How You Do Anything Is How You Do Everything
They entered the building respectfully, as if they were going back home for Christmas, but their parents had a new house. Twenty years had passed since they did what they did together, but you wouldn’t know it by the way they looked. Or the way they talked and laughed. I was reminded (like I could ever forget) of the things that made their journey so grand, and how only a sliver of it had to do with how many games they won. These were remarkable women who simply did anything the way they did everything. That much is obvious when you look at them thriving in the middle of their forty-something lives.
Last weekend the University of Oklahoma celebrated our 2002 Women’s Basketball team that ran to the Final Four and fought UCONN to the final buzzer in the National Championship game. This squad broke all kinds of records while setting a standard of how to play and how to be, and maybe most importantly, of how to play and be together. I never really knew what to call it—this formula that made our whole always greater than the sum of our parts. But it had something to do with immersion, I think. An intentional head-first dive into whatever it was that needed doing. That was their modus operandi: the willingness—always-- to get soaking wet.
That team produced two doctors, a physical therapist, a prosecuting attorney, a global entrepreneur, an NFL broadcaster, a college coach, a couple of high school coaches, an athletic director, a Nike executive, a couple of teachers, a couple of small business execs and a bunch of wives and mothers. And that’s just what they’ve done. Though it takes a minute to let all that sink in, who they are is where the treasure really lies.
At the reunion event so generously hosted by the current staff and team, we watched videos of our run to San Antonio. From Dales’ look away passes, to Caton’s rebound put-backs, to Caufield’s and-one baskets, to Roz’s transition threes, this team had weapons everywhere that could bury opponents in an instant. And, more often than not, they did. They had such complimentary skill sets–we had a driver and a spot-up shooter and a passer and a post—skills that played off one another like late night talk show hosts and their foils who bounce their jokes back to them from just to the side of the stage.
Everybody on the team was fundamentally sound and good at lots of different things. What made us extraordinary, though, was that everybody’s best was different. Every player had a wonder lane, a place where they excelled. And only some of those lanes were on display through the course of a 40 minute game. As many were in the margins as they were within the lines.
This was a cast of characters who would orchestrate their departure off the bus by zipping their gear up over their faces to appear as headless horsemen making their way toward the gym. Sometimes they de-bussed backward, sometimes in a chorus line. They came to game day shoot arounds, on occasion, with their shorts on inside out. They covered for each other, and scolded each other, and fought for and with each other like siblings. They served one another without condition; their love was absolute.
On the day of our national semi-final game against Duke in San Antonio, we did our game day shoot around on the rooftop of our hotel. The court time we had been given at the Alamodome was brief and ridiculously early, so we decided to sleep in a bit and get the last minute prep we needed in the San Antonio sun. With two managers posing as goals and a pillow for a ball, we walked through inbounds plays and half court sets and rehearsed how we would win. Lesser teams would have acted goofy. Some would have blown it off. A bunch would have been way too cool to focus. But most were not our team. Led by the bouncy confidence of our seniors, we got more out of our make-shift Madison Square Garden than we would have had the Alamodome been available for our prep. This squad yearned for things they could fashion for themselves.
Our run through the conference and the region and into the national championship game was not without adversity. We lost three players to season ending injuries and had one starter who played her entire career at Oklahoma without an acl. We didn’t have much size, we didn’t have a great deal of experienced depth, but part of this team’s DNA was the ability to not see what was missing. They were adept at having a field day with whatever it was they had.
As much as this squad loved winning, they loved playing even more. It was as if they constantly craved to sharpen the collective knife--play cleaner, move the ball sharper, be more efficient together. Their approach it seems was always: how well can this game be played? And that was a coach’s heaven. To never have it be about anything other than that, is the best it ever gets.
Our internal theme in 2002 was, ironically, the word, “Bound”. Because I believed both we and they were. We were bound together in the pursuit of a standard, not an outcome, and you could feel that no matter where we were or what we were doing. And they were bound for the outer edges of things in their lives outside the gym. The excellence magnet pulled them. They were always wired to soar.
And have they ever.
Sherri Coale
P.S. RIP Rosalind Ross. We miss you every day!