"I've noticed especially with my grades that I tend to do better during basketball season," Allie says. "You have such a tight schedule. I don't have time to watch TV and talk on the phone. I have to get my homework done and get in bed by 11:30 or midnight. ... I have also met a lot of people. I'm probably kind of like a shy person and that was probably why I joined freshman year. ... I get tired of basketball, I get frustrated with basketball, but I really do love the sport."
"I liked how it's based on teamwork. That's what really interested me. I like to work as a team more than as an individual," says Tiffany, who is also vice president of Lowell's senior class.
"I like the way it involves teamwork," says Traci Kanzawa. "And it's I just like playing and playing for a team and everything."
"I don't know. I like it. It's challenging. I don't know, I don't know. Let me think for a minute," says Lindsay. "There's the teamwork, I know that. I know discipline, you need to work hard and stuff to get things done. I know you can't do everything by yourself."
But on the clear November Saturday that finds the rest of the team in the fluorescent-lit gym, Lindsay has opted to go it alone. She's skipped out on the practice, something about a book that she couldn't check out of the library, and Jim Thomas isn't taking it lightly.
"This makes two days in a row that Lindsay isn't here. It ceases to matter whether it's a good reason or a poor reason. The fact is, she isn't here," Thomas says.
So what do you do about a player like that? Someone who's talented, who has pierced her nose, who won't cut her fingernails for the game, and who should be leading the team?
"Sit her down and let her watch," Thomas says. His voice, as he says it, is like a flat line -- resigned. Perhaps angry. "We don't handicap eight people because she's not here."
On this Saturday afternoon, the first game of the pre-season is just over a week away. Last season, the Lowell team lost the city championship in the final game. The year before that, 1994, Lowell took home the trophy. This year -- well, that's up to the players who are out on the floor. How well they play, and how well they play together. How much they can overcome everything girls learn growing up -- be nice, be polite, be agreeable -- and learn to be what they need to be to win.
The team rolls through the drills, through the crunches, through the suicide sprints that Thomas throws out as a penalty for all every time any one of them does anything wrong. At the end of the day, after three hours of play, Jim Thomas is standing in the middle of the basketball court between two teams of his players, who will end this practice in a scrimmage, working against each other to work together, and he has something to say.
"You have to work to get what you want," he says. Then he throws the ball up in the air, for the tip-off.
