The Rebounders by Amanda Ottaway

Author:Amanda Ottaway [Ottaway, Amanda]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: BIO016000 Biography & Autobiography / Sports
ISBN: 978-1-4962-0587-2
Publisher: UNP - Nebraska
Published: 2018-01-07T16:00:00+00:00

Belk Arena was not empty as we huffed around the court that evening after the App game. It was dinnertime on a Saturday, and other athletes had the upper courts, also patrolled by their coaches and a few athletic trainers. I saw some of the football staff gazing curiously at us staggering around, shoving each other. I registered all these witnesses somewhere in the back of my mind, behind the pain and exhaustion and Katz’s voice, calm and dangerous in my ear, to box out.

Pat Summitt’s postgame practices were the stuff of movies. If Coach Summitt did it, it had to be an acceptable coaching move, right? After one loss at Ole Miss, she made her team take the floor—in Mississippi—and run twenty suicides, despite the Ole Miss fans still leaving the gym. After a loss at Vanderbilt and a bus ride home to Knoxville, she made them get dressed and back on their own court for a practice at two in the morning. When they lost at South Carolina, they had to put on their stinky uniforms the next morning when they got back and play as she yelled, “Now you’re going to play the half you didn’t play last night.”

Coach Katz kicked us out of our locker room during a rough streak my freshman year; Pat Summitt had famously pulled that trick for five weeks with her 1989–90 team. We spent a week or so changing in the general locker room with whoever else happened to be in there and showering in the referees’ locker room. Coach Katz also told us that because we were an embarrassment to our college, we were not allowed to wear any Davidson gear, so we all showed up to practice in ratty, mismatched cutoffs from high school.

There were important differences between Coach Katz and Coach Summitt, though. The most obvious was that Coach Summitt’s teams went to the NCAA Tournament every year and sometimes won championships, and Davidson women’s basketball did not compete on that level. We had never qualified for the NCAA Tournament or won even a league championship. Having read every book about Coach Summitt’s teams I could get my hands on as a teenager, I suspected that their success—partly due to their superior talent—also came, in part, because they felt loved. Maybe they felt like all the punishments, awful as they were, came from a place of powerful shared competitiveness and deep love. Maybe they understood there was a purpose to each punitive action and that there could be redemption.

I believed that Coach Katz loved us in her way. I just didn’t think she knew how to show us. So a lot of the time her competitiveness came off as plain old hurtful. We were competitive, too, and we didn’t need her love to cushion the blow, but we did need to know that the anger we saw was founded in something rational, in a sense of belief in us and that we could be better. We needed to feel like we could be forgiven for our screwups, not that people held grudges against us.

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