Despite all that’s crooked and upside-down across the landscape of collegiate sports, Saturdays in the fall are still for football. I love the precision and near perfection of  teams that line up on Sunday, but there’s something about the next-in-lines who take the field the day before that I’m drawn to even more.

Every woman wants to know. Many men, maybe, too. But we don’t hear them asking nearly as much. Not all urgent, anyway, like we do. We pose the question to one another, to the “gurus,” to the Universe at large, our honest yearning squirting out unselfconsciously because we need to know:  How do you balance it all? 

My granddaughter tells me hot and cold are opposites. “Large and small are opposites,” she says, popping the Ps so that each of the three syllables of the word pack an equal punch. “Light and dark are opposites. Fast and slow are opposites. . . .” She can go for days. Her three-year-old brain is creating buckets for where to put things, most of which are cut and dried.

My husband was born in Kansas, but he moved to Wyoming a couple of years before he started school. He was the middle child of schoolteacher parents, so he began kindergarten with one foot already on third base.  What he hadn’t been taught, he’d overheard, and what he hadn’t actually done, he’d watched.  So, no one really should have been surprised at his response when early into semester one of organized schooling, his teacher asked the class to name the four seasons.  A simple question to which he supplied an obvious answer: “Duck, Quail, Pheasant, and Deer.”  One really ought to be more specific if wanting to talk to Dane Coale about temperature and trees. 

Sitting on a park bench in Sausalito looking out into the bay, I couldn’t help but overhear. About ten yards to my left, a lady dressed in Lululemon, white Asics sneakers with arcing pink stripes on the sides, and a ball cap with her ponytail poking through the hole in the back had claimed a seat like mine with a view. She was feverishly talking on her phone.

"Actually, nobody owes you crap." That's what the bumper sticker on the otherwise nondescript Geo Prism at the stoplight in front of me said. I laughed out loud when I read it. Then I started chasing rabbits while waiting for the light to turn to green.

We’re on the bumpy asphalt behind the school building and I am in third grade. Some kids are swinging, some are climbing on the monkey bars, the broody ones are sitting next to the red brick building scowling because they have to be outside in the heat. My friends and I are jumping rope.

“What’s the best piece of coaching advice,” a young wanna-be recently asked me, “you received early in your career?”

“Stand and clap - no matter what - during the play-offs.”

I don’t know if that’s the best piece of advice I’ve ever been given or if it’s simply the one that elbowed its way to the front of my mind, into my throat and past my lips, but it’s been living in my head for over 30 years.

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.