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Date: Fri, 23 Feb 2001 16:33:37 -0600 ()
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Subject: “Coaching is great, but my dream is to play.”

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“Coaching is great, but my dream is to play.”

By LEIGH ANN TIPTON, Courier & Press staff writer<br>(812) 464-7505 or <a href='mailto:[log in to unmask]>[log in to unmask]</a>
http://www.courierpress.com/cgi-bin/view.cgi?200102/18/+coach021801_features.html+

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Jennifer Carter takes careful aim at the regulation 10-foot basketball goal in Mater Dei High School’s gym. Standing on her knees, she lunges forward, hoisting a basketball through the net.

    The ball is no more than 3 feet off the ground when it leaves her hands, and because Jennifer puts just the right spin on the ball, it bounces back to her on the rebound.

    For Jennifer, such tricks are a way of life. Now 15, she has battled the effects of cerebral palsy since birth. It has bent and turned her legs and forced her to walk with the aid of two aluminum, four-legged canes.

    But it hasn’t deterred her from a passion for basketball and the dream that she will one day walk onto a court and play without canes.

    “For her, everything is focused on how she’s going to get around with her devices,” said Jennifer’s mother, Jackie Carter. “She can’t carry her book bag; she can’t run up and down the stairs 10 times picking out her clothes. Everything has to be organized and planned out.”

    The Mater Dei freshman was diagnosed with cerebral palsy at the age of 13 months. The disease of impaired muscular power and coordination stems from brain damage usually at or before birth. Doctors told Jackie Carter and her husband, William, their daughter would probably never walk.

    “She was so curled up,” said Jackie Carter. From the start, the Carters weren’t offered much hope. On the first day of therapy, Jackie Carter was told “to expect nothing. That way, you always get something.”

    It was difficult advice to bear, but the couple’s perseverance to stretch and straighten their daughter’s legs paid off when she began to walk. She even could play basketball in the third and fourth grades with her elementary school coach there to pick her up every time she fell.

    Jennifer walked without aids until her bones began to grow faster than her muscles, when she was in the fifth grade. She began using a walker, “which made her go down so fast,” her mother said.

    Jackie Carter paused, debating whether her daughter would want people to read about her lowest point. She took a deep breath.

    “Once, she was so far down, she was in a wheelchair,” Carter said.

    Carter prodded her daughter to fight the disease. “I said, ‘If you sit in that, you’re never going to get back up.’

    “I’ve had people ask me, ‘When are you going to let it go?’ But you don’t. She may quit, but we can’t ever quit.”

    Constant therapy

    The struggle to walk on her own requires a constant assault. Every night as Jennifer sleeps, a machine jolts her muscles with tiny amounts of electricity to stimulate and strengthen them.

    She has been through a surgery and serial casting — every two weeks doctors would stretch each leg as far as it would go, then cast it to hold it in place. It was painful, and didn’t work in the long term, Jennifer said.

    She has a list of exercises to do in between her weekly therapist visits, and her mother says diligence is the key to Jennifer’s freedom from canes. Although it’s something Jennifer has heard her whole life, she hasn’t always followed the regimen, which includes riding a stationary bicycle and crunches.

    Mater Dei with its many steps creates its own therapy. When she first started at the school, Jennifer was completely worn down by the time she reached the top of a flight of stairs. “She’s always tried to figure out a way around things ... but there is no way around the steps,” Jackie Carter said.

    Basketball gives Jennifer the motivation to exercise that her parents have been trying to impose on her. She doesn’t want to be a spectator anymore.

    “For the first time, I’m (exercising) because I want to do it, not because I’m being made to. I love what I’m doing it for. Now that I’m doing it on my own, I’m happier,” Jennifer said.

    The times she concentrates on exercises she grows stronger. By the start of this school year, Jackie Carter said, her daughter could walk approximately 10 to 15 feet without her canes.

    With her renewed emphasis on playing basketball, Jennifer has made more improvements in the past two weeks than she had in the previous three years.

    Carter is eager to see her daughter walk into school without canes. Early this year it almost happened. Jennifer and her therapist thought she was strong enough, but as they pulled up in front of Mater Dei, Jennifer decided no, not this month. She’s set a new goal of walking without canes by July.

    Jennifer’s aspirations go beyond walking without canes.

    “By basketball season (next year) I want to have enough endurance to get some playing time in a game. I don’t care if I play a minute; I just want to wear a uniform.”

    Her back-up plan is coaching.

    Modeling herself after Tennessee’s Hall of Fame women’s coach, Pat Summitt, Jennifer  tested coaching on the Mater Dei women’s freshman team. Her friends, many of whom are on the squad, persuaded her to ask the coaching staff about being a team manager.

    One day Jennifer showed up for practice, and she’s been a mainstay in Mater Dei’s program ever since, said coach Missy Groben. Jennifer has an uncanny eye for the details of the game. She notices foot position and wrist motion and dreams up offensive strategies.

    “Right before I lay down and go to sleep I’ll think about plays, and I’ll jump up and say, ‘I’ve got to write that one down!’” she said.

    “She looks at all the scouting reports we go through,” said Groben. “Sometimes we don’t take her advice and we look back and say, ‘Oh, she was right.’”

    The movements of the game replay constantly in Jennifer’s mind.

    “They say when one thing goes, another becomes sharper,” said her father, William Carter. “I think that’s what happened with Jennifer.”

    She recited the national anthem in its entirety at the age of 2, and can watch a movie once and recite its dialogue afterward. Since about age 5, sports, basketball in particular, have been the focal point of Jennifer’s brainpower.

    “My dad would make me watch basketball games and try to figure out what was going on,” said Jennifer. “He taught me to love it, and I just ended up knowing it. Things just flat out come to me. It’s wild.”

    Because of her disability, “she was sitting, so she was focused,” Jackie Carter said.

    Advice and respect

    At basketball practice, Jennifer interacts with the players, shouting encouragement and making suggestions to tweak their shots. She makes sarcastic jabs at coaches and players, all in fun, and they make them back at her. Groben said Jennifer’s humor is balanced with an understanding of when to be serious.

    Before a recent practice, Jennifer had studied offensive diagrams from women’s college teams that she had collected off the Internet.

    “I think we could do this one,” she says to Ashley Alles, a member of the freshman squad. “We could probably do Tennessee’s, too. But it is hard.”

    Alles, tossing a basketball from one hand to the other, jokes about the notion, then runs out onto the court to shoot free throws.

    Jennifer watches the mechanics of her shot.

    “When they’re having problems shooting, I try to help them,” Jennifer says. “I can see the way they hold the ball, where they put their hands, which way it goes.”

    One player looks over to Jennifer after she misses the first of two free throws. “Bend your wrist more,” Jennifer tells her. The second shot is short of the rim, but otherwise looks to be perfectly aimed at the goal.

    “A little harder and a little more to the left,” Jennifer says.

    “We treat her as if she was an assistant coach,” said Groben. “We respect what she sees and what she says. The girls also respect her and listen to her.”

    In practice, Jennifer works from her knees in the post. One day she played defense against freshman Jenna Schmitt. Jennifer said Schmitt pushed her “all over the place.”

    “I like working with Jen,” Jennifer said. “She’s very attentive when I talk to her about what she’s doing wrong. Every time I give her some advice, she tries it and if it doesn’t work she says, ‘What am I doing wrong with your advice?’”

    Jennifer feels more comfortable working with the freshman team because she knows the girls.

    “I’m always up and yelling, but I try to shut my mouth at varsity games,” she said. “I’ll sit there and think, ‘Man, that sure did stink,’ or ‘They did that really well,’ but I’ll never say it out loud.

    “First of all, the coaches would probably kill me, and second, if they didn’t the players would,” she added with a laugh.

    Jennifer is a statistician for both the junior varsity and varsity games, keeping shot charts. During freshman games she’s the girls’ offensive coordinator, helping decide which plays the squad should run. She shouts out directions and congratulations and tries to make them smile.

    “Coaching is great,” she said, “But my dream is to play.”

    Competitive fire

    Jennifer’s story reaches deeper than what is obvious on the court. What people see — or in some cases refuse to see — is her disability.

    Behind the canes is a complex but buoyant young woman intent on hiding her pain.

    “Sometimes I get upset, but I don’t show it because I don’t want to take people down by my being down,” she said. “I don’t want my friends to be down because I am.”

    Jennifer isn’t looking for sympathy or special treatment. She just wants people to look beyond the disability and see her passion and her competitive fire.

    “When she started going to Mater Dei, she said to me, ‘Mom, people actually look at me, and they want to know who I am,” said Jackie Carter. The mother’s voice tapered off into a hoarse whisper. She worries about how her daughter feels, about the emotions that may be bottled up inside.

    Carter knows it isn’t easy being a teen-ager, and she wonders how hard it is to be a teen-ager with cerebral palsy.

    At the same time, she is overjoyed by the idea her daughter may be finding solace in the companionship and kindness of others. Jennifer’s personality is often a testament to that. She is bubbling, outgoing, even zany.

    “If you’ve seen ‘Miss Congeniality,’ I’m her,” Jennifer said. “I’m just like Sandra Bullock because I’m sarcastic about everything.”

    Some days, Jennifer is frustrated about her chances of playing basketball again; on others, she is zealous about overcoming the odds.

    Happy to be here

    If Jennifer’s mind has grown stronger and more attuned to the intricacies of basketball, then  her heart has grown more aware of the intricacies of life. She is the constant observer and feels as deeply as she thinks.

    “One thing that’s difficult emotionally is when I go out in public, people just look at me like if I breathe on them, they’re going to get my problem,” she said, fidgeting with a basketball in her hands. “It makes me feel inferior when people stare at me and tell their little kids not to look at me.

    “People think I have a really bad problem, and I’m getting tired of them thinking they’re going to get it from me just because they’re near me.”

    Jennifer combats that by being bold, introducing herself to the children and telling them about cerebral palsy.

    Although it may seem a delicate subject to passers-by, to Jennifer, dealing with cerebral palsy is life. “When a kid is staring at me, I say hi, so they know there's nothing wrong with me,” she said. “And I tell them what I have. You have to tell them, or they'll freak out.”

    In spite of the stares, Jennifer said, she’s happy with life and doesn’t see cerebral palsy as a burden anymore. “If I didn’t have it, I might not be here right now. My life would be different.”

    To Jennifer, “here” is at the Mater Dei freshman practice, her pony tail hanging out the back of a white baseball cap, “Tennessee” scrolled across the front in bright orange letters. She jerks forward, trying to get a better look at what’s happening on the court.

    “Dude, I’d have them trapped right now,” she says to herself.

    “Everybody’s got their unique abilities, but coaching is one of mine,” she says. “It makes me confident to know I know the game so well that I can help others. I can get them so pepped they want to go out and, quote, ‘kill the other team.’”

    Even though she is coaching, there is a hole in her heart that can only be filled by a walk down the court. Groben thinks Jennifer can do it if she gives her dream her all.

    “She’s headstrong and has a very uplifting attitude,” says Groben. “She doesn’t let anything stop her.”
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