Rough Notes: I Am Not A Basketball Player
Of course that's not exactly true.
This is a Rough Notes Deep Dive: intimate & wide lens writings on women’s basketball culture, politics, histories, and my own basketball becoming. They are sometimes free and sometimes just for paying subscribers; upgrade your Rough Notes subscription to dive deep every time.
My personal definition of who “is” a basketball player is as broad as my definition of who “is” an artist: a person to whom these identities have once felt, for however long or brief, correct. This could be a definite conclusion, a sense of completion (of a whole basketball season, or a pencil drawing over months) or it could be more amorphous, a kind of dream-like thing. A whispered conversation with an imagined Lisa Leslie, when you were just 10 years old, late at night, about one another’s lives. A feeling of exhilaration after sneaking into a place you promised yourself you’d write about. The knowing, no matter how others see you, that this part of you is somewhere, scrambled up or delicately wrapped or maybe hiding, still intact, amongst all the other parts.
But there’s one period in my life when I wasn’t ever known as a basketball player: four (and a half) formative years, between 2008 and 2013, which I spent at a small liberal arts school in Vermont called Middlebury College. In the four years preceding college, basketball was often the only thing people identified me with: I’d started every single girl’s varsity basketball game at point guard. But I didn’t plan to play in college. Once I was at Middlebury, I didn’t just distance myself from basketball — and all athletics — I also felt repelled by them.
In January of 2025, as I flailed into my first month of full-time sportswriting and freelancing (that might not be true, but you know, the forever inner critic), I felt strangely called back to Vermont, and to Middlebury, which is both a college of 2,400 undergrads and a town of nearly 10,000 people. So I drove there. And I ended up spending the entire month there (thanks to a sweet old friend who was away traveling & told me in the most Middlebury the town kind of way: “of course you can stay in my apartment, I left it unlocked.”)
One big & pretty obvious thing I realized is that no matter how much over the years I’ve downplayed the role of the seemingly “random” and highly preppy/Old Money/overwhelmingly white college in Vermont I attended, the truth is I am obsessed with it. Or perhaps, as a highly sensitive creature, there’s simply no other way to feel once jolted back into the thing, shockingly zoomed-in, absorbing it once again. At this particular fancy school, over 30% of the student body participates in varsity sports. And this creates both a pervasiveness to the athletics culture, as well as a binary: you’re in or you’re out. During this January in Vermont, I wonder whether now, I can disrupt this dynamic anew.
My first night back, I insist on going to the college dining hall with a friend, who is back after a decade away, working as a therapist at the on-campus counseling center. This is one of those colleges where, like a boarding school, the dining hall is everything: equal parts life source, main pedestrian thoroughfare, and nightmarish daily happy hour (usually without the alcohol), full of best friends, estranged lovers, charged crushes and worst enemies. Stepping inside of Proctor Dining Hall, I am both elated to have driven 6 hours from New York City to find, once again, such familiarity in this well-lit room, and also filled with a triumphant relief in no longer giving a fuck about what anyone inside of it thinks of me. What a victory: now and forever more, in this haunting building, I can spoon shitty rice pilaf onto a plate in peace.
But of course I fall into chatting with students, a group of seniors who ask me questions as we compare notes, assess the contemporary culture. How much longer can I get away with critiquing the politics of “the Booth Room” (the alternative cultural hub of my day), and asking about the messiest drama with administration? When some of the students half-invite me to play Spikeball in the athletics center with them, I offer a ride from the dining hall down the hill. “That’s ok,” a presumably 22-year old girl/woman says. “I’ll walk.” “Okay,” I say. “But it’s cold. You don’t want a ride?” “I’m not sure I want to get in a car with a stranger,” she says. And I suddenly understand. I am in my 30’s now, over some cusp, outside of the thing. And rarely do these students encounter, never-mind speak to, someone without a designated role within Proctor Dining Hall. “Oh, oh, of course!” I say. “That’s smart. You’re smart.” And then I flee the campus entirely.
Arriving at Middlebury College in 2008 from Oakland, California was bewildering to me for many reasons. In a striking difference from the world where I grew up, I learned that here, an elite athlete is intertwined with (or at least often eager to appear like) the most esteemed social tier at the college: people who are rich, white, went to prep school, hot (in a rich, white, preppy way), and who come from the particular places that produce such a person: Darien, Wellesley, Scarsdale, Rye. And so while athletes themselves may feel alienated or pigeonholed by the rest of the college, they also belong to, or at least exist in the shadow of, a group with more power than any other on campus: those who know the rules before the game even begins.
At a private D3 school, athletic recruitment helps you get admitted, but does not cover the cost of tuition. Instead of promising financial scholarships through sports, what athletics at Middlebury offers is a valuable experience, as I imagine coaches might sell it. What you get is a recruited identity, an offering of pathways carved by those that came before you. They’ll tell you where to sit during meals, where to jog in the springtime, what to major in, what kind of people to date, whether or not it’s okay to be queer.
For a while, I thought the female athletes in my freshman hall were my friends, but quickly realized that what was most important to them was a kind of inevitable social ascension they’d been assigned to complete because of the sports they played: it required a separate standard of beauty, a continuous social dance with certain men’s sports teams, and a whisper network of secret sororities. I learned quickly that here, the athletics culture is marked by an unexplained supremacy, kept far away from the rest of us.
That freshman fall, though I never planned to play basketball here, my hands started itching. I think I went to two basketball scrimmages, lightly considering trying out for the team (to become an inevitable bench warmer, I would have been no kind of star, don’t get that confused). Compared to those not-really-my-friends-anymore freshman hall-mates, I could tell the basketball team was not quite cool: that there was a clunkiness about this social group, maybe a whiff of aspiration? It seemed to me to be suffering from the condition of being conjoined to so many other sports severely sanitized by whiteness and wealth. More than anything, I quickly realized that there was nothing I wanted less than to be socially enveloped by a group of people reporting to the top ranks of Middlebury athletics society. And so turning my back on basketball in college was really a two-edged thing: my own dismissiveness lined with a new fear of social rejection.
Perhaps this kind of “following the lead” among athletes is true of collegiate sports everywhere. Maybe it’s even more intense in a D1 setting. But for a school so small, which at least to me marketed itself as a place of creativity, diversity and collaboration, the definitive separation of sports as a lifestyle was striking. It created, in this allegedly tight knit campus that felt sometimes like a snow globe you could never escape, like a cruel trick.
I watch three Middlebury College women’s basketball games throughout the course of January. This is three more than I’ve ever seen before. Turns out it’s easy to go to a game because you can get a lotta things done quickly in a small town: stop by the Middlebury Coop to get 10 signatures on your friend’s school board petition, lie your way into the best parking spot in the lot (“I’m just using the gym”), get the details on the access TV courtside reporter (he’s been doing it for 12 years, and instead of pre-game press conferences, he just texts questions directly to the coaches the day before), gawk at a few coaches you’ve still never talked to for over a decade, and sit back and enjoy four quarters of a D3 basketball game.
The players become familiar to me. There’s #5 with the silkiest shot, and #20 who was apparently a walk-on but is playing the best basketball of her career, and #12 their star and leading scorer, who seems to relish in moments when her abilities outshine the others and #24 the center and senior captain, a scrappy multi-tasker and the only one who wears her uniform correctly according to 2008 rules, which is a tucked on top with shorts loose enough to be called, at least very slightly, baggy. Their parents fill the stands of the gym, plus some folks from the area (especially with young kids), and a few dozen students, most of whom also play sports. And the team, which is pretty good for a D3 program, wins all their home games, one with an especially close finish that my friends’ kid calls “extremely unexpectable.”
But my desire to get more immersed in the culture around basketball here, in the athletics scene itself, is less successful. I look for “sports people” who will talk to me. I meet an alum in his 50’s, now an executive in professional sports marketing, who played lacrosse at the college in the 1980’s. He’s teaching a month-long course here called “Sports & Society.” When I tell him that I write about women’s basketball, he seems fairly unimpressed, but invites me to “sit in” on his class. When I do, I use my introduction to burst out with “I hated sports when I went here,” and when I see this guy at the bar later that week, we avoid eye contact. I sit near the women’s basketball alums in a WNBA shirt that I hope signals some kind of like-mindedness (and later feel stupid about), but no one has any interest in talking to me. I try to hang out with an assistant basketball coach, who graduated a few years ago, but we never do. When I show up at noon at the gym to shoot around, I realize that’s when the faculty & staff pickup game happens, and the assistant coach is sort of the leader of it all, but while I work with my friend’s 9 year-old kid on the mechanics of shooting, neither of us look at one another nor say hello. Or perhaps it’s just my imagination.
During one of the basketball games in January, I’m joking around with two friends from my era, both of which played basketball (of course this takes place at halftime, while the rest of the basketball alums are gone.) There are three options, one tells me: “the ones who are ‘straight’ and don’t care about people thinking they’re gay, the ones who are ‘straight’ and terrified of being perceived as gay, and the rare few who are publicly gay.” I realize that perhaps this is my beef with this place: a culture that produces so many of that second type of person. Seeing the female athletes at Middlebury sometimes terrified of homosexuality reinforced my own internalized fears around being queer. Because I knew, in some part of myself, that I am a basketball player. Here, I learned that there are reasons to be afraid of being a gay one.
Unwritten rules: there’s an intoxicating superpower to knowing what they are, and an equally powerful self-consciousness about breaking them. This is exactly what inspired me to start thinking about the unwritten rules of women’s basketball, and about the person who broke so many of them seemingly without apology: Brittney Griner. I began my sociology thesis about the BG in 2012, in part because I wanted to understand not only women’s basketball players better, but also the female athletes surrounding me at this particular kind of D3 school.
At the end of college, as I started to fall in love with women’s sports again, I reconnected with the girls from my freshman year hall, who in my mind had left me gladly behind four years ago. We’d relaxed, finally, and though there was still an unevenness to our interactions, the re-ignition of those friendships was overwhelmingly filled with kindness. I was doing spoken word poetry by that point (god help me) and they showed up for my “Poor Form Poetry” performances, genuinely curious and engaged. And I got to know them better, and their friends, came to their field hockey and ice hockey and lacrosse games. I developed, while briefly appearing on the sidelines, an admiration for their abilities.
But the gap remained: we were safe in these cross-cultural relationships so long as the lines between our identities were never blurred. My friendship offered them something opposite. The fact that I started caring about sports in my own ways was irrelevant. Instead, I was always careful to make clear: I am not here to question you. You are who you say you are.
Finally, with February breaking open, I leave New England to return to the Midwest. Driving down Route 7 and out of Middlebury the town is a fresh gasp of relief. It takes only a tiny bit of movement for the tribalism of that college campus to melt away, its identifiers immediately outdated.
Because long distance driving is, I think, a kind of ayahuasca trip, I move through twelve million different emotions while on the road. What I end up with is a half-sensical metaphor about how one rejection is connected to another: not only an experience of pain, but the act of it occurring while you’re so close to something sacred and tender. Like you’re speaking to a precious child sitting on the floor, when you kneel down and you want to say hello, and you want to look into their eyes, and hope that they, without moving their little tush on the floor, will look into yours. But so often they do not. Other beings cannot always hold the eye contact you search for in them. They are learning to see in other ways. This is the thing that tears me up. I’m not sure if this makes sense, but but by Fredonia, New York, I’m convinced this is what haunts me, and doubt my ability to endure it.
I drive 12 hours on Route 90 to Huron, Ohio, spend the night in a motel on the edge of Lake Erie, then up to Ann Arbor for a game between the University of Michigan and the University of Oregon women’s basketball teams. It’s my first time attending a game with official credentials for Rough Notes, and Rough Notes only.
Everything in Ann Arbor is totally different from the place I was before; to me it’s encapsulated by the absolute reverence with which Michigan’s student journalists cover the game. They are four undergrads, dedicated beat reporters of the women’s basketball team, who travel to every single away game and who participate in the post-game press conference with the energy of a top Bar or Bat Mitzvah student. And while I might typically find this vibe egregiously annoying, I am struck by the beauty of these student journalists as part of the story itself.
I ask Michigan’s head coach Kim Barnes Arico about the young journalists, and her answer immediately stretches open to contain more than I expect. “Part of my life has been the fight for change,” she begins. “And the fight for equality and the fight for opportunity... And when you have a group of 1-2-3-4-5 people that are invested and wanna spend time and wanna go on the road and wanna travel and actually care, like that just… like melts my heart. The fact that they care is growth. The fact that they’re here is growth… it means the game is growing, it means Michigan is growing, it means the people in this room are growing.”
I love this answer, of course. Kim Barnes Arico for women’s basketball president. Her words make me excited about the kaleidoscope of ways you can connect to women’s basketball. That beyond small, insulated environments like one small liberal arts college in New England, our sport is becoming more and more the opposite: an ecosystem that celebrates people joining, more people mattering: the kids with their autographed jerseys, the queers who thought they weren’t into sports until they watched the WNBA, the witty culture critiques across social media, the teen who spends hundreds of hours of Paige Bueckers edits, the student writers eager to help tell a story of change. I love that women’s basketball’s most powerful form is one that prides itself in opening up. On the next leg of driving, I decide that this is worth the kind of endurance you constantly have to renew.
heh the Lisa Leslie reference seems pretty specific 😁