Part 1:

“It Ain’t About The Record”

by John Branch

Destiny, a 17-year-old senior with a crossover dribble, a silky shooting touch and a habit of drug use, was the only one of the nine Carroll Academy players with any previous high school basketball experience. There were games this season when Destiny scored all the team’s points. There were times in every game when her passes, delivered at the velocity of someone playing dodge ball, bounced off teammates’ hands, leaving Destiny in a quiet fit of grimaces and upturned palms.

On the court the previous night, her street-tough persona boiled toward reckless anger. Defended tightly, often by two opponents, she was all elbows and sneers.

Coach Tonya Lutz did not like what she saw and benched Destiny in the second half. Randy Hatch, the school administrator, did not like what he saw, either.

He had a hunch. And he had a tip. He ordered a drug test for Destiny the next morning.

That was why she was crying in Room 5.

“I’m not going to be able to pass my drug screen,” she said when Lutz, Hatch and the school’s security director, Patrick Steele, came into the room. And before she was escorted to the restroom to urinate into a cup, she pressed her face into Lutz’s shoulder and sobbed.

Learning to Be Survivors

Carroll Academy is in Huntingdon, about 100 miles east of Memphis and 100 miles west of Nashville in West Tennessee. It is a strictly run day school with about 80 students operated by the Carroll County Juvenile Court, filled with teenagers trying to work their way back to their home schools with the velvet-hammered guidance of parole officers and people like Lutz, Hatch and Steele.

Among the nine girls on the Carroll Academy basketball team, only one lives with both her mother and her father. A seventh grader, she lived with her parents and two younger siblings at a grandmother’s house, having been evicted from one trailer and waiting to move into another.

A few of the players moved more than once during the season. A couple have lived for weeks or months in abandoned houses without water, electricity or heat. Few of the parents have steady jobs, and at least one is in jail.

One girl spent time in rehabilitation for alcoholism. At least one regularly smoked marijuana with her mother at one house and her father at another. Two worried aloud about their mothers’ regular use of homemade methamphetamine, in a county where the judge signs two or three search warrants each week to break up meth labs. Most of the girls are on medication themselves, for attention-deficit disorder, bipolar disorder or depression. Some say their parents sometimes take the pills instead.

Few had played team sports. Fewer still had played on a basketball team. Most did not know one another, their lives scattered across small, depressed towns and rolling hills in West Tennessee.

The reasons for being ordered to Carroll Academy varied. Three of the girls on the team were kicked out of their home schools for a year, part of a zero-tolerance policy, after taking their parents’ prescription pills to school. A few were habitual truants. A few had habits of rage —fighting at school or uncorking violent tempers at home.

For nine girls, ages 13 to 17, basketball is a way to keep their after-school time occupied, to provide them supervision, to give their worlds a bit of structure and to teach them about teamwork and trusting others.

“I want to teach them to be survivors,” said Judge Larry Logan of Carroll County Juvenile Court, who helped start the school in 1994 and sends many of the students there as part of their sentence. “If you get knocked down, get back up. It’s a good habit to have.”

For girls unaccustomed to positive reinforcement, it is reasonable to wonder about the value of losing, game after game after game, by scores this season like 80-8 and 65-7.

“If I looked out and I could see in their eyes that they’re depressed about losing, and hated to come out here, it wouldn’t be worth it,” said Hatch, a 54-year-old lifelong resident of Huntingdon who long served as Carroll Academy’s boys and girls basketball coach, as he watched a game from the stands. “But they put it behind them quicker than anybody.”

He looked out at the girls, running up and down the court, gamely chasing a team they would never beat.

“But they got experience at it,” Hatch said.

House Arrest, and a 6-Player Team

Destiny admitted that she had smoked marijuana a couple of nights earlier. A drug bust with several older friends in a Walmart parking lot resulted in Destiny’s being sent to juvenile court last year. While she was on probation, she said, threatening text messages to another girl landed her at Carroll Academy.

Destiny bounces between homes. Her father is the youngest of 16 children in a family that has supplied top athletes to nearby Clarksburg High School for generations. He lives with his parents, works odd jobs and has never seen Destiny play, she said.

Destiny’s mother works as a nurse. She recently gave birth to her fourth child from three men she had married, at least one of whom beat Destiny, Destiny’s parole officer said.

Yet Destiny does not hold a grudge. Whenever she is told that her mother is outside, waiting to give her a ride home, Destiny’s face brightens like a full moon.

Lyda Allen, Destiny’s maternal grandmother, was often the only relative of any of the nine girls cheering them from the mostly empty bleachers.

“If this place wasn’t here, God knows where she would be,” Allen said of Destiny. “I don’t know about the others, but the parents are probably the reason why most of these kids are here. But I’m not going to give up on Destiny.”

Hatch was not, either. He held Destiny’s fate. He could send her to months of drug rehabilitation at a facility far away, which would then release her back to Carroll Academy. But Destiny was a senior. When she turned 18 in June, she could walk away from school without her diploma. Further trouble after that would probably land her in jail.

Hatch quizzed her. A county parole officer tabbed to run Carroll Academy when it opened 18 years ago, he used his arsenal of knowledge, instinct and bluffs. He spoke with a serious tone and a gentle expression.

You were out with older kids, weren’t you? Yes, she said. You broke curfew, didn’t you? Yes, she admitted.

“I knew that, too,” Hatch said.

He dismissed Destiny to class, leaving her to worry what her future held.

When the team gathered that night for another game, Lutz felt a strange vibe. She asked the girls to raise their hands if they would fail a drug test. Two did: Summer, a 17-year-old senior with a baby, and Alleyah, a tiny 14-year-old eighth grader.

They were tested. The others were not.

“There ain’t no reason to lie,” said Summer, who cried because she feared being separated from her 8-month-old son, DaMarion. “They’re going to find out about it anyway.”

Summer failed. Alleyah passed. (The theory was that she either smoked synthetic marijuana, sold over the counter despite concerns about its health dangers, or unsuspectingly smoked some other herb.)

Hatch put them on house arrest for the weekend, meaning they — and their parents — would be in violation of their court orders if the teenagers wandered away. Lutz suspended all three girls for that night’s game against Gleason High.

But they would not be kicked out of Carroll Academy.

The suspensions left Lutz with six players. Constance, a soft-spoken, 5-foot-2 eighth grader with a penchant for throwing things in anger — most recently her mother’s collection of porcelain figurines, leaving craters in the walls — managed a first-quarter free throw.

Leslee, a fast-talking ninth grader who usually started, fouled out in the third quarter. Two other girls were hurt badly enough in collisions to stop the game, but they managed to stay on the floor to the end.

Carroll Academy lost, 44-1.

“It ain’t about the record,” Hatch said. “You have nine girls. My job, and Tonya’s job, and everyone’s job, is to go 9-0 with them. If you go 8-1, you’ve had a losing season.”