Lily was a classmate of my daughter Kate’s. They were teammates and rivals in soccer, basketball, and softball. Lily is an excellent athlete, but her edge was having what Kate didn’t: a quiet but ruthless father who pushed her relentlessly.
I cannot understand Lily and her father, despite having spent so much time on this or that court or field together for 14 or so years.
Lily’s father, Gordon, is a lawyer, like Nancy and me, but he lives in an entirely different world: he’s a patent lawyer. Like tax lawyers, they don’t tend to have any social skills, but they are burdened with another handicap; because they know some science and passed an extra bar exam, the patent bar, they think they’re smarter than the rest of us.
Gordon behaved like he believed it. He had been a football guy; someone knew that and passed the word around. He wasn’t very tall and had the stocky build of a linebacker or maybe a fullback, if that position exists anymore.
He inserted himself in the coaching milieu--dads either became coaches or they didn’t. Being a baseball guy, I assisted coaching Kate’s softball teams until the arthritis in my wrists prevented me from hitting, throwing, or even catching a ball.
He was prominent in coaching Lily’s softball and basketball teams. He abstained from soccer probably because like a lot of us he knew absolutely nothing about it. Anyway the local football club had Scots and north of Englanders, incomprehensible but expert, to run things. No outsiders need apply.
In the event, Lily quit soccer probably by the time she was nine. After that, the singular feature of Lily’s career was that she played on teams of girls older than she was. Gordon’s strategy was simple: if you play against older and more experienced kids, you get better faster. But Lily’s teams were always getting crushed; I thought it made for a dispiriting way to improve.
But you couldn’t tell by just looking at Lily. Her solid poker face never changes; she has a lovely smile that she saves only for team pictures. She has an athlete’s build, slender and tall (6’1”), and she is crowned by a bushy hairdo.
Kate said that when she and Lily passed in the hallway, Lily never acknowledged her, though they’d spent so much time playing three sports together. Lily ought to be smart—whatever Gordon was, he was smart, and Lily’s mother seemed bright, too, and, when one ran into her in the grocery, she was, if not voluble, smiling and kind and willing to exchange news.
Kate said that Lily never spoke in class. In their high school senior year, sometimes Lily would join Kate and her friends at lunch, but Kate’s friends, if they were athletes, were soccer teammates. Lily never joined the conversation. In fairness to her, Kate and her friends were aggressive conversationalists.
I had to wonder: was she lonely? So extremely introverted that real friendship was a chore? Or simply so unburdened by social skills that she didn’t feel it necessary to make an effort?
Once, during an all-star tournament, Kate came to bat. She had borrowed a helmet from a neighbor who had played on a local travel team, Dustbusters, the name and logo of which were printed on the helmet. Nancy and I were seated on the left field line. Several coaches of other Bainbridge teams congregated just feet behind us, including Gordon. When Kate came to bat wearing her helmet, Gordon asked the other coaches, “Did she play for Dustbusters this year?”
Later Nancy said, “We were sitting right in front of him. He could have asked us.”
His lack of social skills carried over to when he was coaching Lily in softball. Because she played on older travel teams, and because Gordon pushed her so, in little league she was nearly an unhittable pitcher for a couple of years. Gordon had a soft voice, but one was always aware that he was badgering the umpires, trying to intimidate the other coaches, generally behaving as though the game was everything.
One particularly assertive parent called him out on his extreme competitiveness. She reported that he said, “When I get out there, I just can’t help myself.”
A particularly funny habit he had when Lily was pitching and he wanted to get her attention was to stand outside the dugout and mutter, “Lily…Lily.” I wanted to call out, “Hey Gordon, everyone can hear you, it’s no secret.”
Here’s the point where I begin not to get it, because our parents never pushed us, and we never pushed Kate. Lily had some contraption that I don’t understand, a softball attached on a rope to the ceiling in her room. She was supposed to grab the ball and do something a hundred times a night. I don’t know what; Gordon obviously went on YouTube to educate himself on softball and rigged it up.
Some friend asked Lily if she liked the routines Gordon instituted. Lily apparently said, “I love it and hate it.”
Finally, Lily quit the high school softball team because she wasn’t getting to play shortstop and was only pitching. The team had a wonderful shortstop, someone larger and with a better arm who also could hit better than Lily. Yet I guess Gordon wasn’t satisfied. Maybe Lily wasn’t either, but it’s hard to imagine her with enough agency to make the decision to quit herself.
So she became a basketball star on the high school team, eventually setting the records for scoring and for three point shots. It’s easy to believe: from her time as a little girl on parks-and-rec teams, she never passed and shot indiscriminately.
We heard that her dream was to earn a scholarship on a Division I college team. She did, at a western college. I won’t name it because I don’t want to identify her any more than I already have, but it wasn’t prominent. Say, it was in the state of Wyoming but not at the University of but some lesser branch. Then after a year she transferred to another, similar school, but a little higher on the ladder. She may have stayed two years there. I wish I’d paid more attention to her statistics, but those were not good teams.
Then, a shock, she transferred to a prominent Division II team, again at a branch of a western state university. I’ve taken to watching her games, which the school streams.
It’s sad. Lily isn’t on the starting five, and she plays a little less than half of each game. She averages six points a game, and she makes about 33% of her shots, which is really subpar. Her teammates shoot in a more respectable range, between 43% and 66%. On offense, she receives passes and then immediately gives up the ball to someone else; her ball handling, like her shooting, is a second thought. It must be difficult for her, as she was the undisputed star at Bainbridge High. I feel bad for her.
You’re wondering now why I’m following Lily so obsessively. It’s because I don’t understand the arc of her life. Was it all Gordon’s doing? Lily is going to graduate from a respectable school, but nothing like what her peers are going to do. Several of Kate’s friends are at the Ivies, some at very good California state schools and the excellent UW, and Kate is at Michigan. Nothing about the three schools where Lily chose to play ball made sense in that context.
If you were smart, why would you attend a succession of mediocre colleges with mediocre basketball teams? Every young woman at that high school was worried about her future. Wasn’t Lily? Certainly she has no chance of playing in the women’s pro basketball league. Does playing college basketball mean that much to her? Why, if it’s a mediocre path that she is trodding in a mediocre way?
We know any number of young men and women who were sparkling stars of some sport or another in high school. When it came time for college, they shrugged, tossed off their garlands of honor, and put sports behind them to pursue a real career. It’s the natural order of things. Some of those who pursued a Division I career quit—soccer, crew, none in the revenue sports of basketball or football—because it was too demanding. But in high school, Lily was known as a gym rat. Is this course simply a matter of habit?
Was this course Lily’s choice? Always Gordon pushed her. Was it his idea for her to obtain a Division I scholarship? Did he want one and pushed her to be the athletic success he wasn’t?
But don’t teenagers rebel? Or was some obedience baked into Lily, that of the player to the coach, that she just followed his wishes? Did it matter that she was a first child and a daughter? In an unusual display of excitement, she blurted to the local paper that Boise State, a more prominent program than the ones at which she ended up, was interested in her. So maybe this was her idea?
As hard as I try to parse the psychology—and I’ve set forth about half of my puzzling here—this situation makes clear what my wonderful therapist Larry Galpert has taught me: we have no idea what people bring to a situation: their traumas, childhood and otherwise, their prejudices, their dreams, their needs, their worries. Here, as I stare into their dead eyes, their set faces, I can’t even tell whose ambition rules, or what tensions exist between them. People are a glorious mystery.
Iowa's star shooting guard Caitlin Clark: "I don't know why Lily can't shoot like me."
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