But we would not allow it to defeat us before the game had begun. We would march into the East Leyden gym and take what was rightfully ours, what we had sweated and worked and fought and cried over for three long years.
Susan Sternberg of the Suburban Trib likened Niles West versus Glenbard West to “other super match-ups such as boy meets girl, the 1975 World Series and good against evil. It’s the game girls’ basketball followers have been waiting for—the one featuring the two best teams in the suburban area.”
“Determination isn’t going to win it,” Coach Earl was quoted as saying, “but it will help.”
So would experience, and finally we could say we had the advantage in that department over almost anyone we faced. Not only had we played in pressure situations but we had both failed and ultimately triumphed in many of those situations. We were battle-tested and savvy, and we seldom choked, which would make Shirley proud.
One member of our team who was not particularly experienced, however, suddenly began to feel like it.
As we dressed before the game, Becky thought she might throw up, kind of like she felt before our first game of the season when she spent the afternoon baking cookies with a friend, then promptly lost hers. She kind of felt like that again, a “What-am-I-doing-here?” refrain ringing in her head. And in the locker room, she eyed the giant pickle jar filled with dextrose tablets that we lugged to every game. No one particularly noticed that up until that point, Becky had avoided the pills like rat poison. She knew they weren’t rat poison, but she was reasonably sure they were dangerous narcotics of some kind, and even the endorsement of her mentor and idol Connie could not have convinced her otherwise. But her first supersectional could, and she quickly choked one down, thinking she surely needed it for what was in store.
When we walked out of the locker room, we were struck by one thing and were quickly relieved. One side of the gym was solid green, the other a massive wall of red. The Niles West turnout was unlike anything we had ever seen. It made last year’s supersectional showing look like a junior high pep rally. The roar was spontaneous and deafening and brought tears to the eyes of the older girls.
They were all here. Finally. For us. The same girls they wouldn’t allow into the Boys’ Gym three years earlier were overcome by a roar that lifted us up and carried us onto the court.
Our hearts were hammers inside our chests as we performed our ballhandling drill, each backhanded behind-the-back flip eliciting cheers. We could not be any more ready. So psyched was I, it was all I could do not to run out for the opening tip.
Glenbard West was no fluke. The Hilltoppers shook off a 26–18 first-quarter deficit and kept it a game most of the way. But it was clear which was the dominant team. When we weren’t forcing them to take low-percentage shots over our 1-3-1 zone, we were forcing 15 turnovers, mostly off our press, in the first half alone. We held a 44–31 lead late in the half despite playing the last four minutes before intermission without Connie, who had picked up three fouls.
Peggy had already scored 16 by halftime when we led by 10, and in the third quarter, Coach Earl called off the press, hoping a man-to-man defense would suffice and save Connie from further foul trouble. But Glenbard West closed the margin to four once and to five two other times before Connie took control.
A steal for a layup, followed by another Erickson steal and a feed to Peggy underneath helped us mount a nine-point third-quarter lead as we shot 10-of-19 from the floor and held on to the momentum. As we held an eight-point lead in the final minutes of the game, Connie and Barb simply took the ball out of the Hilltoppers’ hands, directing a four-corner stall that left them frustrated and flailing.
And as we closed out the 71–64 victory, the familiar chant began, garbled at first as the Niles West half of the gym got in sync, and then clearer. And louder.
We are going. We are going. State, state. State, state.
Connie finished with 17 points, and once again, it was Peggy, chipping in her usual underrated 23 on 10-for-12 field goal shooting, who carried the day.
On court at the final buzzer, Connie found me and I found Peggy, and together we found Judy and Karen, the five seniors who understood better than anyone how truly sweet this moment was as the crowd poured out of the bleachers, enveloping us in a giant group hug.
“They were the quickest and best passing team I’ve seen all year,” Glenbard West coach Emily Mollet told reporters on her team’s sideline, shouting to be heard over the din.
Hinsdale South and Dundee, supersectional slayers of years past, were a long way away. And so was Marshall, our first-round opponent in the state quarterfinals in Champaign only three days from now.
We had taken a disciplined, methodical approach to finally breaking through our supersectional stumbling block, and now we acted like the kids we were, giggling and dancing and hugging each other again and again. Connie slipped one of the nets around her neck like the familiar jewelry it had become, and it fit her perfectly.
Since our loss to Maine South when we had committed one of sports’ greatest sins in looking ahead, we had stayed focused. We were veterans. We knew better. And then our coach called us over to the bench, pulled off his tie, unbuttoned his sweaty dress shirt, and tossed them aside. Forced to keep his sport coat buttoned up all night so as not to reveal his secret, he could now bare all. Underneath, he was wearing a white T-shirt that read JOY IS WINNING A SUPER SECT.
Even Peggy had to laugh.
CHAPTER 22
Why Not Us?
OUR LOCKER ROOM AT East Leyden just happened to lead into both the gym and the school’s swimming pool, a sign from above, some of us felt, that we should cap off our celebration by jumping in. So what if we didn’t have bathing suits, hadn’t received permission, and our bus, our coach, and most of the 3,000 fans who had come to see us were waiting for us to come out?
We were celebrating, the pool was private, and most importantly, it was there. And so we jumped in, some of us still with our uniforms on, some in just bras and underwear. And everyone was forced to wait for us to finish, including the janitor who had come in to clean and stayed to watch despite our shrieks.
The next day, we were back in class pretending we were paying attention, a nervous energy fueling us as classmates and teachers greeted us with hand slaps in the hall and a steady stream of “Congratulations,” and “Good luck at state.”
Before we left for Champaign on Thursday, there was another pep rally—and this one was spectacular. Far from our usual apathetic Niles West affairs in which those students who did show up only did so to miss class and yawned louder than they cheered, this one had the pep band and cheerleaders, TV cameras and newspaper reporters, and the entire student body and faculty. We promised to bring them home a title, and they roared their approval, sending chills up and down each one of us.
But the cheerleaders were a contentious point. Though we never had a problem with the group as a whole, we felt insulted by what we viewed as their disinterest all season, particularly in the postseason. Our coach was just plain annoyed. Now that we were actually going downstate, playing before an Assembly Hall crowd and a television audience on WGN, the cheerleaders were interested in coming, they said. But Coach Earl gave their supervisor a firm “No thanks,” and we left them behind.
It was a strange sort of reprisal. They were our peers. Some were gymnasts and on the track team, athletes themselves and our friends even. They were not, by nature, the sort of prissy girls we could easily detest. But in drawing the line that day, we somehow stepped away and symbolically separated the girls who cheered from the girls who played. We played. And we didn’t have much patience for the rest. Not now anyway. We had business to do.
Our first stop on Thursday was the Rantoul High School gym, not far from the Illinois campus. Coach Earl knew the athletic director from his downstate days and had arranged a practice there since we could not practice on the Assembly Hall floor. It was a smart move, and we wondered among ourselves if Ma
rshall, our quarterfinal opponent, was as prepared as we were. Sweeping through the school and into the gym, we felt like celebrities, bigcity supersectional champs gracing Rantoul with our presence. What made it even better was the fact that the students all had to be in class while we practiced.
This could not be much cooler.
In some ways we felt we were carrying the hopes of not just Niles Township but the whole Chicagoland area, despite the fact that we were about to play the Chicago Public League champs. The night before our supersectional victory, we had watched Magic Johnson’s Michigan State team defeat Larry Bird and Indiana State in one of the most closely watched and celebrated NCAA title games in history. But the big story of the tournament for us was Ray Meyer’s DePaul team starring Mark Aguirre, which had lost in the NCAA semifinals to Indiana State.
DePaul’s Final Four berth had captivated the city and suburbs and inspired us. We felt a strong connection to the school, as many of us had gone to both DePaul and Chicago Hustle games in DePaul’s gym, Connie and Peggy were being recruited by the women’s team, and Barb’s father, Pete, owned the Seminary Restaurant, where Coach Meyer’s players ate most of their meals and where we often dropped in as well.
The Blue Demons were heroes to us, and in our own goofy way, we felt like we were following in their footsteps. In another triumph for our area and even closer to home, Maine South had won the boys’ state basketball title in Class AA (which was the larger of the two classes in Illinois boys’ basketball), so we had inspiration seemingly everywhere we looked.
This was to be the third and final year of a single-class state tournament in girls’ basketball. Participation was rising in the sport among member schools and topped 600 in ’79 after numbering 475 for the first girls’ tournament in ’77. But we sort of liked the fact that we still had just one class. There would be no doubt as to which was the one top team in the state after this weekend, and we carried that cockiness all the way to the point when we turned a corner that Thursday night and approached the great white mushroom that was the University of Illinois Assembly Hall.
The 16,500-seat arena was already 16 years old at that point, but it still looked like something out of 2001: A Space Odyssey to us. Rising seemingly out of the cornfields on the Illinois campus, it glowed from the under-mounted lights, almost beckoning us closer even as it was scaring the daylights out of us.
Clearly, those in Coach Earl’s lead car urged him toward the building rather than continuing on to the hotel, which we had planned, and Miss Heeren simply followed. No one was sure what we were doing there, but then this was our goal, getting here, to this building, and so it seemed only natural that we would drive directly to the place.
It was already dark when we got out of our cars by the lower service entrance and let ourselves in. About half of us had been here for the tournament the year before, but we walked through the bowels of the building like astronauts navigating our way through an alien spacecraft, knowing as we did that at any minute a janitor could pop out from behind a corner and zap us. Coach Earl had little choice in the matter as we were clearly commanding this mission.
When we finally made our way to the court, which was one level below ground, we could make out enough of the place to tell how truly cavernous it was. We slowly circled the court, which we had not dared to do the year before. Then we stood on the free-throw line looking at the basket and the space behind it. It seemed like if you missed a shot, the ball would fly out into the great beyond, never to be seen again. I pictured an endless supply of basketballs at courtside, so they could shuttle one in every time a ball disappeared out of bounds.
Silently, Connie worried. What if all this confidence was just that? What if we were kidding ourselves here, in this massive place, with teams who believed themselves to be every bit as good as we were? But she also knew that our bravado was who we were, and if she showed her nerves, it could spread to all of us.
Coach Earl must have seen the looks on our faces because he took great pains to quell our fears.
“Gang, it’s just like our gym back home,” he told us. “It’s just like every gym we’ve ever played in.”
“Except the girls’ gym,” I whispered to Peggy, and she nodded solemnly.
“The basket is the exact same height,” he intoned, “and baseline to baseline, exactly the same dimensions.” Some of us wouldn’t have minded some actual proof, since it looked the size of a football field.
“I feel like Neil Armstrong,” Coach Earl said. “Like the first man to walk on the moon.”
That Friday in Skokie, classes were officially in session but no one who went to school that day was actually taught anything. TVs were everywhere—in the cafeteria and the gym and the student lounge and classrooms that were largely empty. Kids stood around in clumps—those unlucky enough to have their own school or sports commitments keeping them from going to Champaign and those who may have professed disinterest but still found themselves gravitating to the TVs. The teachers had to be in school on Friday, and Billy Schnurr was no exception, though his PE class watched our 12:15 game against Marshall.
Doc Kusch, the women’s basketball coach at Loyola University who was hoping to get both Connie and Peggy to play for him, had predicted a close contest in Friday’s paper. Coached by the feisty Dorothy Gaters, Marshall was representing the Chicago Public League—whose champ got an automatic berth to the state quarterfinals in Champaign—for the second year in a row.
The Commandos featured 6-foot-3 sophomore Janet Harris, the Public League’s best player. But as a team, they were an enigma. They were big and quick, and like us, they had an intimidating press. They won 58 of their last 59 games and at 29–0, they manhandled most teams on their schedule by lopsided margins. We saw the scores in the state program and “lopsided” actually did not do them justice—112–7, 111–21, 105–26, and 119–31.
It was ridiculous, like the Boston Celtics against Lincoln Hall Junior High. But we heard Gaters kept her starters in most of the games to run up the scores, and we knew that the rest of the Public League did not put up much of a fight. We did not know a heck of a lot more because Coach Earl had not scouted Marshall before our game. He simply hadn’t had the chance. He did not tell us this. Instead, he read the papers for any helpful information and worried.
Inside the dressing room, so far from the court that it seemed we might have to call for transportation to get to the game, we were both calm and collected, thumbing through the state program, area newspapers, and telegrams from well-wishers, all while trying to contain the adrenaline that was threatening to exhaust us before the opening tip. Mostly, we were excited to let a brandnew audience—including those viewing on WGN-TV, which began broadcasting nationwide in October as a superstation—see what we were all about.
“We’re sprinting onto the court,” Connie and I yelled at our teammates, the idea being that we would carry that intensity throughout the game. Also that, well, we would look cool, flashy, and maybe even intimidating as we took the court. “Full speed!” I screamed for emphasis.
And that is precisely what we did. One small hitch on the way there, however.
As we were sprinting full speed—one of my best things—my adrenaline got the best of me, and I tripped, fell, then skidded facedown for several feet. If there was any question as to whether my teammates might be unnerved by this or by some chance stop to help me up, that possibility was immediately put to rest as one by one, they deftly hurdled over me.
I scrambled back up in one nearly fluid motion, and for an instant, I foolishly believed that maybe no one had even noticed. As we formed a circle for our ballhandling routine, I whispered frantically to Connie and Peggy and everyone else around me, “Did anyone see me? Did you see me? Do you think anyone else saw me?”
“Shut up,” Peggy finally hissed at me as only a friend could. “No one saw you.”
And I almost believed her as I glanced down, only to see most of the material from my warm-up pants missing
from my left knee and blood dripping over the rest. Then I looked up at the stands and instantly spotted Shirley, one of my oldest, dearest friends, at the game to support her old team and laughing so hard she looked as if she might go into convulsions.
I had a sneaking suspicion that she had seen me.
As my knee swelled to twice its normal size—finally a game-related injury—the announcer introduced both teams, and we jogged to the free-throw line as our names and numbers were called. “Intensity!” we cried as we huddled up without our coach, just us, grinning for a long time at each other at the sheer excitement of it all, knowing exactly what was going through each one of our minds and coursing through each one of our bodies. We were really here.
Searing through Marshall’s press and a team that was not nearly as quick as we’d expected, we led 14–0 before Janet Harris scored the first bucket for Marshall, five minutes into the game. By the end of the first quarter, we led 21–5, and by midway through the second quarter, we stretched the lead to 22.
Then we went to sleep for a while. Against their half-court press, we failed to score for the next seven minutes, allowing the Commandos to ease their way back into the game as they narrowed the margin to nine in the third quarter. By the time it was over, however, we outscored them 29–15 in the final quarter, winning 80–50 and forcing the Chicago champs into 34 turnovers and two technical fouls out of obvious frustration.
Because the state tournament was only three years old, it was relatively easy to set records, and we got off to a rousing start in our opener, setting new marks for highest point total, largest margin of victory, most free throws made (28), and most assists in a single game with Connie dishing out 11. Peg led us in scoring with 20 points, while Holly finished with 15.
For Marshall, the loss was bitterly disappointing to a team that felt it simply could not compete with the suburban schools. Gaters lamented afterward that they just did not have the budget to play a tougher schedule, and she offered the example of going to play Regina Dominican of north suburban Wilmette. Getting to Wilmette cost $200 for bus transportation, she explained, and in return, the school got a check for $37.50, or half the ticket sales. It cost the school nearly $2,000 to get to Champaign. Her team was a long way, Gaters said, from a state championship.
State Page 25
