Sports - The High School Glory Days

Warning: This is a very long post. I got carried away in my nostalgia. For a lighter post, check out the one before this and add to our collective 'Easy Top Tens'.

I become a 'senior player'

After third form I started getting all my friends to play. We had a summer league team called 'We're Not' (so called in the hopes that the other team would say, 'Who're we playing this week?' and the answer would be 'We're Not', so they wouldn't turn up and we'd win by default). We won one game (a very sweet two-point victory over the hapless Mavericks, a team made up of short Asian girls).

That was around the time of the basketball hey-days in Levin. My mum was Teacher-in-charge of basketball at our school, being the kinda parent who was very 'hands on' when her kids developed an interest. We went from having just the boys team playing in the Palmerston North league to having six teams. She even single-handedly started a mid-week high-school league in Levin, inviting teams from Foxton and Otaki to play as well. It was fun. Our whole family would spend Thursday night down at the stadium, doing score-bench, reffing and playing. Dad would come pick us up after work and we'd get Chinese take-aways. Something inevitably got stolen and you had to keep a tight grip on any basketball you had with you. Many was the time I had to get mum to go reclaim a ball that very clearly had 'JUDGE' written on it, but had been picked up 'accidentally' by some kid from Waiopehu College (punks!).

Sometimes I was playing or training up to five or six days a week. Basketball was life. Me and my brother had posters up in our bedrooms. Our family ordered Pontel tapes from Europe (this was before the days of Sky and there were no NBA games of regular TV for a while) and half the Senior A boys would come around on a Tuesday night and watch our latest NBA offerings. Our family even planned an America holiday roughly around attending as many NBA games as possible (we went to seven, including Christmas day at the classic Chicago Stadium watching our favourite team, The Bulls, beat their nemesis at the time, The Knicks).

In fourth form I trialled for, and made the Senior A team. But, I didn't think I deserved to make it (the coach seemed to have some blind loyalty towards me!) and the few players that I was friends with all decided to play for the Senior B team instead, so I joined them. In a cruel stroke of irony, the Senior B team ended up being better than the Senior A team and I got almost no court-time all season. I had a miserable time. If I hadn't been a Judge I might've quit. But Judge's don't quit (not often - our parents wouldn't let us! as a teacher of today's youth I appreciate that parental pressure!).

Remember, at this point in time, that the kinda kids playing basketball weren't really the kinda kids I was hanging out with at school. They were a rougher element. It was a great way to get 'in' with the tough girls who smoked in the 'N-block' toilets. But, as you remember, I was a shy girl.... I could easily go to a practice session and not say a word the whole time (just smile eagerly and do what I was told). It was also cute that the basketball community of Levin always knew me as 'Kate' because that's what my mum would introduce me as, whereas at school and around my friends I was still 'Katie'. It was a distinction.

Fifth form was a different story. I trialled for the Senior A again and made it, along with some of my friends, Sarah and Iona, who'd been playing for 'We're Not' (which had now become 'The Shaquilles' and 'Hakuna Mutata'). So I was happy! I went from being last on the bench for the Senior B to starting five in the Senior A, and got the 'Most Improved Player' award at prize-giving and a penant (our school's top prize for athletes, only four players in our team got them).

To top it off, our team had just been promoted to the Premiere city grade the season before..... and this season we WON it. A little old scruffy old team from Levin winning the Palmerston North league. It was a Cinderella story! We even beat our arch-rivals QEC in the final.

The night of the finals my mum was in hospital in Palmerston North. She had been in and out of hospital for a big part of that year, her cancer having come back for the third time since I was in standard two. She couldn't come to the game. We taped it for her and about a dozen people visited her hospital ward at about 9.30pm after the game finished. I remember Dad going to get her, and her coming down the hall quietly to greet us (her drip-machine on wheels at her side). Everyone else in the ward was asleep and it was dark, so we'd all waited by the elevator. She had tears in her eyes. It was nice. She died about three months later and I'd say one of the things she was most proud of is how well her basketball kids ended up doing (she helped hundreds of kids over the years, and not your 'easiest' kids either).

While I'm on the heart-warming Judge family memories.... My brother had been taping the game on one of those old-school video-cameras that came in a brief-case for Mum to watch later. I had a good free-throw shooting game (and it was a close game, so every point counted) and on about the fifth one in a row that I made you could hear him cheering in an oddly high-pitched way, and then one of the other guys said, 'Whose sister is that, David?' and he said, 'That's MY sister!' really loudly. Awwwwww. Big bro was proud.

I kept playing in sixth and seventh form, being captain in my final year. We won the premiere Palmerston league both of those years as well. The THREE-PEAT. It was fun. Our coach, Mike, had total faith in us and while we didn't have the most complex strategies, we kinda had a good feel for each other and developed a style that suited us perfectly. He always kept me on the court most of the game (being tall I kinda anchored the defence and it dropped off a bit when we had a shorter line-up on) and I loved that!

One of my best friends, Sarah, played along-side me in the starting five and we called ourselves 'The Terminator' and 'The Exterminator'. We even had matching wrist-bands (erm, my idea) and practised our 'tricky play' at trainings (it involved a between-the-legs-pass and was never-ever used in a real game).

It remained our Friday ritual to drive the 45 minutes to Palmy every week and not get home til almost midnigh, after having our post-game wrap-up at McDonald's on the square. My brother would come and watch since he was at Massey in those days.

My brother was, by the way, an amazing player. He is a very coordinated guy (he can dance just like Michael Jackson and has been a ringer at Masonic Debutante balls to escourt girls he doesn't even know because of his twinkle-toes). During high-school he would spend hours every night watching games in freeze-frame, sketching the moves into his notebooks (he was an amazing artist as well) and then going outside and practising them. He would also spend hours jumping off his graphics desk and trying to rebound up and touch the ceiling (which was 12 foot high). As a result, he could score 20-30 points at will and was one of the best technical post-players you'd ever see.

He also had an amazing vertical leap, being able to do fancy dunks (windmills, 180s, reverse-double-pumps). He went to some Five-Star camps with guys who ended up being in the NBL and would be one of the few who people stood around and watched have dunk-offs. He was in the Manuwatu Under-20 and Under-18 teams with more future NBL players.

Trouble was that he was an early grower, but never got past 6'2. Though he was the tallest player on the team most years, he was never going to be able to be a post-player in higher leagues. Didn't matter though, cause he didn't really have higher aspirations and I think he had burn-out (due to a series of frustrating and painful injuries) and was quite happy to go off to uni and just play socially. He enjoyed coaching a few girls' teams at school (including my 'Hakuna Mutata' one, 'The Petals' (someone from the basketball associate rang up to ask what the team would be called, he thought 'Hmmm... something feminine cause they're girls.... I know - The Petals!', needless to say they were not feared by opponents) and the aptly named 'Banes').

I got some impressive-sounding honours, but I really think it was just a matter of 'right-place-right-time' and being tall :) I have no delusions of grandeur.
- selected for Manuwatu U18 team
- selected for Levin Women's team
- Played for Levin U16 team

Anyhow, that was a huge part of my high-school years. I fit it around study and a part-time job one year and never missed a practice.

Other than that my high-school sports stories are limited to a brief stint in the U16 school volleyball team (we got knocked out in the first round of qualifying games) and two years in the Lawn Bowls team (I think my pairs teaming was the worst each respective year I played). Oh yeah, and I got third in the Intermediate Discus one year. And me and Tammy had a battle to get last in the cross country every year (we had a tense routine of waiting til the last possible minute and then trying to out-sprint each other near the finish line, but walking the rest). I think I gained the dubious honour of being dead-last in the senior girls' cross country in seventh form (Angela was probably hiding in the toilets not doing it at all, bloody piker!).

Side-Note: My Cunningly Cowardly Brother

Another vivid memory of my brother playing sports was the 800m race on athletics day. The whole school was watching and my brother was house captain, so he was entering everything he could [don't get me started on how he pressured his self-conscious-chubby younger sister to swim more than one race during swimming sports - in the days before boardies]. He went in the 800m race, which was perhaps out of his ideal range (being a 'twitch-muscle' kinda guy).

Coming up to the home-straight he pulled up lame and limped off the field, failing to finish. My friends were all terribly concerned and said, 'Katie - your brother is injured!'. He had a long history of horrific sporting injuries (being a keen jumper and all he often pulled/tore/fractured things in his legs and wore a bionic brace).

I shook my head and said, 'Nah, he knew he wasn't gonna come anywhere and thought it would be easier to just not finish, betcha!' And I was right. He faked an injury in front of the whole school to save face and I was the only one who realised what he was really doing.

Sister knows best!