Over. The game was over. On the way home, they watched a videotape of the game and drank Martinelli’s sparkling cider supplied by Jan Klenowski’s mother. Coach Moyer was already envisioning a swank community banquet at the campus center at U Mass, something classy and memorable, not just lukewarm lasagna and chicken thingies but sliced roast beef, lukewarm lasagna, and chicken thingies.
Someone had already asked him, did he plan to retire Jamila’s uniform? At Amherst she had ended her six years with 1,728 points, 569 rebounds, 511 assists, and 433 steals. It was impressive, but you didn’t retire a uniform until after there had been a whole career of such achievement. Besides, there might be a few hundred points left in it; one of the younger players might wish to choose number eleven next fall, though he doubted anyone would take on that mantle lightly.
He wondered how long it would take Jen and Jamila to become captains at Dartmouth and Stanford.
He had already picked the leaders of next year’s Hurricanes: the two Emilys, Jonesbones and Gumby. It was a title Gumby had been craving ever since the sixth grade.
As he settled back in his seat, outside it was still, of course, winter, but to him summer had arrived again, at last.
Kim began mentally composing a letter to her father: “Dear Dad, At long last a lot of hard work finally paid off.”
Jen was stunned at how it had fallen into place: We were so fluid, it was scary. And then she too, like Kristin, began to sob. From the seat in front of her, without turning around, someone thrust her hand back to Jen to hold: Jonesbones, goddess of kindness.
While they watched themselves, television viewers all over the state were witnessing recaps of the highlights and hearing the verdicts of professional commentators who claimed these girls had wandered into the wrong league: They shoulda been playing Calipari’s men at U Mass; they coulda taught the Celtics a thing or two.
The girls would hear all that in days to come, but at this moment they were mostly thinking about the present—when truth itself had become a dream. The bus was going backward, retracing its earlier path, down the Pike back through Palmer, where the only sense of abundance is in the fast-food stores, then through Bondsville, with its gin mill and the sunken rusty metal playground with a metal fence, back through the center of Belchertown, a singularly flat stretch in a town with a singularly unfortunate name, and back in and out of Pelham—thanks to Jen, on the map at last.
Kathleen Poe wished that the whole team could sleep that night in the gym at the high school, the coziest, most homey, softest place she could now imagine, that they could all sink into its floor, become part of it forever. She kept trying out rhymes in her head, phrases popping into her head like sudden rebounds: top and stop, pride and ride, forever and sever, heart, smart, true, you.
Hoop Phi is of an intangible, untouchable breed,
It satisfies the soul and a life-long need.
We represented our school, represented our sex,
Now maybe both will get some well-earned respect.
No one really wanted the ride to end. The bare trees, the velvety night air, the cocoon of the bus itself.
At the town line there awaited another police escort, this time back into town. The cruiser was once again full of proud, slow ceremony. At the corner of Main and Triangle, the cruiser seemed to lurch right to take the shortcut back to the school, but then as if that were only a feint, it continued to move forward so that the girls would be brought through town the long way.
The bus, boisterous in its very bigness, moved past the red-bricked Dickinson homestead with its top-heavy trees, tall and thin with a crown of green: We’re Somebody! Who are you? The college kids who could afford it were all in Florida for spring break, and so downtown was almost empty save for a couple of pizza eaters in the front window of Antonio’s and a lone worker sweeping in the back shadows of Bart’s Ice Cream. As the strobe lights from the police cruiser bounced off the storefronts, the bus wheezed past Saint Brigid’s and the bagel place, turning right, then left. They gave their ritual cheer one last time:
“Give me an A . . .”
And then, finally, the bus pulled into the school parking lot a few minutes shy of midnight. All of a sudden one of the players shouted: “There are people there, waiting for us!” And, indeed, in the distance was a small crowd standing in the cold and in the dark, clapping.
When the bus came to a stop, Coach stood up. “I promise it won’t be mushy. There’s just one thing you should know. When you’re the state champions, the season never ever ends. I love you. Great job. And now, I’d like everybody else on the bus to please wait so that the team can get off first.”
How often in the past the Hurricanes had bounded off the bus in a joyous squealing clump! But on this night the pace of their leave-taking was different, almost regal. They rose from their seats, slowly, in silence. State champs! For the final time this season, with great care bordering on tenderness, the teammates gathered their stuff, their uniforms, their shoes, their socks, their game faces, and their courage. And then in a decision that was never actually articulated but seemed to have evolved as naturally as the parabola of a perfect three-pointer, the Hurricanes waited for Captain Jen Pariseau to lead the way, which she did, and one by one the rest of the women followed, with Captain Jamila Wideman the last of the Hurricanes to step off the bus into the swirling sea of well-wishers and winter coats.
Overhead the sky was as low-hanging and as opaque as it had been earlier in the evening, but it didn’t need stars to make it shine.
EPILOGUE
Almost twenty-five years later, the girls you met in the preceding pages are in maximum strength adulthood: in the throes of acquisition not of shedding, of bold upward changes not of timid lateral moves, of definition and redefinition.
News of their whereabouts and fates filters back to me from time to time: a chance run-in at Henion’s Bakery with Bernadette Jones (mother of Emily), or at the Care Center in Holyoke with Anne Teschner (mother of Rita) where she is the director, or at the local fitness club with Stan Shore (father of the other Emily).
Coach Moyer and I get together every six months or so at Johnny’s Tavern just to catch up. His wife Betsy died in 2003 after a two-year struggle with cancer. The normally talkative coach is suddenly soft-spoken: “It was a hard time.” He is retired, with four grandchildren who live nearby. In 2010, he married Suzie Dickson Moyer, celebrating with a party at the UMass Campus Center featuring cupcakes for dessert and an array of songs to dance to—all with lyrics that included the word “Sue”.
Thanks to these encounters and talks I have given from time to time, including on the 250th anniversary of the town of Amherst, as well as at various schools, I carry around an invisible rolodex. So when someone says, “What are those great girls and their coach up to now?” I can always cobble together an answer. Maybe it’s not as up to date as I would like ideally, but it’s at least more so than when they were last seen in the final pages of the book, proudly processing off the bus with their heads high before they folded themselves into a dark winter night that did not seem dark to them. I also still field inquiries from readers who want to know about the town (has it changed?) and what prompted me to write about the Lady Hurricanes in the first place. After all, every year, fifty teams from fifty states win championships. Why this team? Also, for some reason, I am frequently asked to name my favorite moment in the entire season.
Favorite moment?
That is the easiest.
Right after the final game in Worcester, Massachusetts at the Centrum. The Amherst players had refused to leave the locker room and the more their coach found himself knocking on the door, each rap louder than the last, the more they huddled together inside, weeping copiously.
Finally, he announced he was coming in, and what greeted him was a roomful of girls who returned his level gaze with eyes that were rheumy and red as they sputtered: “Last . .
. final . . . never again.”
He looked at them as directly as he ever had in all those moments of coaching when they’d needed a solid unforgiving gaze, and he said: “You’re wrong. This isn’t the last. There will be lots more basketball.”
His tone was conversational, almost adult to adult.
“But . . .,” they started to say.
“I promise you. There will be lots more basketball.”
Still they regarded him with disbelief. They could not decipher his real message, at least not at that moment. They couldn’t fathom how the word “basketball” might have more than one meaning.
There will be lots more basketball.
The girls looked skeptical.
But that can’t be true. Only two of us are planning to play on college teams. Coach doesn’t know what he is talking about.
And the tears flowed anew.
Lots more basketball: that is what he said.
Lots more ups, downs, challenges, victories: that is what he meant.
In the years since, basketball indeed has had many meanings: resilience, flexibility, self-awareness, finding jobs, leaving jobs, finding partners, leaving partners, finding new work, getting advanced degrees, finding new partners, getting married, moving, moving again, having children, coming out, singing, running a company, fighting for the downtrodden, blessing a congregation, counseling teens on how to keep a job, staying in touch, losing touch, regaining it. All the usual markers and rituals of adulthood have been punctuated now and then, ever so distantly, by a faint bell tolling the same news over and over. At one time long ago the Lady Hurricanes had banded together and through their sweat and their magic they enthralled an entire town.
Rita Powell (cupcupcup all day long) went to Barnard College, where she was on the women’s softball team at Columbia, and then went on to Yale Divinity School. “I’m actually an Episcopal priest. Who would have guessed? I worked a lot with sports and religion as an undergraduate; I am very interested in how the body is the site of spiritual experience. Ultimately, I got interested in food, too, as a means of communicating spiritual experience—hospitality, visions of the kingdom as a feast, which is what I focused on at Yale.”
Rita spent a semester with the Taize community in France: “My work at that point had to do with honoring the particular vision and insight of young people in an effort to let the church be what it must be: a center in a community for meditation, existential questions, and the practice of love.” She initially settled in South Dakota working with young people as a priest in the Episcopal Church. She is now one of five priests at Trinity Church, on Copley Square in Boston, the scene of a powerful pro-immigrant rally two weeks into the Trump administration. “It is hard to know where and how best to take a stand. But if you believe in Biblical witness, it wasn’t so difficult in this case, as the Bible says you have to welcome the stranger. It is not Christian not to.”
She finds herself constantly “amazed at how much my athletic experience from high school has informed my life.”
A year ago she was invited by the Department of Youth Services in Boston to teach yoga to a group of incarcerated young men. All of them had played basketball so she showed up in basketball clothes and incorporated heavy energetics and strength into the routine.
“My past experience as a basketball player allowed them to believe in me.”
Her husband is a professor in the Physical Therapy department at Simmons College. They have two children, Jackson, seven, and Juliet, five. Rita treasures a photo of Jackson at ten months, holding a ball: “He couldn’t even walk and yet he had perfect throwing form.” Recently, while he was huffing his way up to full speed on his bike, Juliet sprinted alongside, outpacing her brother.
Kim Warner (whose mother always worked two jobs, and who Kim and her siblings once surprised with a gift of four new tires) is two courses short of her degree from UMass, a situation she is in the process of addressing. She lives in Westfield with her husband and her fifteen-year-old twins, Joseph and Madison. When the children were little, she relished being a stay-at-home mom: “I like doing things old-style.” Eventually she went back to work and is now a full-time secretary “at their school, for the first time.” Neither of the children play basketball, but “Joey is on his high school swim team and in the scouts. Madison? Well, somehow I landed myself with a dancer.”
In the summer, Kim works with at-risk kids who qualify for a state grant to get part-time jobs. She checks in on them, helps them with their cover letters and resumes, trains them in how to interview, and in how to conduct themselves in the workplace. When she finishes her college degree, she would like to become a guidance counselor along the lines of Coach Moyer. What she admires most about him, in retrospect, is:
“He was always there for the kids. They know it. It’s crucial.”
Kim’s mother succumbed to complications after surgery three years ago. “She died slowly, painfully, gracefully.”
For Kim, the death was life altering. “After someone takes care of you your entire life and then they are gone . . . it shook me to the core. She was a best friend to my twins. Whenever there was a problem, I would get my mom on the phone to calm them down.” Her mother died days before she would have celebrated her sixty-fifth birthday: “I was rocked.”
As for the championship season: “The more the years go by, the further out it goes. I sometimes use it as an example with my own kids. We had a losing season; we had a winning season. You don’t always win. As long as you do your best.”
Emily Shore (Gumby) lives in San Francisco:
“It’s hard to sum up a life, but here’s what comes to mind. I love to learn and use my hands to make things, and feel bored when I’m not. The main passions of my adult life: playing guitar, becoming a licensed acupuncturist, and working for a hardware start-up. All involved using my hands to do precise work. In many ways I think best with my hands—often I don’t know the solution to a problem until I’m physically working with the objects involved. So, to me, approaching an arrangement on guitar, implementing an acupuncture treatment, and working on an intricate hardware repair project are all the same thing, even though to most people that idea is just absolutely nuts. My wife and I spend a lot of time being active, cooking, playing ukulele, and hanging out with our fetch-obsessed dog and all her Ultimate Frisbee friends. I’m also really proud of the two CDs I’ve recorded and released. I wrote, arranged, co-produced, and project managed them. And I feel like they really stand up well.”
Emily’s favorite song is about . . . basketball.
“And that’s the one I get asked to play most often.”
As with many of the Hurricanes, she says she stays in touch with some of her teammates mostly through Facebook and email.
“Our interactions are less frequent than I’d like. But I’d give any one of them a kidney. That is . . . unless I was gonna play one-on-one with Rita, for which I would need two kidneys in case one was knocked out by her high-rebounding elbows. (Sorry Rita!)”
Emily credits the town of Amherst as a major influence:
“Having grown up in the Pioneer Valley, I really love to read, to learn and understand more about the world, and to have civil but engaging conversations with people about important topics. On our honeymoon, my wife and I were in a hot tub at a resort in Hawaii with a white, straight, conservative couple. They were clearly wary of the Black Lives Matter movement, and they asked us point-blank what we thought about it. I explained to them my understanding of the basic core principles of the movement and why I thought that was really important, and they listened. Later that night they sent over an expensive bottle of champagne to our table. I am not saying that I think I made a difference—who knows if that’s even possible? And I’m far from an in-your-face type of person, but when I see things being done in a way that I consider to be wrong or hurting someone, and I am talking about prejudicial statem
ents or actions, I am usually the person in the room that first says something about it. I think that is Amherst’s influence.”
I asked her if she could go back in time and talk to the seventeen-year-old girl she was in 1993, what would she say to her?
“That’s a hard one. Invest in Facebook? Buy before you’re priced out of Berkeley? But more seriously . . . Maybe I wish I could tell her that while I would continue to see and sometimes experience a lot of homophobia (verbal, nothing violent) over the next decade or so, that I would not lose family, friends, or career when I realized I was gay. My twenties were hard in that regard, and I wish it could have been easier. This may surprise some people, but in my experience, homophobia was still pretty common in the overall Amherst environment at that time we were growing up. Probably not worse than other areas of the country, but also not the liberal concept of Amherst that many people might have. And I think it made it a lot harder for me, and I wish my younger self could have had reassurance. There are hundreds of other things I’d like to tell my younger self, but I guess that one comes most to mind.”
Kathleen Poe (Skippy) graduated from Cornell.
“In that time, I got in some good rugby . . . and I got some good rugby injuries.”
She went to the Sloan School at MIT with the goal of eventually applying for-profit business models to social problems. When I last spoke to her on the occasion of Amherst’s 250th anniversary, in 2009, she said she was “living in Boston and working at a cool innovation consulting firm that helps companies come up with new businesses when they run out of ideas. Ta-da.”
She characterized the town where she grew up this way:
“Amherst really is unique. How can watching, as a baffled little kid, naked people do yoga in the sauna at Hampshire College not teach you to be at least a little bit accepting . . . or lead to years of therapy? And really, either one of those outcomes is very Amherst. My love of Atkins Farm (or at least their cider donuts) has led to ambitions of opening a similar glorified fruit vegetable stand with a smoothie bar and make-it-yourself trail mix bar that also had a separate part that would have live music and dancing at night that could be free for community organizations to use during the day. And it would employ primarily punk teenagers who would learn business skills and mentor other youths as they moved up. I think that after growing up in Amherst, I am happily ambitious, optimistic, and deluded enough to think that such a business model could work.”
In These Girls, Hope Is a Muscle Page 25