amandaottaway

[amandaottaway]

"But it was one thing to acknowledge women's right to play and quite another to embrace women's athletics with enough enthusiasm to turn on the television or get out to the games. For fans to respond in large numbers to women's teams, players would need not only to play well, but to exemplify a kind of womanhood with which large numbers of spectators could identify and which they found pleasing to watch. This would prove an enormous challenge...Basketball rewarded strength, determination and assertiveness -- qualities prized in men but still dangerous territory for women." 

-Excerpt from the book "Shattering the Glass: The Remarkable History of Women's Basketball" by Pamela Grundy and Susan Shackelford. I highly recommend this book and am happy to lend out my copy although it is littered with my terrible underlining and stars and exclamation points and smiley faces and angry faces. #research #AfterTheLastBuzzer

[amandaottaway]

In the brave spirit of true, buckle-down, shoe-leather reporting, I decided to recreate the most hellish of our college basketball conditioning tests today so I could write about it more accurately in my book: the 300-meter shuttle run.

In this test you sprint up and down the court 12 times, touching a line just past the opposite foul line. Guards have 65 seconds to finish those 12 up-and-backs; post players have 68. You do that three times, meeting the same time requirement, with two minutes of rest between each.

I woke up this morning with a familiar feeling of dread in the pit of my stomach, right on cue. I finished my sprints today -- 4+ years after I passed the test with three straight 68-second runs -- in 89, 95, and 91 seconds, respectively.

Now, two hours later, a report on the condition of my body: Due to stabbing pains in my lower back, I cannot stand up straight or walk properly; I have a headache; I have been coughing so hard I almost threw up earlier; my head hurts; my hamstrings, calves, and butt feel simultaneously tingly, crampy and heavy. I can't stop eating. This group text with my former teammates is about all I have the energy to do. 

#sacrifice. #journalism. #AfterTheLastBuzzer (Video diary available upon request.)

[amandaottaway]

“For some reason, our society has completely put a negative stigma on mental health and emotional health,” Logan Hartman told me in a late 2014 interview. She and I played high school basketball against each other in Pennsylvania and ended up Davidson teammates. Just before the start of our sophomore season, during a full-court drill, she fell and hit her head on the floor so hard that the resulting brain injury eventually ended her career and impacted nearly every facet of her life. She clawed her way back and just finished her first year as a fourth-grade teacher in Kannapolis, North Carolina. Here she is with their class pet, a bearded dragon named Herman.

Logan and I talk about brains a lot. It’s this thing we do.

“We go to a vagina doctor when we think we have vagina problems. When we break a bone, we go see an orthopedist. When we have allergies, we go see an allergy specialist," she said. "When we have skin problems, we go to a dermatologist, you know? You go see all these different specialty doctors, but with your mind -- no one goes to see a psychologist regularly, ‘cause there’s a negative stigma on it that you’re crazy to take care of that part of your body. But now I’m starting to learn that you’re crazy if you don’t. Why do you go to the gynecologist every single year and get a pap smear, but you refuse to take care of your mind? Like why don’t we as Americans take preventative steps toward mental health to keep ourselves healthy? And it’s really, really difficult to convey that to people who have never been to that point before.”

‪#‎AfterTheLastBuzzer‬

[amandaottaway]

Mason Jeffries (Davidson women’s basketball 2011-2013) walked on to the Davidson women’s basketball team as a freshman. She’s now living her dream as a first-year medical student at Tufts University, and we spent a few days hanging out together in Boston. “Basketball was something I had always done,” Mason told me. “It was definitely part of my identity in high school. It’s not cool to be really smart, it’s not cool to be a little nerdy and anal about school, and basketball was like my alias. “Little did I know how much my high school [basketball] heartbreak would be nothing compared to how much college basketball puts you through the grinder. I’m still glad I did it…I think I just didn’t really know what I would do if I didn’t. As a person I felt really really comfortable when it was just me in the gym, shooting. That was one of the times I felt most like myself, was me in a gym and just totally low-key, maybe listening to some music, just hanging out and shooting baskets.” Mason left the team after her sophomore season to focus more on her schoolwork and on doing things “normal” college students do. She wasn’t on scholarship like most of her teammates, and she averaged less than six minutes a game her freshman and sophomore years. But walk-ons play because they love to play, and we had a particularly close team bond with Mason. “After I quit, that was also a very beautiful time of being like, what else is there, what else do I want to spend my time doing?” Mason explained. “The highs are higher and the lows are lower in college basketball. And you’re exhausted, so it’s that much more intensified; your emotions are very up and down, and I think that’s part of what bonds you to your teammates is that it really is up and down. “The part of me that was a perfectionist was like, well, [the coaches] are gonna yell at me if I go in [the game]; at least here [on the bench] they’re not gonna bother me. But that’s not how you should live life, and I understand that now. Some of my favorite memories were on the bench.” 

#AfterTheLastBuzzer #walkon #medschool #Boston

[amandaottaway]

“Well, the vast majority of WNBA players lack crossover sex appeal. That's just the way it is. Some are uncomfortably tall and gawky, while others lack the requisite, um, softer qualities to captivate males between 18 and 35. The baggy uniforms don't help. Neither does the fact that it's tough for anyone to look attractive at the end of a two-hour basketball game."

-Former ESPN columnist, and editor-in-chief of now-defunct sports website Grantland, Bill Simmons, circa 2006

"It is a lady’s business to look beautiful and there are hardly any sports in which she seems able to do it. I am reminded particularly of an international [squash] match in which two gals played themselves into a state of absolute popeyed exhaustion, so that between games they sat panting on the floor of the court, their legs spread out, backs to the wall, tongues hanging out, faces beet-red, hair damp and scraggly, shorts and blouses wet and clinging. Come, come, girls. We simply cannot be having that sort of thing.”

-Sportswriter Paul Gallico, 1936

Photo by Tim Cowie, 2012.

[amandaottaway]

Barbara Sitton lives in Minneapolis, Minnesota and is a software developer for Target. We talked about the two big careers she’s had in her life – basketball player and then coder.

“I’m gonna be honest, the way that I used to think, I valued money way more than experiences,” she says. “And I don’t know if that comes from growing up without it…it was like okay, how do I get that? So that’s pretty much what drove my decisions…Realizing that WNBA players don’t make that much money, I knew I couldn’t make a career out of it -- it just wasn’t gonna work for me."

But basketball – which also happened to be her passion -- was her ticket to a free college, which in turn could be a ticket to a lucrative career.

“So basically 12 years of my life was driven by basketball,” she says. “After graduation, as much as I thought I was ready, I guess I wasn’t ready to go into the real world. And it’s like being lost. I felt so so lost." The money didn't matter as much as she thought it would. "I guess the hard thing is that I’m hoping that there’s more than that one passion inside of me.”

Barb, who started at Target as a business analyst, learned how to code and became a developer, a job she loves but a job where, she admits, she often feels multiple types of pressure.

“On the Davidson basketball team, I know that I’m one of the only people of color on the team,” she says. In software development, she’s often the only woman and woman of color in the room.

“You walk in, one, with the mindset -- I don’t wanna think anyone to think I’m just in here ‘cause I’m black, and two -- prove it, and three -- I don’t want to be that black person who overdoes it 'cause they’re trying to prove it so much. So I don’t have to walk into a room and try to force my authority on everyone because 'I’m the black person here and I’m educated, don’t underestimate me.' I try not to let it affect anything in the way that I do things, but there’s definitely twice as much pressure.

“Ultimately I should be proud no matter who I am,” she says. “No matter my ethnicity or gender, I have just as much knowledge as the 30 year-old men working right beside me.”

‪#‎AfterTheLastBuzzer‬ #women #girlswhocode #target

[amandaottaway]

Monica (Mo) Payne (formerly Monica Laune, Davidson women’s basketball 2006-2010) hustled more than anyone I have ever played with. Once, she got elbowed on a rebound during a game and her head split open right down to her skull. She grew up in the tiny town of Ashland, Nebraska, and moved back after graduation. Now she lives in Lincoln with her husband, Tyler, and two kids, Kooper and Kayden.

I read an NPR article some months ago (linked below) that explored why adult women don’t play pick-up basketball as often as men do, and I thought Monica did a nice job of explaining the puzzle from her perspective.

Mo said that before Kooper was born, she’d work late all the time, and she and Tyler played basketball and sand volleyball a few times a week. Having Kooper changed that.

“Those nights where I had basketball -- it’s so much time away from her,” she explained.

“I didn’t have a desire to play pick-up on the weekends because Saturday rolls around, I finally have a day with my daughter, and the last thing I wanna do is call my mother-in-law to hang out with her for three hours so I can go play basketball.

“Tyler’s like, ‘I want her to see you playing, I want her to want to do it like her mom does, and play 'cause her mom played, and to not only get that example from me, but from you.’ And in some ways I felt guilty for not wanting to play, but at the same time, I just wanted to spend time with my baby.

“I do want to play again, it’s just so hard right now…It’s a totally different relationship with basketball then it was. It’s still obviously a love of mine but not in the same way. It’s strange, it’s very strange. It was so much of who I am. [Now], I’m a mom. That’s so much of who I am now and who I love being, which is the best part.”

You can read the NPR piece here: http://www.npr.org/…/women-want-to-stay-in-the-game-but-lif…

‪#‎AfterTheLastBuzzer‬

[amandaottaway]

Alex Thompson (AT) is a doctoral candidate in the North Texas University Department of Psychology and works as a consultant at their Center for Sport Psychology and Performance Excellence. She and I spent a few days in Denton together, playing pick-up basketball and hanging with her photogenic dog, Zooey. Because of her psychology background, I wanted AT's take on a question that's been bugging me: Why have so many of the strong, progressive, feminist women I've talked to said they might prefer to have a male coach?

“What models have women coaches had of other women coaches who were positive and effective leaders?" AT asked. "Are they modeling themselves based off of successful male coaches? And if so, if they do the same things, will it come out and be received in the same ways? And I think the answer’s probably no.

"What messages related to how men should treat me versus how women should treat me are at play [for me] as an athlete, and how does that impact how I view the coaching to be okay or not okay? It’s so hard to compare. If [a male coach] said the same thing in the same way [a female coach] did, would I hear it the same way as I did coming from her? Do I expect more of [my female coach] because she’s a woman and expect her to develop more of a relationship with me, and feel some sort of anger or disappointment when she doesn’t? I don’t know. It’s hard to untangle.

“All I have to know is that you care about my well-being, you respect me as a human and you do things that make me respect you as a human. Men can be passive-aggressive too, but we don’t automatically label it as passive-aggressive. We say, ‘Oh, he’s angry right now, so he’s saying those things.’ So I don’t know. It’s very confusing. You can’t untangle it because we live in a patriarchal society, so you can’t remove your twenty-whatever years of being raised in that.”

‪#‎AfterTheLastBuzzer‬ #feminism #patriarchy #coaching

[amandaottaway]

I was expecting to have a tough time tracking down a live-stream of the Division I women's basketball championship game in Mexico tonight, but I wasn't expecting Google and the March Madness app to be as little help as they were. (That one ended already, guys, go Nova.)

Eventually I found a TV with ESPN and goddamn, is UConn fun to watch.

‪#‎AfterTheLastBuzzer‬ (or before it) #UConn #ncaaw

[amandaottaway]

The NCAA Division I Women's Final Four starts tonight. Over the past few weeks, a rash of journalists and fans and critics have discussed whether UConn's perennial dominance is harmful to the women's game. Inherent to that discussion is the question of who watches women's basketball, who doesn’t, and why.

A few weeks ago I talked with Davidson women’s basketball assistant coach Kira Mowen, who had a fascinating and somewhat radical perspective on the women’s basketball fan base.

“The general public has been trained to like the NBA, music playing in the background, dunks and no defense and Steph Curry shooting threes,” she told me. “It’s like a club, it’s like open gym. Nobody sees the beauty in our game because their mind is trained to think ooh, ahh.

“I mean, we have our fan base, and I don’t think it’s ever gonna change. I think instead of magnifying who our fans aren’t, I think we should involve the ones that we do have more, and love them more,” she continued. “If it’s gonna be lesbians and old people, it’s gonna be lesbians and old people. What can we do for them? And families with kids, that’s another one. Instead of trying to reach the businessman, why not just try to reach more of who do come, and who do enjoy it?”

Maybe, Kira reasoned, the audiences for men’s basketball and women’s basketball are just different. Why fight that?

“Bring in women, bring in families,” she said. “Bring in who would love it and who would support it. We spend the most of any girls’ team on campus…so why not try to make some money out of it, and don’t fight what we’re not? I don’t need this person and that person. I know they come to the men’s games -- I don’t care.”

‪#‎AfterTheLastBuzzer‬ 

[amandaottaway]

Chloé Woodington (Davidson women's basketball 2007-2011) took me fishing in San Antonio a few miles from her apartment. I let her string the worms onto the hooks. (That's what she's doing here.) We each caught a trout.

Chlo is in her second year of medical school, simultaneously pursuing an MD and a master’s degree in public health. She’s involved in, by my count, seven extracurricular groups at her med school.

We talked about her and we talked about hoops and women in hoops, and women in other sports.

“People would be like, ‘women’s soccer played today and Alex Morgan is so hot,’ but is she even the bomb? No one was saying Abby Wambach was hot, but she was the bomb,” Chloé says.

“I remember when I was watching [basket]ball at first, the players who were the best players weren’t what a lot of people would probably consider looking cute. They were the rough girls and the strong girls and the athletic girls.

“When it changed though, my thought that cute girls can hoop too, [I saw Stanford’s Candice Wiggins] and that was the first time that wasn’t mutually exclusive. I think it just made me think I could do it too. Play ball and look cute and still be a good player. I wanted to be cute and have my hair done but I also still wanted to wear my big shorts, and have on like my sneakers. I wanted both. And I cared about both.”

We discussed the impossibility of the stereotypes female athletes face that lead to some women “wanting both.”

“I could see, especially people who are trying to separate themselves from a stereotype, 'if I look a certain way people are gonna stereotype me and say I’m a lesbian,'” Chloé continues, “'but if I get all cute, they’re gonna say I don’t care about basketball, when I actually do.' Maybe that’s where it came from, that trying to get the middle ground, still get your hair done, still trying to be cute, but still have the attire of a ball player.”

‪#‎AfterTheLastBuzzer‬ #women #athletes #soccer #cute #hair 

[amandaottaway]

In college, we called Ashley Sineath (Davidson women's basketball 2007-2011) "Laxie" -- her maiden name is Lax. Coaches sometimes called her "beanpole" and "violin player." She finished her career having made the second-most made three-pointers in program history and she scored over 1,000 points, despite multiple stress fractures, a shredded patellar tendon, a broken nose, and swine flu (there was a breakout on campus in 2009). She's thoughtful and reserved and has a deadly sense of humor and a master's degree in public health from the University of Alabama at Birmingham. So I asked her what she thought about dry season -- the annual team rule that players couldn't have a sip of alcohol from the day of the first practice to the day of the last game.

"For the intensity and the demands, strictly speaking from an athletic perspective or a biological perspective, I think dry season is wise," Laxie says. "I think the way that alcohol can affect your body and the way that it can stay in your body could potentially get in the way of peak performance. I think it made sense, if what we’re striving for is peak performance in every sense of the way. I think if your goal is different, than that then maybe it’s not the right policy. But I feel like at that level that is the goal.

"Now from a social perspective, I think you’re asking a lot of your players. I think to be a college student and to be withheld from partaking in what is a social norm in college is asking more than the average student, but then again they’re there for a different reason. You are at the school for a very specific reason."

We also talked about being athletes and women in the workplace.

"I feel like a lot of coaches challenged me to be more vocal, or to be more assertive or to not be afraid to lead, and I think being stretched in that way through sports has carried over to the workplace," Laxie says. "Confidence, maybe, to be who I am and not be afraid of speaking up or leading. I've seen [this] working in an organization in North Carolina: a lot of the female staff were afraid to say what they thought, or to lead. They weren’t confident in what they had to offer and what they thought. And that was just different for me. I think being around our team, we were not afraid to say what we thought most of the time, and we were asked to be vocal, asked to encourage others, asked to motivate others, and looking back, that’s pretty cool."

‪#‎AfterTheLastBuzzer‬ #alcohol #college #women #workplace

[amandaottaway]

To its credit, Davidson College allowed the creation of a women's #basketball team just about a year after trustees voted to start admitting women as degree students for the first time (1972). But sportswriting still had a way to go... "Don't be alarmed one of these days if the Davidson College sports information office distributes basketball rosters with players possessing statistics like 36-23-36. If that sounds suspiciously like a well-proportioned female, your suspicions are well-founded." #AfterTheLastBuzzer

[amandaottaway]

This is Laura Murray Kindig (Davidson women’s basketball 2010-2014). The psychology major left college as the Wildcat women’s all-time leading scorer with 1,880 points. We hung out in Atlanta, where she lives now with her husband Seth. They met when Seth joined the Davidson women’s basketball practice squad, a group of male students who came to our practices a few times a week to play against us. (Laura and Seth’s might be my favorite love story ever.)

Practice is not pretty, and our practice players see all of it up close. We shove and sweat on and grunt at each other. Big bodies crash. People fall hard.

“Girls, girlfriends, are always a lot smaller than what I always was,” Laura says about growing up an athlete, echoing the sentiments of many of her teammates. “You’re not like, the ‘fat friend’ but you’re a little bit bigger and you’re stronger, so I think for girls especially it can be viewed as not as feminine or not as girly. And when you hear people say, ‘Wow, you look really strong,’ what does that mean? Is it a compliment?”

Eventually Laura figured out, as many of us did, one way to feel about her body. “My body was created to make me suitable for all different types of things in my life, like playing basketball,” she says.

“I think that women who play any sport, do anything, we should be proud of what we do. And if it’s something that we love, it’s okay to say, hey, I’m willing to get a little sweaty and aggressive and look a little ugly sometimes for this thing that I love.”

Now she and Seth, the “Coaches Kindig,” coach an elementary girls’ basketball team together. They went into a fifth-grade classroom and asked all eighteen girls if anyone wanted to play basketball, and all but six joined the team. None have played before.

“A lot of times the girls sway away from basketball simply because it is sweaty and you gotta get physical with people, and it may not be attractive, I guess,” Laura says. “And I want these girls to realize that it’s okay to really, really love something, and find something that you’re passionate about and go after it at a hundred percent speed. It’s a hard lesson to teach.”

‪#‎AfterTheLastBuzzer‬ #bodyimage #girls #women #love 

[amandaottaway]

Hannah Early (Davidson women’s basketball 2011-2016) just wrapped up her college playing career, which she extended by one year with a medical redshirt after a 2011 ACL tear. The religion and political science double major set the single-season record for made three-pointers with 74 and became the 17th player in program history to score 1,000 points.

She told me about a recent conflict at Davidson College. According to Hannah and a few other folks on campus and to the online message boarddavidsoncats.com, after a recent men’s home basketball game was attended by fewer students than usual, head coach Bob McKillop and one of his players made public statements that they were disappointed more student fans hadn’t shown up, that the team works hard and deserves the support of the student community.

“Campus erupted,” Hannah says. Many players on Davidson’s 20 other varsity athletic teams, who make up nearly 28% of the student body, expressed that they, too, felt underappreciated and didn’t work any less hard than the men’s basketball team, which averages more fans at home games than any other team.

Hannah, who’s on a full athletic scholarship, partnered with a field hockey player and a women’s volleyball player – neither of those sports is fully funded at Davidson; in fact no sport is except men’s basketball – to write an opinion piece in the campus newspaper, The Davidsonian.

“That night, men’s basketball experienced what most students, athletes, and non-athletes alike experience throughout their Davidson careers,” the women wrote. “Although home games normally offer the hosting team an advantage, this is not the case for most Davidson sports teams other than men’s basketball…

“The problem of weak support does not just affect the athletic community. Other students work hard to represent Davidson on the stage acting in plays or musicals, at research symposiums presenting their ground-breaking studies, in peaceful protests advocating the values they stand for, or at VAC art galleries displaying their senior art shows, and rarely experience support from students outside of their friend groups.

“Working to create [a more uniformly supportive] culture could help Davidson become a place where not only the men’s basketball team feels supported, but all athletes, artists, musicians, dancers, activists, and academic scholars can also shine in the spotlight.”

You can read the Davidsonian article, called “Creating a Culture of Support,” here, in the “Perspectives” column: https://issuu.com/_davidsoni…/docs/2-17-2016_the_davidsonian

You can also see community comments on the incident that sparked the discussion on this message board, under the subject heading “Woeful”:http://davidsoncats.com/viewtopic.php?t=22562

‪#‎AfterTheLastBuzzer‬

[amandaottaway]

The year Sarah Marie Davis (Davidson women’s basketball 2009-2013) graduated from college, she was hired as a Language Arts teacher and head girls’ basketball coach for seventh and eighth grades at Southwest Middle School in Gastonia, North Carolina. Sarah grew up in Michigan and she loves where she comes from more than probably anyone I know.

“Academics were always first for me,” she says of her own school career. “I never asked for an extension, I never asked to take a test late because of basketball. And I think a lot of us work better under pressure anyways. We got it done.”

A lifelong basketball player, with her new coaching job Sarah finally got a taste of life at the head of the bench. That first year, 2013-2014, she was named the school’s Coach of the Year.

“It was a very, very eye-opening experience being a teacher and a coach at 22 years old,” she says. “I definitely didn’t know what I was getting into.

“When we lost in the championship game, I think that was the hardest loss I’ve ever had in my life,” she says. “To not cry in front of them was so hard. When I got home I texted my AAU coach and he called me and I was crying, talking to him, and he was like, ‘I’m telling you, coaching, it’s harder on the heart than it is as a player because you feel responsible for the heartbreak of all of your players.’

“To talk to him about it made me feel better because he knew what I was talking about…[when I played for him] we’d lost some game and he thought, I hope these girls don’t hate me because we lost that game. And I said, that thought never crossed my mind ever, and he was like, ‘Your girls don’t think that about you. You just feel that way; you are responsible for them.’”

#AfterTheLastBuzzer #teacher #coach #academics

[amandaottaway]

"You silly guys," said two-year-old Kooper (left) when her mama Monica (Laune) Payne (Davidson women's basketball 2006-2010) and I showed her this picture. Then we toasted with Go-Gurt. Also note Kooper's baby brother Kayden, five weeks, being incredibly patient with me as I hold him in what looks like an uncomfortable position. It's so cool to hang with the babies and partners of my college teammates, and so hard to leave every stop on this trip. #AfterTheLastBuzzer #greatdaytobeawildcat (at Lincoln, Nebraska)