At his 2024 season-ending press conference, Oklahoma City Thunder GM Sam Presti compared the orchestration of a team to the controlling of a mixing board. When producing music, for effect, some sounds need to be softened, some amplified. If all the instruments and voices are at an eleven out of ten, the final product is just noise. Presti spoke specifically about Thunder forward Lou Dort’s willingness to “turn down the volume” - to do less, to “refine” his game rather than “expand” it so that younger players around him had space to become. He said the upside-down gift was that Dort got better because of the downshift. The younger players’ games blossomed given room to root, explore and rise while Dort’s sharpened as his focus tapered to specific skills. The final product was music to everyone’s ears.

She ducked into The Ice Creamatory for a reprieve from the heavy, hot July. Looking more for a distraction from the heat than a particular flavor-of-the-day, she perused the Board of Choices from her end spot in the snaking line. She also checked out the pallet of colors behind the glass of the display case.

Getting started is like trying to burrow a hole in a rock with a needle. There are days when it feels like I can’t possibly get in. The only hope is to out-will the granite. Who will be the first to blink?

I dribbled inbounds. From outside the court boundary where the referee handed me the basketball for the throw-in, I just took off as if someone had lifted the gate to let the ponies run. Understandable for a third grader – maybe – but I wasn’t in third grade. I was in COLLEGE! My faux pas hit me and the man in the striped shirt with a whistle around his neck at precisely the same time - about two steps inside the baseline when I turned back to toss him the ball. Before he could even engage in the mechanics to illustrate the call, I had begun jogging toward the bench while verbally and demonstrably urging my coach to take me out – as if I was the only one in the arena who thought that was a good idea. Surprise to none, I got no argument from him.

It was the only thing I could think to do at the time that might keep me from bleeding out.

Every once in a rare while you get to meet someone you respect and admire from afar only to discover that they are even better in reality than you could have imagined they might be.

I met Jack Nicklaus today.

Our rubric was one thing, two ways, three times. Keep the message simple and clear, deliver it so that it can be both heard and seen, and don’t be so naïve to think that once will be enough. In the throes of a fast-paced basketball game, little is more important than the sharing of information. Accurate intel has to get in, come out and be constantly passed around. Everyone has a hand in it, but the point guard is the one most responsible for making sure the word moves up and down the chain.

In the Oklahoma Women’s Basketball era of Stacey Dales, our games actually started about 50 minutes before the opening tip. During warm-up. Though no one really realized it but us. The way our 6’2'' leader took the floor granted us an immediate advantage over the competition. Opposing coaches and players couldn’t keep their eyes off her. Stace would bounce out onto the court—shoulders thrown back, a “look-out” expression on her face—and the other team would start to wilt. Our point guard made everyone believe that we would win.

A point guard runs the show. In Basketball Land she is the floor general…the play caller…the leader of the charge. She is the apex of the defense, the instigator of the offense, and the talker in the huddles that happen at the free-throw line. Her responsibilities start before the ball is tossed and continue long after the final buzzer sounds. Like leaders on every landscape, business hours do not apply to her.

My love for the game of basketball grew alongside of and intricately intertwined with my fascination with the point guard position. At 5’4”, it was where I physically fit. But it was also where I wanted most to play.

When I was in third grade, I wanted to be just like Starla Cosper. She was the leading scorer and best player on the Healdton High School girls’ basketball team, and I couldn’t think of anything I’d rather be when I grew up. Her mother was a beautician who worked at the hair salon in town and like clockwork my Granny went to visit her every week to get her hair done. In the summers when I was out of school and my mom was at work, I tagged along.

During the Covid lockdown of 2020, I got a dog. Well, technically, I didn’t. But our family did. We got a dog. Or more specifically, our adult daughter who had returned home as a pandemic boarder did. She got a dog-- who lived in our home. Rosco –who sort of belongs to all of us—was Chandler’s dream long, long deferred.

We had a sleepover, recently, my three-year-old granddaughter and me. On these fantastic every-once-in-a-whiles, we pile into the bed in my daughter’s old room, watch a few episodes of CoComelon and then tell stories over and over in the dark. When morning comes, my little wonder always exclaims, “It’s wake-up time!” which signals our pilgrimage down the hall to start the day. We roll out from under the covers, land our feet on the hardwood floor and like a couple of wobbly new-born colts, begin to make our way.

Yesterday was my son and daughter-in-law's seventh anniversary. Several years ago, on the days leading up to their wedding, I found my mind exploding with things I wanted my son to know. Or maybe it was just full of things I felt like I needed to say. Most likely, it was a head-on collision of the two. But had I opened my mouth to share it, nonsensical drivel wrapped in tears would have landed in his lap. So I wrote him a letter instead.

This is it.

It’s spring. In Oklahoma that means storms. Wind, rain, lightening, hail, hooks that turn into tornadoes on a dime. Every day is an adventure. We move about doing what we normally do but with one eye on the radar, perpetually “weather aware.” Sometimes super cells manifest, sometimes they don’t. But when they do, they turn things upside down. Tree limbs, garbage cans, pool chair cushions, roofs -- any and every item not battened down, as well as plenty that are-- end up someplace where they’re not supposed to be. And often, the conveniences of our modern world (that we think we can’t live without) go with them. Electric lines come down, the power goes and people go out with it. Out of homes and buildings, onto mutual turf, where we do what we don’t normally do.

We talk.

I have a recipe drawer in my kitchen though I don’t open it very often. In it are six or eight cookbooks-- several small-town plastic-spined put-togethers (fundraiser projects from the “county extension” way back in the day), one hardback from the Pioneer Woman, another titled “Desserts” that I think I received as a wedding gift, and one professionally published paperback from the Women’s Auxiliary at Oklahoma Christian College that I wrote the forward for. The greater contents of the drawer are handwritten loose-leaf recipes separated into categorical bundles secured by sturdy metal clips.

These are the things handed down.

Below is a slightly revised, updated version of a previously published piece about perhaps the most iconic of all professional sporting events— The Magical Masters…

I wonder if when they built it, they knew what it would become. Bobby Jones and Clifford Roberts were iron-willed men on a crusade to create a thing they could see and taste but on earth were unable to find.  So maybe.  Maybe they had an idea. But it would be impossible to have known then what an icon it would become. When the two men first laid eyes on the abandoned 400-acre Fruitland’s Nursery running parallel to the Savannah River, Jones said it seemed as though “the land had been lying here for years waiting for somebody to lay a golf course on it.” So they grabbed it, and with the help of Alister MacKenzie, that’s exactly what they did. They built Augusta National’s sweeping fairways between the trees, and layered dogwoods and azaleas in the straw underneath the pines. They used the bends and hills as guideposts; they built water and sand to act as foils.  And for the last 90 Aprils, it’s been hard to tell what the “and 1” is at the Master’s— the landscape or the golf.

“Aim higher,” the tennis guru said as my forehand laced with topspin slammed into the tape on the top of the net. “Really?” I thought (and I think I said out loud.) “You get paid to tell people THAT?”

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.

My assistant coach’s first “courtesy car” was a four-door Chevy Malibu in a purple-ish shade of blue. In the early days of Division 1 coaching, a car loaned to the athletic department by a local dealer (aka University supporter) was part of a coach’s package. Recruiting required lots and lots of driving, so a car on loan -- periodically rotated so as not to pile up miles -- made sense. It was an added value for a coaching worker bee whose salary didn’t compute, while simultaneously being a write-off for a donor who wanted tickets to football games. Typically, these vehicles were swapped out every 4-6 months before wear and tear could accumulate— or whenever a dealer had a buyer in the market for a slightly, mostly-loved “new car.”

In the middle of life, dichotomy reigns. “This stage is awful and it’s awesome,” a friend so aptly stated, as he weaved his way through an ordinary day that was suddenly anything but. “The highs are high and the lows are low,” he matter-of-factly lamented. In almost everything he touched he could feel both sides of the coin.