They’ve Got Game

The way college sports started is the way it still is for hundreds of students who pay to play. They call their own shots, and there’s nothing casual about the competition.

Published in Carolina Alumni Review, January/February 2007. (Digital version available to GAA members here.)

Virginia Ariail is pleased to say she hasn’t broken any bones yet in her own body, but last fall, at a match with Appalachian State, she did manage to break the nose of an opposing player who was 6-foot-2, 220 pounds. That’s about twice Ariail’s body mass. “It didn’t hurt me at all,” said the sophomore from Rockingham of her rhinoplastic tackle, “but my knee went right into her face. It was pretty bad.”

In 2005, five of Ariail’s teammates on the Carolina women’s rugby team suffered torn ACLs, although as of last fall, the club had tallied only one such tear in ‘06. Her sister, Dorothy ‘04, had a promising career, too – until she broke her collarbone as a freshman and hung up her cleats.

Perhaps all of this bone-crushing should come as no surprise; as Ariail understatedly points out, this is no girly-girl sport. What is remarkable, however, is that she and her 30 teammates actually pay money, in the form of annual dues, to put their bodies through such regular torment. Like all of the athletes who make up UNC’s 53 sport clubs, rugby players earn no scholarships, attract few if any fans to their contests and approach their sporting endeavors with one novel concept in mind: the joy of play.

Hurts So Good

If the Detroit Pistons’ talented forward Rasheed Wallace ‘97 is such a heel, why is he the basketball valentine of so many Carolina alumni? The fans, the sportswriters and one infamous list explain why love doesn’t always feel like it should.

Published in Carolina Alumni Review, March/April 2005

You can have your Joe Namaths, if you want to be obvious, if you want some good old-fashioned, Brady-Bunch-approved chutzpah, the kind of boasting you can see coming from a mile away. If you want a drama queen, you can have the guy who promises a win in the Super Bowl. In the Olympic 100-meter dash. In Game 7 of the World Series. Go ahead. Pick your favorite glory hound.

Me? No thanks. I’ve got my eye on somebody else. Somebody less predictable. He’s standing over there in that corner of my brain that summons what I know I’m not supposed to love – like a boy with a fast car and a late curfew – with the kind of nasty attitude and inked skin that doesn’t exactly spell e-n-d-o-r-s-e-m-e-n-t-s, giving me that come-hither scowl. From the moment he reared back his head and roared into my life at Midnight Madness in the fall of 1993, he has promised me something different from all the rest: the Montrosses and the Lynches, the Jamisons, and yes, even Vince and Stack.

He promised that Carolina would never lose to Duke on the Blue Devils’ home court while he was a Tar Heel – for all two seasons that he was a Tar Heel before he left for the NBA draft in 1995.

I know this last assertion because of The List.

What the Fields Teach

For 25 years, Anson Dorrance ‘74 — graduate of an all-boys boarding school — has been the unlikely conductor of the greatest athletic social experiment since women began playing college sports. It’s what you don’t see in games, however, that keeps the whole thing brewing.

Published in Carolina Alumni Review, November/December 2004

I had to suppress a smile recently when my 9-year-old niece’s soccer troubles were revealed by her mother during dinner. “She comes home from practice crying,” said my sister, amused as well. “She doesn’t like all the running they have to do.” Don’t be mistaken; I take no pleasure in her struggles as part of a new “challenge” team she recently had been invited to join – a kind of all-star or advanced squad to which recreational youth players can graduate. It’s just that I had spent the past two weeks at the practice field with the UNC women’s soccer team, watching freshmen who had played the game all their lives – well enough to be recruited by the most complete and successful program in the nation – bring up the end of a starting line and then, as punishment, complete five one-arm pushups in 90-degree heat and humidity before lining up to sprint 10 consecutive lengths of a soccer field and jog back to the beginning just as many times – a test that is known infamously in the champion-training business as “doing 120s.” I’d seen them wince from the physical and psychological pressure of trying to make it to one end in 18 seconds and back in 30 on each run. Two-thirds of the entire defending national championship team failed that benchmark. The eight players who did not fail got to sleep in while the others met for “breakfast” at 7 a.m. each morning thereafter – not to share a bagel but to run until they did pass the 120s.

Years ago, if you were a little girl who came home crying from an activity, it was probably from ballet practice, and not because of the strenuous nature of the hour but because one of the other girls was better than you or prettier than you or just didn’t like you. Today, if you’re a young girl shedding tears from the physical intensity of a lot of running, you’re in pretty good company.

The Lowdown on Rubdowns

Sports massage may be one of the most important parts of your training program. Here’s why.

Published in Runner’s World, June 28, 2004

Loretta Ulibarri, 49, is training for her 49th marathon this summer, which will put her on target to reach 50 marathons by her 50th birthday. Achieving this feat, which has sometimes required tackling four marathons a year, took more than guts, grit, and lots of running shoes. “If it weren’t for massage, I wouldn’t be able to do this,” says Ulibarri, who lives in Denver. “I had a lot of inflammation problems and ongoing soreness that interfered with my training. Ten years ago, I started getting a sports massage every three weeks, and since then, I’ve been injury-free and able to train year-round.”

Desperation Shot

Time was running out on Nikki Teasley ‘01, and more than a game was at stake. With the help of her coach and her school, the basketball star beat the clock, won her life back – and opened some very heavy doors in college athletics.

Published in Carolina Alumni Review, May/June 2003

The moment the end begins is the most important moment, of course. Nobody understands that better than Nikki Teasley.

She had missed her first four three-point attempts in this game, and her 11 assists – a record though they were for the WNBA Finals – would be little more than a footnote if her team, the defending champion Los Angeles Sparks, didn’t win the ending. It’s funny, really, how you can play 39 minutes of basketball and treat each of those minutes like it was the last and still find the score tied with a minute to play. The ending – that’s what really matters. That’s where the future is written.

Had this been any other time in her life, Nikki Teasley might have been distracted by thoughts of the doubts people had when her coach, former L.A. Laker Michael Cooper, traded a veteran point guard, a championship point guard, for her – a rookie who couldn’t keep her head on straight enough to play at the college level, much less with the Sparks.

Had this been any other time in Teasley’s life, she might have thrown the ball to the other team just to avoid the responsibility of losing. Or winning.

That was once true. All of that was true, not so very long ago.

Twelve, 11, 10 …

The score was tied at 66, and Teasley took an inbounds pass from her teammate. She dribbled in front of the Sparks bench at Staples Center and looked for MVP Lisa Leslie under the basket. But New York Liberty players had the 6-5 Leslie swarmed – and even Teasley’s defender, Liberty guard Teresa Witherspoon, had left her alone, figuring Teasley’s four earlier misses made her too cold to shoot, let alone score.

Nine, 8, 7, 6 – The seconds ticked away. Teasley clearly had no other options. But she’d known this feeling before in her life – being out of options, being the architect of an ending – and this was just a basketball game. This was nothing like planning the premature end to your life.

The Rarity of Rasheed

Published in Carolina, the UNC basketball gameday magazine, December 1994. (Sophomore year)

Questions, questions. There always have been questions for Rasheed Wallace. When Sports Illustrated came calling at 14 years old, Wallace probably had a pretty good indication it would be difficult to hide from all those questions for the next, oh, 20-30 years.

When The Philadelphia Inquirer and Daily News began a college-choice vigil on the lanky 6-10 center from the City of Brotherly Love when he was 15, he probably knew he could throw normalcy out the window.

And when the Inquirer magazine ran a Wilt-Chamberlain-sized article about his daily life at 16 — Who’s your Algebra teacher, Rasheed? What do you talk to your girlfriend about, Rasheed? How are your grades, Rasheed? — well, let’s just say it’s enough to drive a man to silence.

So if you have a question for media-tested Wallace these days, he will answer it for you on the court. Because that’s about the only place you can be sure to find him eventually.