Excerpt from Amanda Ottaway’s “The Rebounders: A Division I Basketball Journey”

Excerpted from “The Rebounders: A Division I Basketball Journey” by Amanda Ottaway by permission of the University of Nebraska Press. ©2018 by Amanda Ottaway

Chapter 6: Knocked Out

It happened at full speed, as injuries often do. During our last practice of the preseason of Olivia’s, Taylor’s, and my sophomore year, weeks after our drinking punishment, our hard, bruised bodies ached for real action. Rory and Sam had both committed, the recruiting–weekend disaster was behind us, and now it was time to get down to the busi- ness of the season. We were in the best shape of our lives and ready to kill each other for playing time.

We were running a one-on-one full–court defensive drill with screens on the hard, concrete upstairs practice court. I dribbled in zigzags up the right side of the floor. Liv was on me tight, shoving a little, so I jabbed back at her with my free arm. Coach Katz strode alongside us, watching closely, shouting encouragement.

“Good job, Olivia,” she was saying. “Keep working hard.”

Olivia scowled with concentration, keeping her eyes focused on my belly button so she wouldn’t get faked out, spurred on by Coach Katz’s enthusiasm. We kept banging into each other, both of us grunting.

Whitney stood waiting to set a screen on Olivia. Olivia was supposed to get around it. Instead, off-balance and moving fast, we made con- tact. Three big bodies clashed. Six long legs tangled. I lost control of the ball and fell forward onto my stomach, catching myself with my hands. A few feet away Olivia fell backward. I watched the back of her curly-haired head smash into the court with a loud, grotesque thud and bounce up faster than a snapped rubber band, so fast that at the hospital that night they would evaluate her for a broken neck from the force of the whiplash. Textbook concussion.

I got to my feet and reached to help her up, but Liv rolled over and buried her face in her forearm, shielding herself from the gym’s bright lights. She could not bear to hear them buzzing. “This is bad,” she thought.

None of us liked to think about it, but we all knew we risked serious injury every day we played. In addition to Acl tears, women’s basket– ball players are at particular risk for ankle sprains, concussions, and stress fractures.

Micky Collins, PhD, the clinical and executive director of the Univer– sity of Pittsburgh Medical Center’s sports concussion clinic, describes concussions using an egg metaphor: The brain is the yolk, and the skull is the shell. When an outside force rocks the shell hard enough, the yolk shifts and hits the inside of the shell. That’s what happens when you get a concussion: it is not your head hitting something else; it is your brain hitting your skull. That’s why helmets don’t always help.

Coach Katz was squatting at Olivia’s side within seconds, her face white.

Our full–court drill stuttered to a halt as players realized what was happening, straightened up, tucked basketballs into the crooks of their arms, and traipsed hesitantly over to the scene. Olivia, her face still jammed into the crook of her elbow, did not move at all. Whitney and I hovered awkwardly nearby, not sure what to do or where to be but knowing instinctively that now was a time to keep our distance. We could not tell if Olivia was unconscious.

Jenni appeared at my side. “What happened, Otto?” she asked. “I

heard her head hit the ground.”

I explained briefly, and we stood in silence. I did not feel guilty, because I knew it could just as easily have been me who fell backward that day. We all knew the risks of what we did for a living.

There was sometimes a certain bizarre, backward, ephemeral relief to getting hurt on the court. It was a break. We got to sit down. We had time to absorb things. The other aching parts of our bodies had a chance to heal. People paid attention to us, at least at first. We were presented with the strange privileges of watching the gears from the outside and of missing basketball, which helped us remember that we loved it after all. I had reached a point the year before when I was so frustrated and embarrassed by the season and my lack of playing time that I found myself wishing for an injury. I wanted no choice but to ride the pine, as if sitting hurt was preferable to sitting healthy, because at least then I had an excuse. I knew I wasn’t the only one who occasionally felt that way.

As we loitered over Olivia that day, I was having a hard time gaug- ing the severity of her injury. We were all hurting, and we had little patience for people with low pain tolerances. Neither Olivia nor I had played much as freshmen. It had been a long and exhausting pre- season for everyone. There was that time Olivia dropped out of the conditioning drill during our punishment week. Maybe this incident was a plea for attention from a coach she felt didn’t pay her enough. Maybe she just needed a break from the drill. Maybe she was upset about something else.

“Olivia. Olivia,” Coach Katz was saying in a low, steady voice, squeez- ing Liv’s hand. “Stay with me, Olivia.”

A small crowd of concerned onlookers had gathered around our prac– tice court. As was standard with an on–court injury during practice, our assistant coaches herded us to a different part of the floor to continue playing, but we could hardly tear our eyes away from Olivia, especially when the paramedics arrived a few minutes later. They strapped her to a stretcher and carried her out the door to the waiting ambulance. Meghan, our trainer, and Mac—who by this point in the school year must have been getting pretty used to hospitals—went along with her to the trauma center in downtown Charlotte, almost thirty miles away. Practice resumed in earnest. We had a season to prepare for.

In the back of the ambulance one of the paramedics, a man, intro- duced himself to Mac and Olivia as Ashley. But in the South we called

everyone “sir” and “ma’am.” Liv, strapped tightly to a stretcher because they were worried she had broken her neck, thought that was the fun– niest thing in the world—a man named Ashley.

“Stop calling me ‘sir,’” Ashley told her. “My name is Ashley.”

Eyes closed against the harsh ambulance lights, Olivia lifted up her right arm and used it like a sword. “I now dub you,” she slurred, “Sir Ashley.” She started giggling uncontrollably.

Coach Katz drove to the hospital when practice ended. She pulled up a chair at Olivia’s bedside, and Olivia, turning to say something, threw up on her by accident. The second time it happened, Coach Katz was ready with the bedpan. She stayed until Olivia was released late that night, making periodic phone calls to Liv’s worried parents to update them. Coach Simmons joined them and took Mac home.

A ct scan revealed nothing wrong with Liv’s neck, but doctors diag- nosed a concussion and prescribed meds for the pain. Coach Katz drove Olivia back to campus late that night, stopping at multiple pharmacies until they found one that was open. She refused to take Olivia home without her medicine.

“I’m happy you’re here,” Olivia murmured to her as they waited in the drive–through lane of an open pharmacy. “I didn’t think you cared about me. But now I really think you do.”

Olivia’s roommate, Hope, and I were in their room, waiting for her to get home, when Hope’s phone buzzed. It was a text from a delirious and panicked Olivia. “She’s coming in,” it said. “Clean up the room now.” Coach Katz sure had made a lot of unexpected appearances in play– ers’ living quarters that fall. We went down to the parking lot behind the dorm to meet Olivia and Coach Katz when they arrived to try to

intercept Olivia without Coach Katz’s having to come inside.

“Hi, Coach,” I said as she opened the door of her big black sport– utility vehicle. “You remember Liv’s roommate, Hope?”

“I sure do,” Coach Katz said. “Hi there, Hope.”

Olivia was slowly extracting herself from the passenger seat, winc– ing, and all three of us rushed to help her. She still had on her practice gear; her face was pale, her hair stiff with dried sweat. Even though it

was dark outside, her eyes were half–shut, squinted against the park– ing lot lights.

“We can take her from here, Coach,” I said to Coach Katz. “Her room’s right there.” I gestured vaguely.

“That’s all right, Otto,” Coach Katz said. “I want to make sure this girl gets safely in her bed. She took a hard fall today.”

So Hope, Coach Katz, and I, all three of us in mom mode, slowly walked Olivia the whole way inside and helped her climb into bed. Hope, Olivia, and I all held our breath until Coach bid us good night and left. Hope watched Olivia through the night, waking her up every couple of hours to make sure she was still conscious.

Olivia’s parents drove down the next day. That night was Night with the ’Cats, which she had been looking forward to all year. Our class dance theme this time was rock and roll. We were supposed to wear fake tattoos and fingerless fishnet wrist gloves, tease our hair, and rock out on neon air guitars to Aerosmith. The costumes were deliciously campy, Olivia’s masses of curly hair were perfect for the occasion, and this year’s dance would be fun and maybe even cool, not embarrassing like last year’s. We had been practicing for weeks.

The flashing lights, loud music, and excitable crowd made Belk Arena a virulent cesspool of concussion stimuli that night. Olivia went to the locker room and threw up. Her parents took her back to her dorm, and she puked three more times there while the rest of us hammed and scrimmaged for the crowd. Afterward, she barely remembered anything.

For several days after that Olivia barely came out of her room, which she and Hope had darkened like a cave. Hope, who had been raised by two doctors and still wanted to be one herself, continued to wake Olivia up periodically to check on her.

Olivia did not go to class. She did not shower. She did not eat. She had lost, at least for the time being, much of her ability to taste and smell. Mary Marshall, our sweet soccer-playing friend who lived on the hall a few doors down, went over and spoon–fed her oatmeal.

Family friends of the Lowerys picked her up, and Olivia slept at their house for five days. She ate two bowls of Ramen noodles. The family drove Olivia back to the hospital in Charlotte for an mri.

Afterward, Olivia got a voice mail from the hospital, saying she needed to admit herself into the trauma center in downtown Charlotte immediately. Our friend Bryce drove, flying down i–77 with Hope in the passenger seat and Olivia in the back. A brain surgeon and a wheelchair were waiting for Olivia at the trauma center.

The mri had shown three contusions  on her brain, which meant Liv’s brain was bleeding. If they had seen this the night she hit her head, they would have drilled into her skull to relieve the pressure, but the doctors had been focused instead on her neck and whether it was broken. They sent her back to campus, and she spent the night in the student health center, where nurses woke her up every thirty minutes to check her heart rate. When Olivia woke up in the morn- ing, her mom was there.

In the weeks following Olivia’s fall, Coach Katz asked her to come to practices and sit in the gym so she could keep up with the plays and scouting reports. Concussion science was still new, and coaches didn’t know much about the countless ways this kind of brain damage could impact their athletes. But being around a sporting event is a profoundly uncomfortable experience for many concussion patients and for peo- ple whose brains are bleeding. A basketball court teems with painful stimuli—the sounds of the bouncing ball, the whistles, the crowd, the buzzer, the bright lights, the back–and–forth nature of the sport. Being at practice or games made Olivia physically ill, so she would go down to the training room and sit there instead. She was not well enough to travel to away games with us, although injured athletes often didn’t travel anyway because our budget was so tight. Eating in Commons, the school cafeteria, overwhelmed her. We almost never saw her.

The rest of us had plenty to keep busy and only so much extra capac– ity to support our teammates, and now Liv was one fewer person with whom to fight for playing time.

Doctors diagnosed Emma with a stress fracture in her foot, and she sat out the exhibition game. She wore a cast for a week, followed by a boot. Ashley, finally healthy from her back–to-back Acl tears, did not feel like herself, like the player she had been in high school. Even though she was a junior, she had never officially played in–season col-

lege basketball before. So she was in the awkward position of simulta– neously being an upperclassman leader and a wide-eyed “freshman.” Because her first tear had happened when she landed from a layup

on the right side of the court, Ashley now had a phobia of that side. It was a mental block that became a physical one; she couldn’t figure out which leg to lift, which hand to shoot with. The footwork didn’t make sense anymore. She started doing left–handed finger rolls on the right side of the basket, which she had seen the men do. She could go off her strong leg this way. It drove the coaches crazy because if she always went left, she was much easier to defend, but Ashley was defiant.

Ash had a wicked handle, quick feet, and a keen eye for passing. She balled out when she came to Davidson for camp the summer before her freshman year, and the upperclassmen started worrying for their spots. Ashley’s first love was baseball, though. She played both sports as a kid and loved being the only girl on her baseball team. When she got old enough that practices started to overlap and she had to choose— baseball or basketball—she reminded herself that girls did not play baseball in college. Ever since her accident, she had wanted to be a doctor. Ashley, valedictorian of her high school, knew medical school was expensive, so she wanted to go to college for free. Only basketball could help her do that. She quit baseball cold turkey.

Now, though, Ashley felt slower and more tentative than she had before the two Acl tears, like a different player. She wasn’t excited to get on the court anymore. Our loud, giggly, spunky Ash, whom Coach Bailey had nicknamed “Hot Sauce” for her sass and speed and handles, whom we had seen be so outspoken and outgoing, turned inward. She didn’t talk much, didn’t smile much. Off the court she was so busy, we barely saw her outside of mandated team time. In order to distract herself from her injuries for those two years, she had gotten involved in a bevy of extracurriculars on campus and made new friends, moved on with her life.

Once Ashley was cleared to play, she and I were often on the same team at practice, a group of substitutes whose prescribed job was to make our starters better. Often we played offense in the half court as our starters worked on their man–to-man defense.

“Force them baseline” was the constant refrain from the coaches to the defense. “Cut off the middle. Whatever you do, do not let them go middle.”

The middle of the court, they explained, was the easiest path to the basket; if a defender angled her body in such a way that the ball handler had to dribble sideways, toward the sideline or baseline, instead of toward the middle of the key, the handler could not go toward the hoop. Coach Katz’s most obvious coaching strength was defense, and it was our primary focus as a team. Keeping a player from going middle attracted high praise. Letting a player go mid- dle was the most cardinal of sins, sometimes punishable by a per– sonal character attack. A poor defender didn’t care enough about her teammates to hustle. She didn’t care about her scholarship. She was selfish, selfish, selfish.

Allie, a freshman, watched the rest of us internalize the criticism and drown in guilt. I don’t think she didn’t get there on defense because she didn’t have the heart to, Allie thought as somebody got reamed out. I think she didn’t get there because she didn’t get there.

Ashley’s flashiness as a player was highly functional, but she was the only one of us who played with any, and we were not all accustomed to playing together yet. Her passes were much quicker than we were used to, and sometimes she threw them without looking or behind her back, something none of our other guards did. When Ashley put her head down and drove right, shifted her weight, pulled back her dribble, slipped it between her legs, and whipped a left–handed no-look pass at me in the post, all in a matter of a second and a half, I didn’t see the ball coming, and it hit me in the shoulder.

“Otto!” Ashley shouted. I fumbled for it, but I was too late. My defender, Whitney, had the steal.

“Turnovers for Otto and Ashley,” Coach Katz said flatly to Mac, who marked it down, wincing. “Steal for Whitney. Get it together, ’Cats.” “Otto, you gotta be ready!” Ash exploded. “You gotta be looking.

You’re open, I can see your numbers, I’m gonna get it to you.”

“You gotta yell my name sooner than that, Ash!” I shot back without thinking. She was right, though. It was not her responsibility to tell

me when I was open. I should have been ready. And if the guards and the posts didn’t get along, the posts would never get the ball.

We all wore knee pads and mouth guards in every practice and game that year—coaches’ orders. I wished Ashley’s pass had hit me in the knee and ricocheted out–of–bounds, as passes into the post often did that year due to the springiness of our knee pads. Better than giving Whitney the steal.

Another practice we were working on our full–court press. Freshman Leah, on one team, was assigned to guard junior Ashley on the other. Leah was riding her, harassing her, all over her. Ashley, who was, at her quickest, quicker than Leah and easily the best ball handler on the team, could not get the ball past half court. We had run the drill a half-dozen times and turned it over almost every time. Our starters’ press could not possibly be that good.

“Again,” Bailey intoned.

I was supposed to inbound the ball and then hover near Ash– ley, across the court but parallel to her, in case she needed to pass the ball off. Taylor was waiting down near our hoop  to make a cut toward half court for another possible pass. Leah positioned herself on the left side of Ashley’s body so Ashley would have to dribble right, something  she had been avoiding because of her injury-induced phobia.

“You got this, Ash,” I muttered, standing on the baseline, tossing her a firm bounce pass around Leah and trotting inbounds alongside her.

Leah was on Ashley immediately like a koala on a tree branch. Ashley took a few dribbles left, and Leah cut her off. Ash expelled a forceful spout of air—“Heeeeeeessssh.” She dribbled between her legs and tried to go right. Leah cut her off again.

“Ash, I got you,” called Taylor, sprinting to half court, holding out her hands for the ball.

Ashley picked up her dribble and faked a pass to me and then tried to throw the ball to Taylor. But Leah was a smart defender. She didn’t go for the fake, and she jumped up and intercepted the pass to Taylor. Ashley’s whole body—her shoulders, knees, head—slumped as Leah dribbled in for a fast-break layup with nobody near her.

Coach Katz blew her whistle. “You can’t just let her go like that, Ashley,” she warned. “You make a mistake, you get back on defense.” Turning to Mac, she said, “That’ll be . . . seven points for Leah and minus three points for Ashley.”

Mac winced and made some notes at the scorers’ table. She was in charge of keeping track of the complex points system Coach Katz used during practice. Players gained points for things like offensive rebounds and steals, but turning the ball over or not boxing out earned nega- tive points. If a player didn’t have a certain number of points when practice was over, she had to run.

“Nice defense, Leah,” Coach Katz said. “Ashley, get it together. Y’all have one minute to get yourselves some water. Hydrate, ’Cats!”

Mac started the countdown clock. Ashley slouched over to Coach

Bailey, who had been a college point guard herself.

“What am I doing?” Ashley asked Bailey, hands on her hips. “Why can’t I get the ball past half court?”

“Well, Hot Sauce,” Coach Bailey said, “sometimes someone just has your number.”

Ashley walked slowly to the sideline for her water bottle. A few teammates, including Leah, patted her on the back.

“You got this, Ash.”

That day was a turning point for Ashley, the day she realized she did not want to use the ncAA–permitted fifth year of eligibility for injured players, a medical redshirt. She was not mad at Leah. She just had no confidence. If this was what basketball was going to be like, she could not handle an extra year of it. If she couldn’t play at the high level she had once been capable of, she didn’t want to play at all.

We didn’t know why it was taking Olivia so long to get better, and more than one teammate suspected that she was milking it. She had come in from the summer a little out of shape and had a rough preseason. The coaches were mostly ignoring her, so we took their cues. Plus, we were emotionally occupied—we started that season with six straight losses. Lucky Olivia, she didn’t have to run around the court and lose; she could stay home in bed.

We got killed at both Nebraska and Creighton on Lyss’s homecom- ing trip to start off the year. Then we lost big time at nc State, where Coach Katz used to coach alongside their head coach, Kay Yow.

We were in Commons eating dinner one night after that, plastic cups of yellow-and-blue-mixed sports drink on our trays. Most of us also had a cup of chocolate milk and a cup of water and three or four different plates of food. We were playing our usual game: talking through the coaches’ actions and puzzling over their motives. There were no freshmen at the table.

One of the freshmen told her upperclassman roommate in the hotel at nc State that Coach Katz had held a secret meeting with the five freshmen. Word quickly got around the bus: Katz had told the freshies that they were the future and the coaches were relying more on them. It was like a game of Telephone. By the time the rest of the team heard and discussed the news, we heard that the freshmen were Coach Katz’s Super Class and that she had given up on the rest of us, and we were pissed.

“I mean, it’s not the freshies’ fault,” somebody said. “They’re in a really awkward position. But still.”

It was a large–scale example of Coach praising one player by putting down her teammates. What were the freshmen supposed to do about that—stand up for us or let her adore them?

“I can never tell if she’s pissing us off to motivate us or if she’s just pissing us off because she can,” someone else said.

“God, the freshies have been walking in the light all year. From the Megan incident on. What are they, the class sent down from heaven to rescue us? They’re really not all that.”

“It’s because they’re the first recruiting class for this group of assis– tant coaches. The assistants want the freshies to show out so they can show Coach Katz what a good job they did. So they’re gonna keep giv– ing them opportunities.”

It was like a grown-up game of “Hey, look, I did the best on my homework!” except the homework was alive.

“If she’s done with us, why not have a conversation about it? Why not talk to us, too, and not just them? And in secret!”

“If they think the freshmen are outworking us,” I added, “are the coaches looking at the same court we’re looking at?”

I had been a freshman once, but I wasn’t anymore, and I was old enough to declare them babies. I didn’t think they were outworking the rest of us. I thought some of them were lazy. It wasn’t totally their fault—most freshmen were lazy. It took a while to get used to the level we played at in college, more intense than we could have dreamed as high schoolers.

At the college basketball level, as one teammate said years later, “the highs are higher and the lows are lower. And you’re exhausted, so it’s that much more intensified.” Players didn’t know what work– ing hard was, what “tired” was, or fully understand that college- level pace and intensity until they had been a part of it. They had to learn by doing.

“The freshies have no idea how to finish a play. Ball’s going out-of– bounds, they just let that shit go. They inbound the ball and jog up the court. Maybe you do that in high school, AAu, whatever. Not here.”

“Allie told me the diagnosis for that stress fracture in her foot is

‘play as tolerated.’ Who gives that diagnosis to a freshman? Or any– body, really, but especially an underclassman? That’s so confusing. She has no idea what ‘tolerance’ even means at this point. How is she supposed to know how hard to push and how much it’s supposed to hurt before she stops?”

Sure enough, in our game at William and Mary, three freshmen started: Allie, Leah, and Alanna. Whitney and Lyss, both seniors, came off the bench. So did Taylor and Ashley. The freshies, to their credit, played pretty well, but we lost 74–63.

When we did see Olivia these days, which was not often, she was miserable and no fun to be around. We let her drift. She wasn’t physically present anymore, and when she was she remained too sick and cranky to make much conversation. So Liv’s situation was easier for us to forget about. We were in full–season mode now and constantly overscheduled and overwhelmed, trying to balance classes, labs, and schoolwork with scouting reports, practice, rehab, travel, and coaches’ demands.

Kathy Bray, the associate dean of students, arranged for Olivia to have a note taker in each of the classes she missed. The basketball pro– gram also covered the cost of tutors, which Olivia desperately needed. By this point professors, coaches, Olivia’s parents, and several doctors had advised her to drop the entire semester, to take a leave of absence and focus on healing. Liv refused. She wanted to graduate on time.

Beth Hayford, the head athletic trainer and resident women’s bas– ketball mother figure, didn’t think Davidson athletes recovered from concussions as quickly as athletes did at other schools and suspected academics were partly to blame. Olivia, and several other players on the team, had been struggling in school anyway. Nobody ever slipped into academic ineligibility, but once any student fell behind at David– son, it was incredibly hard to catch up.

Beth wanted the ncAA to develop some large–scale means of mak– ing academic provisions for athletes with concussions. At Davidson, student–athlete or not, concussion or not, the strict class-attendance rules were pretty firm. Although a lot of professors were understanding, some were less so, and according to Beth one even demanded doctors’ notes to have concussed players miss class. Because most concussions don’t require a doctor’s diagnosis and are diagnosed and treated in the training room instead, a doctor is often an unnecessary expense for players whose parents foot their health insurance bills.

The ncAA doesn’t usually provide accident insurance for its student– athletes. We were not its employees, and it had little legal responsibility toward “workers’ comp.” The ncAA helps with medical expenses under its Catastrophic Injury Insurance Program, which kicks in when an athlete’s injury costs match or exceed $90,000. It is easier and cheaper for the ncAA to be sued later by individual players over health–care bills than it is for them to cover insurance costs for all four hundred thousand–plus student-athletes. For $89,999 bills and below, the finan– cial responsibility for health care related to sports injuries lies with either the school or the student herself.

Student–athletes get free care like initial diagnosis and therapy in the training room, but someone has to pay for mris and ct scans and bone–setting and surgery and specialized protective equipment.

For the most part it’s up to individual colleges to decide whether to provide health insurance for their athletes. No Division I school at the time was required to cover the cost of full primary insurance for student–athletes, so most who came in covered under their parents’ insurance plans remained on those plans (and had to make sure those plans covered collegiate athletics) or under the rules of the school had to buy their own insurance before they enrolled. This meant that the player and her family were responsible for any costs that insurance did not cover, like if they had a high deductible or saw a doctor out of network. The policy frequently resulted in confusion and irritated parent phone calls to the Davidson training room.

As time went on and Olivia did not seem to be making much prog- ress, Mama and Papa Lowery got her an appointment with Dr. Collins, the sports concussion expert. They had great insurance, which covered the visits, and they could afford to fly Olivia back and forth between Charlotte and Pittsburgh for appointments. They are an exception.

Coach Katz had started treating injured players strangely, making a rule at one point that they were not even allowed to come upstairs and watch practice. They had to stay in the training room and do their rehab instead. That meant they missed out on new plays, scouting reports, and bonding with the team during water breaks. They also had to stay home on road trips, because our team was on a tight bud– get and injured players were an extra expense.

Olivia was lonely and lost. She sat in Coach Katz’s office one day crying. “But basketball is who I am,” she said tearfully.

“Olivia,” Coach Katz replied gently, “you are not just a basketball player. You are so much more than that. You love helping people. You love kids. You need to remember that basketball is not who you are. It’s a part of your life, but it’s not who you are.”

We could have beaten William and Mary, but we didn’t. We should not have lost both games at the Thanksgiving tournament in Wilming– ton, but we did. The first loss was to the Duquesne team full of girls my year who had gotten scholarships I wanted and were coached by the woman I had wanted so desperately to play for. The second was

to Monmouth, one of whose new assistant coaches was my old high school coach Anita Jennings.

Emma broke her nose in the Duquesne game, which we lost by three in overtime. (The first girl to get the Duquesne scholarship I wanted, the three-point shooter, scored twenty points.) We were half–court pressing and trapping them, and Emma, part of a successful trap, forced a Duquesne guard to pick up her dribble just over half court. The girl got stuck and, panicking a little, started trying to create space for herself, pivoting with her elbows out. One elbow clocked Emma across the face.

Emma blacked out for a second. None of us even noticed that she had lost consciousness because she stayed standing. When she came to, the ball was on the ground right in front of her. She picked it up, dribbled to our basket, and finished the layup, blood streaming down her face. Our bench went from screaming, “Yeah, Em, nice finish!” to, “Hey, she’s bleeding, ref!” The Duquesne coaches were also pointing at Emma and yelling, “Blood, blood!”

Emma touched her face, and her hand came away red. The refs blew their whistles, and she walked to the sideline and stood, dripping, over a trash can while Meghan scrambled to get her treatment kit together, as she had done for Jenni at South Carolina. Em got patched up and went back in the game. She played forty-two minutes that day out of forty-five, including overtime.

Emma had to wait until we got back to Charlotte before she could really get herself fixed up. Fortunately, her mom was in town and held her hand as the doctor shoved needles up her nose to numb it before they set the bones while she was awake. She had to wear a mask after- ward to play, but it was a free one from the training room—possibly the same one as worn by several broken–nosed teammates, including Jenni. It didn’t fit right, it smelled bad, and Emma, like a horse with blinders on, could not see down or to either side.

“We could get you a custom one,” Coach Katz offered, like the kind nbA players wore. But Emma and her parents would have to pay for it and were told it would cost several thousand dollars. She stuck with the smelly blinder mask instead.

When my teammates and I were choosing a college, our future access to health insurance in case of injury never crossed our minds. First of all, we were never going to get hurt, and second, to a seventeen- year-old, what even is health insurance? The lack of coverage was also, to my knowledge and my parents’ knowledge, never mentioned by any of the coaches who recruited me for any school. It was not a question my family thought to ask, and of course in many cases it’s not information that’s in the best interest of a recruiting coach to volunteer. I didn’t find out until I arrived on campus and we had our annual meeting with Beth and the other athletic trainers that Davidson wouldn’t cover my sports-injury bills, and even then I didn’t totally absorb the information.

According to Beth Hayford, head athletic trainer, since 1994 David– son College had been one of a small number of Division I institutions with no insurance policy at all for its four hundred–some student– athletes, who are at a higher risk of injury than nonathletes. Beth told me secondary health insurance for all of us would probably have cost an additional $160,000–180,000 a year on top of the school’s athletic budget. Many other schools do provide secondary insurance policies, which supplement the athletes’ primary health plans and usually help to lessen or eliminate out–of–pocket costs for athletes and their fam- ilies. When we were at Davidson, though, our school did not. Wildcat sports were not exactly lucrative ones. Unlike larger, more success– ful football and basketball programs that also make arguments for student–athlete health coverage, we did not bring in much revenue.

For Ashley’s, Mac’s, and Erin’s Acl tears; Olivia’s head injury; Em’s and Jenni’s broken noses; Allie’s stress fractures; and all the other inju– ries on our team, any outside–the–training-room treatment, surgery, and gear were paid for by their parents’ insurance and sometimes, when insurance didn’t cover it, by thousands of dollars out of their par– ents’ pockets. In at least one instance our team doctor wasn’t covered under a family’s health plan, and the player got her surgery elsewhere. According to assistant athletic director Katy McNay, there was extra money from the ncAA in a special pot for students who really needed it, but most players did not know the special pot existed.

Part of the reason the Davidson athletic administration hadn’t yet seen the need to make as big a purchase as insurance was that because men’s basketball was technically our only fully funded sport and most Davidson athletes paid some chunk of tuition, the school attracted a lot of kids from well-off families who could afford the extra health–care costs if their kids needed surgery or a special mask or brace. But many women’s basketball players, full–scholarship athletes whose families often depended on those scholarships, fell through the cracks.

Olivia still was not traveling with us much or showing up at practices or team meals. We had so much doubt about the severity of her con- dition clouding our own minds at this point that we weren’t receptive to her often irritable expressions of frustration and loneliness. We all continued to slip further away from each other—players from players, coaches from players.

We were furious when we found out Olivia had been at parties on campus while the rest of us were on a road trip. She was supposed to be in her room by herself, healing, not partying. We thought that had to be the worst possible thing for her head.

But social distractions may actually have been exactly what Olivia needed at that point. “Athletic identity” is the slice of a person’s iden– tity that she relates to her sport. Division I athletes tend to have high athletic identities. But what do you do when the thing you love to do most becomes your job and then when your job takes over your life—and then all of a sudden you can’t do your job anymore? Almost immediately, Olivia started reducing her athletic identity, mostly as a survival tactic, since being around basketball was physically and emo- tionally painful. She went to parties so she could have social interac– tion, since her team no longer gave that to her.

Concussions affect everyone differently, and they’re hard to describe and understand unless somebody has personally experienced one. When Liv got hers I had had one concussion, a much milder one. It was a freak accident our freshman year. A thick, bumpy piece of plas– tic we had been using as a rim cover to practice our rebounding broke and fell off the rim. Coach Katz asked Coach Bailey to put it back on.

The second time the plastic fell, it landed directly on my head. I knew what it was like to feel a little off, a little headachy, a little out of it, a little unwanted, but it was still easy to think Olivia was being dra- matic. Her injury was invisible.

Concussions build on themselves. Usually, the symptoms for a sec– ond concussion are worse than they are for the first, and it takes lon- ger to heal. A third concussion could take even longer, and so on. It is important to catch them when they happen and treat them right away and to make sure they are completely healed before the athlete takes the court again. After my first concussion I was back playing within a few weeks. For Olivia it had been a few months. It wasn’t looking like she would be healthy in time to play at all that year.