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Dunbar had hired a great coach two years before Shay got there. Their first season, they’d gone sixteen and eleven, which wasn’t bad, but it was really just a hair over five hundred, and that wasn’t going to get them anywhere. Their second season before she got there, though, they’d won twenty games and had had a seven-game unbeaten streak. She’d been recruited by Dunbar hard, and while it had been exciting being recruited by other, much larger and more prominent basketball schools, the Dunbar coach had used their recent winning streak and the fact that before her, the most wins Dunbar had gotten since joining the top division of college basketball had been ten.
Shay had been determined to help them improve that record, but during her freshman year, that coach decided to leave mid-season due to health reasons, and they’d had to start over with the one they had now. The two coaches couldn’t have been more different, and the team had suffered as a result of a complete change in their style of play. They’d won fourteen games that year and seventeen the next, which was good, but not good enough to make it to the tournamentin a very competitive conference.
It had all been difficult for Shay, and if she’d had the option of transferring somewhere else and immediately being eligible to play, she would’ve done that, but NCAA rules prohibited her from being able to do so. She would have lost one full year of eligibility unless she appealed and hoped for the best, but her team would’ve known then that she wanted to leave, and she didn’t want to do that to them. Shay had decided to stay and, at the end of every season, made the same decision. Her junior season had been good, but they’d been one win shy of being able to make the tournament they were now in. All the hard work it had taken to get here, and Shay was worried they’d screw it up by staying up too late and not getting enough rest.
“Coach did say to celebrate, but we shouldn’t stay up late,” Shay suggested.
“Fine. Fine. Captain card. I get it,” Jameson replied. “Hey, I thought your girlfriend was coming to this one.”
Shay took a drink of her water and said, “She was supposed to, yeah. Something came up.”
“Like what?”
“Not everyone gets excused from classes because they’re student-athletes. She had a test and a paper due in another class and said she’d try to make the next one or the final, if we make it that far. It’s a flight to get here, too, so she’d have to pay for that and then her hotel since she can’t exactly stay with me,” Shay explained. “She wanted to be here.”
Shay wasn’t so sure about that, but she didn’t want her team to know that her girlfriend of just over a year had texted a few hours before the game to tell Shay that she hadn’t gotten on the flight that Shay had bought her the ticket for. It had been non-refundable, but Eliza had promised to pay her back. The ticket hadn’t been expensive, so it wasn’t that. It was more that her girlfriend, who had also promised to be there to watch Shay play for the first time that entire season, had changed her mind. There was a paper due, but no test. Shay had lied about that. Eliza had always been able to write a paper at the last minute and still get a good grade, though. Her intelligence was the thing that had brought them together.
Shay had needed help in a class during the first semester of her junior year in order to remain eligible to play. A C was okay, but a D wasn’t within Dunbar’s academic requirements or the NCAA’s. She had needed to find a tutor, and Eliza had a listing up on their school app. They’d met, and after a few tutoring sessions, they’d gone out. They’d been together ever since, but they were both about to graduate, and Shay had been worrying more and more about what would happen when they did. She wanted to get drafted, which meant that she could end up in any of the cities where there was a WNBA team. Eliza wanted to stay local since she was from Indiana, like a lot of the other Dunbar students.
Shay had a lot of thinking to do in the next few months. She’d have a degree that she didn’t really want to use because her dream was to play until she couldn’t any longer and then maybe coach or be a commentator. That part was still up in the air, but she had time to figure it out. If she got drafted, played well, and didn’t get injured, she had at least ten good years to play. That was all a big if, and she knew that, but she didn’t want to focus on it too hard because when she did, the whole world seemed to come crashing around her, and she needed to be thinking only about the next game right now.
“Hey, who are we missing?” Shay asked and looked around the room.
“Oh, Layne,” Martin said from her spot, lying on the bed with her ankle covered in an ice pack.
“Where is she?” Shay asked.
“I texted her,” Martin said. “So, don’t blame me. I tried. She didn’t reply. So, probably in her room.”
“Who’s her roommate?” Shay asked.
“Roy,” Martin replied and nodded to Faith Roy, a sophomore guard who hadn’t seen the court all season and, likely, wouldn’t see it any time soon, either.
“Roy, where’s your roommate?” Shay asked.
The whole team was in this room with the exception of Layne Stoll, who, if Shay was being honest, was probably the only reason they’d won the game. Layne had always been fast. Everyone had seen that. But because Shay was usually the fastest person on the court for either team, speed hadn’t been as important as shooting or tough defense, which Martin and Lisa Ledger were better at than Layne. Everyone could find a hot streak, though, and tonight, they’d needed extra speed. Shay could only guard one person when they were playing man-to-man, and the zone they’d tried at the beginning of the game hadn’t been effective. They’d tried a different zone, and that had been better, but Seventeen had still managed to score three in a row. Martin hadn’t been able to keep up with her, and Coach had been right to call Layne in off the bench and use her in that role instead of Lisa, who was a great shooter but not the best on defense.
Martin’s ankle was bruised, and the X-ray she’d gotten after the game had shown a very mild sprain, but the doctor was hopeful that if she took it easy and the swelling went down, she might be able to wear a brace and still play even some minutes in their next game. That was all up in the air right now, but based on how Layne played tonight and the fact that Lisa hadn’t been needed much at all, it was likely Layne would split minutes with Martin in their next game, too. Yet, she wasn’t even in this room, hanging out with the rest of the team, celebrating a win that she was a big part of.
“I just don’t get her,” Roy spoke, sitting down next to Michaels. “She hardly talks, and we room together. I mean, she’ll do the small talk stuff and, ‘Are you going down to breakfast now?’ or whatever, but other than that, her head is in a book or glued to her computer.”
“What’s she doing? Social?” Jameson asked.
“Studying,” Roy replied. “Always studying. When we’re not practicing, on the court, in team meetings, or doing something basketball-related, she’s studying with headphones on most of the time. Is her program really that hard? She’s not pre-med.”
“What’s she studying, anyway? I don’t think I’ve ever asked,” Lisa Ledger said.
“How do we know so little about her when she’s been here for four years? It’s not like we play football, and there are a hundred of us,” Shay said and sighed. “There are only fifteen of us.”
“Yeah, but I invited her,” Martin noted. “And she didn’t come. I can’t get to know her if she’s not interested in hanging out or sharing with us.”
“I think she’s in business, but, like, finance or something. I thought I heard her say once that she wants to do sports management when she graduates,” Shay said, trying to remember.
“We don’t have a program for that here,” Michaels offered.
“Which is probably why she’s in business school, dumbass,” Martin remarked.
Shay stood then and said, “I’m going back to my room. I’m tired. And everyone in here should be in bed within the next hour.”
