How do you put into words three years of hard work, sweat and tears?
How do you sum up all the hours, the floor burns and extra reps?
How do you express the connection one has to their coaches and teammates that ends up feeling more like family and how do you connect outside spectators to an experience like this one?
The only place I know where to start is with the picture of a girl, fingers trembling, fumbling with her shoelaces as tears drip from her bloodshot eyes.
It is this girl—pulling off her shoes after her last game representing the club she loves—who looks back at her AAU career thinking about how many people didn’t anticipate her being where she is at this moment.
It is two months after my freshman year of high school basketball. I am walking into my first ever Finest Basketball Club Northwest Alliance, better known as FBC NWA, practice. I’m not here on reputation, known ability or any type of street cred. I’m here because at 15-years-old I’m pushing 6 feet 2 inches, am stronger than most girls I play against and I’ve promised to work hard. I’m by no means the blue-chip prospect that FBC is known for finding on a nationwide scale. I’m just a kid, who fell in love with the game a little later and wants an opportunity to get better.
The sight in front of me is intimidating. I’ve been in the gym for under a minute and I already feel like I’m sticking out like a sore thumb. The girls, who are just getting some shots in before practice starts, are light years ahead of me. These girls carry a confidence in their game that emits a type of swagger that I do not possess. Leaning on the bleachers a few yards in front of me is a lanky man with a buzz cut and a short beard. He’s wearing an all-red Adidas sweat suit with a whistle hanging around his neck.
‘He looks like he’s a coach,’ I think to myself.
I nervously walk up to him and introduce myself. He reaches out his hand and shakes mine.
“Hi Maddy, I’m Nars. Ready to get to work today?” He asks me. I nod my head.
He seemed confident as well. If he was nervous or scared at all for this first practice at the helm of the newest team under the vaunted FBC banner, he certainly didn’t show it. Today, Nars Martinez is the head director of FBC NWA.
The whistle that hung around my new coach’s neck echoes throughout the gym. Warmups start.
‘Good, this is something I can do and not look like a fool,’ I think to myself.
I manage to get through warmups, and we all line up for drills. I’ve done most of these drills hundreds of times, but this is different. The speed is different. The pace is going 10 folds faster than I’ve ever even seen it in my brain. I’m on the floor with girls who have offers to play Division 1 basketball already. These girls are some of the top ranked in the state—in the country. Some of these girls are playing at Team USA camps. I’m not what these girls are and I’m reminded over and over again as I am humbled by them time and time again. By the end of it I was a lump of soreness, exhaustion and frustration. I had a lot of questions and not a lot of answers. I’m sure many didn’t think that I belonged. I didn’t care. I knew then that this is what I wanted. If nothing else, I came out of that practice with a burning motivation. I made a plan and I knew what I needed to do. I had to do whatever it took to catch up with the rest of the program and allow me to carry myself with that same beautiful swagger my teammates did.
One year later I return to the same familiar scene. There are some new faces. Some girls I notice are absent but there are faces that I recognize. Teammates who I look up to are still there—girls who I know not just for their game, but for their character—which is a relief. You never want to see the good ones go.
I had stuck to my plan. The same burning motivation had remained inside me that entire year and remained with me in that moment. This year I was actually looking forward to the drills that would commence post warmups. I knew I would be able to hold my own this year and that I could be the one humbling people. In the past year, I figured out how to use my 6 foot 2 inch frame and the strength it possessed. My body realized that most girls couldn’t match my physicality and started throwing would be defenders around. I had transformed myself from just a body to somebody. I surprised a lot of people. I surprised myself. With each game I played, I began to see myself playing beyond high school. When asked the year prior if I would play college ball, I never had a good answer. “If it happens, it happens,” I would mumble. Now I had a definitive answer, and it was an answer that my coaches at FBC never doubted. They believed in me long before I believed in myself.
It felt different now. Now I believed in myself. Through the tireless work over the last year, I had gained an extreme amount of confidence that wasn’t there before. And this wasn’t confidence in the cocky way, but it was the type of confidence that took away my nerves before games. Now I walked into games looking forward to making opponents deal with me. This club season, this newfound confidence spring boarded me into my junior year of high school basketball.
My junior season was exceptional. It was everything I could’ve hoped for on a personal level. I lead my team in scoring and field goal percentage. I lead my team and league in total rebounding and offensive rebounding. Along the way, I was named team captain, team MVP and 1st Team, All-League. I was named to the all-tournament team at the Christmas tournament we played in. The accolades piled up over the season and culminated with something I never thought possible. By the time the season wrapped up, I was ranked the No. 1 Center in the state for the Class of 2024 by Prep Girls Hoops. The intimidated young girl who had walked into that first FBC practice had managed to transform herself into a player. I hadn’t done it alone. Sure, I was willing to put in the work and that had to come from me, but it was a bunch of guys who believed in the girls’ game and believed in me that lifted me up to levels I didn’t know I had in me. Had it not been for FBC, I would still be that intimidated 15-year-old fumbling through drills and feeling out of place. I had accomplished some great things, but it was time for one last ride with the team and coaches who showed me what I could be.
My first last practices went well. The first tournament went well. After all the accolades, I was mentally on cloud nine. I had my first D1 school call me. They seemed genuinely interested in me and my unique style of play. My cloud only rose higher from there, and as far as I was concerned absolutely nothing could pull me down. I was conquering my goals and aiming higher and higher.
But unfortunately, every great conqueror falls from grace at some point. They fall from their blissful cloud, to give the story suspense and to test the conqueror’s ability to overcome and learn from their fall. At a travel tournament, I had a chance to show off to a D1 school, and I didn’t play even remotely like myself. I did everything opposite of what I was advertised to have been. The worst feeling was knowing it the entire weekend. Sure enough, when I got home, already upset over my performance, the school informed me they were going with somebody else. I fell, and I fell hard. Every single write-up or ranking I’d gotten in the last six months suddenly felt like a lie, like some sort of set up against me. At this point my recruitment process had been a breeze, and I didn’t know it would take such a sudden and sharp turn. I felt like my world was falling apart.
“What if I’m just never going to be good again? What if I play like that every tournament? Am I still even recruitable?”
Those thoughts tortured the inside of my brain for weeks. And another unfortunate factor was I couldn’t hide my fall. I have always worn my heart on my sleeve, and it was obvious during practices and training I was off, I wasn’t me. I had conversations with Nars. As always, he picked me up, but he also was clear that I needed to learn to pick myself up. One of my coaches recommended the book The Inner Game of Tennis. I wasn’t expecting the book to do much. I’m sure it’s just another book hyped to cure all of your mental blocks. But in the first chapter it already was preaching a powerful message. I gobbled the words that flowed from the pages. I tried putting the things it talked about into practice during my day-to-day life. And sure enough, things started coming around. Each tournament I slowly regained back myself. And as each tournament brought success for not just me but my team, it was also a slow and inevitable countdown my final performance before the curtain call, an inevitability that happened July 24, 2023.
There I am. The curtain has closed. We played well; I played well. The buzzer sounded and it was over—not just for me but for all my teammates. I sit, hands trembling as I fumble to untie my shoelaces. Untying your shoes and pulling them off normally felt like relief after a game, but today it didn’t. Untying my shoes and plopping them back into my bag this time means that the game is done. This time means this chapter was done. I wanted to keep reading this part of my life; I wasn’t ready to close this book. Tears stream down my face uncontrollably. I try to stop them, but I can’t. My teammates have dispersed at this point. I took a picture with every one of them, but the pictures cannot capture every memory I have with them individually or what these three years have meant to me.
My shoes lay untied, still attached to my feet. I lean my head onto the windowsill and let out a long tremulous breath. My dad gives my foot a light tap. Just as I thought I had collected myself; I locked eyes with him, and I lost it again.
“I know, sweetheart,” he says.
“Just one more game,” I beg him.
So, how do you put into words three years of hard work, sweat and tears? How do you sum up all the hours, the floor burns and extra reps? How do you make the reader feel how you were pushed, how you were driven to succeed and most importantly the love you felt from coaches, teammates and your basketball family? Even as I sit here madly typing away my story, my time with FBC, I’m really not sure there is a perfect way to sum all of it up.
