Catch a Star by Tamika Catchings

Author:Tamika Catchings [Catchings, Tamika with Ken Petersen]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Autobiography, BIO018000, BIO026000, SPO004000
ISBN: 9781441219633
Publisher: Baker Publishing Group
Published: 2017-04-12T16:00:00+00:00

In February, we faced a stretch of five games in ten days. Old Dominion was first up on the fourth, then Mississippi State, Memphis, and Auburn in quick succession. None of them were close games, though Old Dominion was ranked third in the nation at the time of that game. Winning big or not, we still played the minutes. Four of the five games were on the road, which always takes more out of you.

Our last game would be against an SEC foe and our archrival in the state of Tennessee, the Vanderbilt Lady Commodores. And we were exhausted.

This was another one of the scheduling gauntlets Pat Summitt intentionally created for her teams. She addressed this in the locker room before the Vandy game. “I’m to blame for this schedule,” she told us all. “I did it by design. So why would I do that?”

I spoke up. “To see if we can handle it.”

“Correct,” she said.

Even so, I wondered if, at certain points of this season as our record continued to build, Pat was starting to regret her scheduling strategy, realizing that we were now making history and seeing that ominous fifth game in ten days looming as a trap game for a team of exhausted college players.

But that last game of those ten days wasn’t a trap game. We’d already played Vandy once, and won, but they were nationally ranked and always a threat. We knew it wasn’t an automatic. We wouldn’t get trapped because we were taking the game for granted as a win, but we could lose outright. They were very good.

Sure enough, we came out flat. We were, for one of very few times that season, actually slow. Vandy jumped out to a 16–7 lead. We gave up more turnovers (8) than we scored points. It was pretty ugly.

Pat called a time-out. She knew our performance was due to fatigue—and she was tired too—but she made it clear we had to take care of the ball. She got us focused not on the whole game or on the score, but on each possession of the ball. If we focused on making each possession count, we’d be okay.

In the last ten minutes before halftime, we came out on fire. Pat had the three of us Meeks in the game at that point, and we began to score, almost at will. We went on a 17–0 run over the next six minutes, leading at halftime by nine.

Pat challenged us not to ease up, not to let Vandy back into the game. And we complied, keeping them quiet in the second half and scoring nearly twice as many points as we had in the first half. We won 91–60, a score that doesn’t reflect how tough the game really was for us.

Later, Pat would write about that game. It was then she began consciously to allow a dangerous thought, one she’d banned from her mind much of the season. Maybe, just maybe, this team might go undefeated.5

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