Blake has been asking me pretty much the entire basketball season to write him a little piece about what it was like growing up as a coach’s daughter and what my path to Alabama fandom looked like. I finally got it to him earlier today on the last possible day of Alabama’s season. I know it’s pretty long, but I’d like to think it’s worth it :)
With tonight’s championship game looming large in everyone’s mind and the end of our season only hours away, I find it appropriate to share a story of love, family, and basketball from the woman behind the man that runs The Rammer Jammer, enjoy:
As Alabama basketball winds down their season tonight (hopefully with a win,) I can’t help but think about my path to becoming the fan that I am today. I love the University of Alabama with all my heart and defend it probably too strongly in dim bars in Tuscaloosa after a few rum and diets, but that’s okay. I have to admit, though, that my relationship with Alabama basketball has been a bit rocky at times, and it has nothing to do with a string of below average years.
You see, I grew up the daughter of a basketball coach. My dad was born an athlete. He lettered in four sports in high school. When it came time to go to college, he played basketball at The University of Pittsburgh at Johnstown. And after that, his whole life was basketball. I was raised in Starkville, Mississippi until I was 2 while he was a graduate assistant coach for the basketball team at Mississippi State. In all honesty, I shouldn’t have grown up a Bulldog or even a Wildcat (my entire family is from Kentucky,) but yet somehow I still ended up as a Bama fan.
My dad coached in Jackson for Mississippi College until I was ten years old. The schedule of a basketball coach is crazy. There are almost 3 times as many games in basketball season as there are in football. You play from December until late March if you’re lucky. There are constant practices. Away games. Long bus rides. And on top of all that, you have to recruit, usually during the same time that your season is going on because that’s when high school kids are playing ball as well. Needless to say, my dad did a lot of traveling when I was younger. I can remember laying on the living room floor in front of the yellow glow of our old sound system with giant knobs turned to whatever fuzzy station was broadcasting the MC Choctaw game that night so we could hear if our dad was coming home with a W or an L. During home games, my sister and I and the rest of the basketball coaches’ children ran wild behind the bleachers, building imaginary worlds under the cement bunkers they taped the games from. We played exactly one million games of sardines and basically felt like we owned the place. After the games we would weave through the legs of sweaty players and coaches wives to snag pizza or fried chicken in the hospitality room. This was life as a the daughter of a basketball coach - lots of nights where he was gone, but lots of fun when he wasn’t. Looking back, it was there that I learned what it was like to have a family not connected by blood. The ties that keep a coaching staff together often go way beyond those of mere coworkers or even friends.
When I was ten, I thought there was nothing could be worse in my entire life than the news that we would be moving to Tuscaloosa, Alabama so my dad could be an assistant coach for the Crimson Tide under David Hobbs. In the end, it has become the best thing that ever happened to my family a million times over. My dad moved to Tuscaloosa in the summer to get right to work with the coaching staff. My mother, sister and I followed soon after. We settled into this new place and new town and got to work building a new basketball family.
One of the first things they do when you come onto the staff at a Division I program is make sure you are fully outfitted in all of their swag. Wind jackets, pullovers, polos with crimson A’s. When my dad went to get fitted for all of this, they found that his neck measurements were larger than normal. A lot larger. He went to the doctor and eventually it came out that he had a stage four tumor in his skull. Stage four is the most advanced stage of cancer classification. If we’d never moved they probably wouldn’t have found the tumor in time and my dad wouldn’t have stood a chance. So his first few months coaching at Alabama ended up coinciding with his first rounds of treatment for cancer that they were fairly certain he couldn’t beat. My dad had to miss practices, miss games, miss the thing he loved because of his disease and how exhausted and horrible it made him feel. At the end of the 1997-1998 season, the coaching staff my dad was on was released. Mark Gottfried was hired as the new head coach and he brought in an entirely new staff, as most coaches do. The University made sure my family was taken care of, though. My dad was placed in the Tide Pride department to help launch their basketball donor program. So we stayed in Tuscaloosa, and eventually my dad beat the cancer.
Something about Gottfried coaching Bama just burned my 11 year old self up inside, though. Looking back, it certainly wasn’t fair, but it was how I wanted to see it. My dad loved coaching. And now he couldn’t coach anymore, and on top of that he was sick, and there was a new guy in charge. So I checked out of Bama basketball for a while. Eventually my dad relapsed and after fighting cancer for three long years, he passed away in December of 2000. I was in 8th grade. Our lives were firmly set up in Tuscaloosa at this point, so we stayed. And 4.5 years later when it came time for me to head off to college, I elected to attend the University that had taken such good care of my family. Time and time again throughout school and since my graduation, the University has taken care of me in every way possible and for that I will eternally be grateful.
I embraced Bama football fanaticism my freshman year of college, but my inner 11 year old wouldn’t let me cheer on our basketball team. I finally started going to a few games my senior year. When rumblings of Mark Gottfried’s firing started up, I was ashamed that I was secretly ever so slightly thrilled. It took Anthony Grant’s arrival and what he has done with our program to get me fully committed to Bama basketball again. Call me bandwagon if you want, but I think the complete 360 that brought me back to Alabama basketb/all is interesting. So tonight, over 13 years since I first heard the words Roll Tide in Coleman Coliseum, I will cheer my lungs out, bite my nails when it’s close, let out excited whoops and claps for every three, and stare in awe at some of Releford’s plays. Hopefully at the end of the game I will be able to celebrate an NIT crown. I know my dad will be watching on from above and enjoying seeing his old ball team living it up in Madison Square Garden.
And I know that no matter what, any old basketball buddy of my dad’s would help me or my family with any thing we ever asked of them. I’ve seen it happen over and over. It’s a family that never leaves you, and that’s what it means to be part of Alabama basketball.
If anyone would like to make a donation to the Kermit Koenig Memorial Scholarship you can do so here.
