruminations over the summer about what had gone wrong against Hamp, it came down to this: the complete absence of a transition offense that attacked the basket before the defense had a chance to get set. It wouldn’t matter how big the other guys were if Jen and Jamila could lay in the ball before the six-one, six-two centers even had a chance to get back. Hamp had beaten Amherst because they had taken one of their players, Johanna Clark, and told her to dog Jamila everywhere. He remembered how Jamila had appeared out of control (“Insane” was Rita’s term), everywhere and nowhere at the same time. She had simply been trying to get the offense established with a player in her face.

  A transition offense is rare for any high school basketball team, boys’ or girls’.

  Most coaches like to have their players come down the court into established positions, read the defense, and then go to a series of rigidly set plays to defeat the defense. A transition offense requires great athleticism; its weapons are speed and skill. For the Hurricanes, it meant that as soon as a ball was rebounded or inbounded, each player ran an assigned lane on the court, leaving the middle open to Jamila. She would attack the front rim of the basket. On her right, Kathleen would run wide, then either set a pick against a low post screen for Jen, running the baseline, or an elbow pick, at the foul line, for Jamila to use. If she was open, Jamila would simply dish her ball.

  The effect of a transition offense is simple: When run properly, it seems as if the team is always running for a fast break. It seems as if someone is always open for the easy deuce or the uncontested three-pointer.

  During the 1992–93 season, Coach Moyer timed his players. After a basket scored against Amherst, he discovered, his team would score a reply in nine seconds or less (so much for the thirty-second clock). If there wasn’t an easy score, he trained Kristin Marvin to come way out to the sideline, take a pass from Jamila, and then return it to her, and they would run a set play. But this was a rarity.

  There was one other major drill: Take it to the basket. The Hurricanes had to toughen their game, get into a little more foul trouble, play closer to the paint. As he put it, he had picked over the loss against Northampton “like the bones of a Thanksgiving turkey, and although I saw the negatives that the kids couldn’t forget—the way they threw crazy passes to each other as if no one wanted to even touch the ball and how they’d pick and fade three feet away from the basket—I also saw the beginnings of almost everything that could make this season different.”

  He designed this drill mostly to help Kathleen and Gumby and Jonesbones. It was one on one, with a little jab step, face up and drive, or a crossover step and drive.

  He had Jen and Jamila and Kathleen bring the ball up full-court against six or seven defenders.

  He also employed what he called his “challenge games.” He would say, for example, “Three minutes
to go . . .” Then he would put the varsity on the floor against the JV. He would ask the JVs how many points they needed to win, and that would be the handicap the varsity faced.

  The losing team in the drills faced the ultimate disgrace. Some coaches might have the losers run wind sprints. The Hurricanes met with a far worse punishment. The losers had to sing to the winners a song of the winners’ choosing. Sometimes they named a tune and sometimes just picked themes: a Christmas song, a song with the word blue in it, something from Sesame Street. Unless the singing was done by Lucia or Rita or Jade, the quality was so wretched, the winners found themselves begging the losers to stop.

  One day during what appeared to be a routine practice, Coach Moyer decided to offer his solution to what he called “the Kathleen problem.” Here she was, a starter, and the only thing she was fierce about was being gentle.

  If he could only get Kathleen to feel the same intensity about basketball that she did about not eating meat. He had to get her to be fierce about being fierce.

  There was not a drop of meanness in Kathleen; she was so sweet, so demure. Basketball has been called a game of subtle felonies, something Kathleen didn’t understand.

  “Kathleen,” Coach Moyer would say, “you gotta cheat a little to win, step on someone’s toe, maybe laugh in someone’s face.”

  She would respond with a bland blank look. What was he going to do with her? She constantly backed away from her opponents, she ran around screens; she played in an unconfident way.

  He folded his arms and bided his time.

  She bumped into someone, and catching herself, she looked up. “Coach, I just said, ‘I’m sorry.’ I’m sorry.”

  “Kathleen, what are the two words you never want to hear on a basketball court?”

  “I’m sorry?”

  “What are the two best words to hear on a basketball court?”

  “I’m open?”

  “Kathleen, if this keeps up, I don’t know what I’m going to do with you. Sometimes I think what you need is an evil twin.”