Sherri Coale Online Journal No. 6

Sherri Coale Online Journal
February 15, 2005

When I was in the fifth grade I used to listen to Helen Reddy before every one of my basketball games. “I am strong (strong!), I am invincible (invincible!). I am WOMAN!” How weird was I?

I also bought John Wooden's “They Call Me Coach” in paperback from a scholastic book fair. My friends were buying Nancy Drew mysteries and I'm buying the Wizard of Westwood. Stranger things have happened I'm certain, but even I have to admit: that wasn't entirely normal.

It's odd, I think, the pieces of our past that stick. I can remember as though it were yesterday, the day Mrs. Patton, my fifth grade English teacher and basketball coach, handed out our royal blue basketball uniforms. I wanted number 10 but it was gone before my turn so I got 25.

I remember my fourth grade teacher reading “Old Yellar” aloud to us and asking me to read the final pages while she blew her nose and cried. I remember the exact way the upstairs of my high school smelled and for some strange reason that I can't begin to explain, I have crystalized a specific time-out in the finals of the Pauls Valley Tournament where we won the Title and I won MVP (neither of which comes clearer than a heavy fog).

We spent the entire day today in Oklahoma City putting on a clinic for fifth grade girls in the Oklahoma City metro area. The clinic was an extension of our National Girls and Women in Sports Celebration and was directed by University of Oklahoma women's coaches and athletes.

The whole event was insanely special and I stop to wonder, tonight, if some piece of my morning in the cavernous Cox Center might one day be that “thing” that fills in the crevices of some girl's soul. Not that anything I said or taught was anywhere close to profound or even particularly insightful. I just wonder if any of today will stick.

It will with me. I can just kind of tell after all these years. Today was one of those “I could feel really sorry for myself if given half a chance” kind of days, and yet it didn't become one because the responsibilities of the day got in the way.

Thank heavens for small favors. We taught kids to whom “sport” is a foreign word. We taught kids who came with ankle braces on and mouth pieces in. We taught kids who wanted to learn and kids who didn't. And we got them moving and jumping and smiling, all the while remembering what it was we loved about it all in the first place.

Fresh air. Fresh air for my soul. I bet you in 20 years I remember something of today -- maybe the little girl whose every braid had a different colored pastel clasp at its end. Maybe my staff lip syncing “RESPECT” between clinics. Maybe the one little girl in a sea of hundred who said thank you' after I signed her bag. Maybe something so trivial I can't even differentiate it right now, but I bet I remember something.

The air is ripe for sticking. I know that because my armor's in a pile in the corner. And I learned a long time ago that underneath all the armor is where the adhesive lies.

Tonight the Celebration (Oklahoma Style) of National Girls and Women in Sports culminated with an inspiring banquet featuring Lisa Leslie as our keynote speaker.

As I watched video of our student-athletes immersed in community service, I was reminded of our mission.And as I listened to Lisa talk about her mother, the truck driver with perfectly manicured red fingernails, I smiled a wry smile thinking of my players' Tuesday conversation about brow appointments and my dark roots.

What is it my Grandma used to say about where you're standing having a lot to do with what you see? I had a better perch today than I've had in awhile. Marita Hynes talked about her collegiate playing days when the volleyball team and the field hockey team and the basketball team and the softball team all shared the same 15 uniforms.

If you were a triple sport letterman like her, it was a pretty good deal because you didn't have to keep up with all kinds of gear. But if you just played one or another it was a nightmare. Can you imagine: play your volleyball game and run home to wash the uni for the field hockey player who has to wear it the next day? And my guys each have five pairs of shoes.

Appreciation, perspective, insight . . . what a perfect recipe for a rather lousy run of days.

I do realize this diary is supposed to be about my team and our season, and it is far more than it might appear to be. The bottom line about us is this: We're in a corner, my team and me. We've been up and down and twisted and frustrated and we need a break. Not a siesta but a big ole' lucky one -- and we need it in the worst way.

In the meantime, however, (while we “watch and pray” as my old church hymnal would say) we work. And I pretend to be Helen Reddy, while reminding my squad that ending the conflict in Iraq is not our mission, though playing as if it were will always be.

There is a right way to do all things and if that's all we learn from our current plight, I am quite certain it will be more than enough. Opportunities to be extraordinary await . . . and as Robert Frost reminds me from the framed photo on my shelf, “ I have miles to go before I sleep..."

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