Mine Was Born Lucky
In celebration of the close of Women’s History Month, this week’s blog post is an excerpt from my bestselling book, Rooted to Rise. We must keep passing the baton…
ONE SPRING DAY, when I was driving my fifteen-year-old daughter, Chandler, to school and we were calendar meshing for the week ahead, she saw “Title IX Celebration” on my phone and asked what in the world it meant. I jumped on the teachable moment and explained it. “It’s the anniversary of the law passed in 1972 that says you get to play basketball like your brother. It’s the law that says girls can go to college and study to be anything they want, just like boys can,” I added.
To which Chandler responded with a snarled lip and slanted eye, “That’s the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard. Why would anybody need a law to tell them that?”
A new paradigm had been constructed. I had goosebumps from my head to the tip of my toes.
As coaching careers go, mine was born lucky. When I got the job as head coach at the University of Oklahoma, women’s basketball was poised for a coming-out party nationwide. New programs and personalities were on the scene, attendance was rising, television was flirting, lightning was begging to be captured in a bottle. I was new to the collegiate scene, barely cognizant of the perfect storm I had landed in the middle of—and yet there I sat at the table with the giants of our game.
I was young and dumb in 1996, but smart enough to be quiet (read: keep opinionated mouth shut) and pay attention. Pioneers in their prime were running the room. Marsha Sharp, as the head coach at TexasTech, was the captain of the juggernaut known as Lady Raider Nation. She coached Sheryl Swoopes, and together with their throng of faithful followers, they won a National Championship and took west Texas and the country by storm. Jody Conradt sat at the table—a national title, an undefeated season, the architect of Texas women’s basketball, and a figure so respected and at times so imposing—that she could have run for governor of that enormous state and won. Across from her sat Ceal Barry, the Colorado coach whose teams won four Big Eight titles and whose tenacious man-to- man defense and post-player development had been building blocks of my philosophy as a high school coach for years. I loved watching her win and I so admired how her teams did it.
Retrieved from https://ifnotforthem.com/
Talk about being in the right place at the right time! At those early Big 12 conference meetings where we made decisions about rules, recruiting, scheduling, and TV deals, the topics were dense and the conversations layered. With the grandeur of the Colorado Rocky Mountains in the backdrop, it was often hard to tell if my shortness of breath came from the altitude or the luck of my draw for getting to be a mouse inside that room.
I’m not sure I really knew it at the time, but the twelve of us around that table were readying our sport for a rocket-ship ride.
The room pulsated with that anxious weighty vibe that often hangs around tethered dreams. I could feel it, but I couldn’t ever give it a name. I didn’t know enough about where we had been to be able to identify where we were, much less where we might be headed, but I knew something way more important than Big 12 business was taking place. I could feel the ragged cusp of it. Every discussion we dove into bore tentacles rooted in a passionate, sacrificial past. From the days of fighting for opportunity to participate, to the lonely plodding of Title IX adjudication once the law was put into place, these women bore the scars of the road less traveled. It was as if they’d been crawling through a tunnel and could finally see a light at the end signaling room to run. Platforms were being built, multi-media contracts were being designed, salaries were set to explode. These women with their eyes locked in on conference minutiae were also crafting a game plan to take women’s basketball to the moon.
We were on a mission. That was always crystal clear.
These seasoned coaches were caretakers of the game, first and foremost. They made decisions based on the blood, sweat, and tears of lives spent creating opportunities for women to compete in sports. Discussions about anything and everything as it pertained to the Big 12 conference were always subjected to the litmus test of what is best for our game. It wasn’t ever “What is best for Texas, or Colorado, or Texas Tech?” It was always “What is best for women’s basketball?” I learned quickly that the sieve through which you pour all issues, great and small, is the one that grows our game. Because that’s how you think when pieces of your soul are woven into a thing.
That’s the part my generation—those of us who were handed the golden baton—have a hard time understanding. And it is our greatest charge.
Those of us who waltzed into the basketball explosion of the 90s and have been stepping through the doorway ever since don’t really know much about life before Title IX. We know about the law; they made us read about it in school. And we get it. But we don’t get it like the group I sat with around that table did. And the generation that follows us? They get it even less. Unfortunately, sometimes that’s how history works: If we’re not careful, if we don’t strive to stay connected to it, we can wind up back where we started. We have to remember where we were in order to keep going where we need to go. And I don’t know anybody who wants to climb that mountain all over again.
My daughter’s generation can’t even fathom a world in which girls are not allowed opportunities of participation. She can’t comprehend not being able to play ball or go to medical school if she so desires, much the way my generation can’t imagine that people actually spat upon Jackie Robinson. That discrimination seems foreign to us. My daughter’s generation sees the world through a different lens.
And yet, Chandler and her contemporaries all need to know. We have to tell them the stories, just the way we tell them about Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King, Jr. and Prentice Gautt. We have to tell them about Bernice Sandler, Patsy Mink, and Billie Jean King versus Bobby Riggs. They have to know how they got here so they can understand the responsibilities they hold.
Our charge as stakeholders of our game is to go about our business in the same way that those who gave us the opportunity to be here did. Our challenge is to work with their dogged determination, to compete with their hunger, and to revel in competition with their joy.
Uh oh. That means we can’t be entitled brats. We can’t coach or play or market or promote apathetically. (I think I just created an oxymoron). We can’t whine or mumble or gripe or complain. We have no right, ironically, to play without joy. We disrespect those upon whose shoulders we stand when we do. Our mission is to honor their path with how we do our jobs.
Our mission is to play well.
P.S. Sarah Kay - Point B