I did not want to play basketball anymore; could not stand another day of practice. And that’s exactly what I was about to tell Ceal Barry, the head women’s basketball coach at Colorado, the woman who had believed in me enough to offer a full scholarship. She was not the only coach to recruit me, but she was the only one whose program was consistently nationally ranked. When it came down to deciding where to go to school, I chose CU because I wanted to test myself at the highest level athletically. And here I was, crumbling beneath the weight—after only a few weeks of official basketball practice. I became desperate for everyday moments, which felt exotic. A trip to the grocery store made me feel like an outsider. Walking the aisles, watching people fill their carts, I felt as if I was in the zoo, on the outside looking in. I yearned to go home after classes and cook, to see movies, to do all the things I saw those around me doing, but which I never had time for. I became resentful.
That day I met Coach Barry, I was still wearing my practice gear: black mesh shorts and a reversible mesh jersey. I had grabbed my sweatshirt from the cubicle inside the weight room and pulled it over my head. Coach Barry was walking in front of me, leading the way out of the weight room, then snaking through the training room and into a corner office of some assistant trainer who wasn’t at work because it was Saturday. She flipped on the lights and lowered herself into the office’s chair.
My teammates and I had just lifted weights inside the Dal Ward Athletic Center, which overlooked the football stadium and offered, especially at dusk, an inspiring view of the Flatirons, the Boulder foothills leading to the crescendo of the Rocky Mountains. I stumbled my way through the lifting session, choking back tears, feeling broken, barely able to keep the dumbbells from crashing down and splitting my head open.
I slipped into the room with Coach Barry, but stood just inside the doorway, my back covering the light switch, as if I wasn’t fully committed to being there. At that moment, I didn’t feel capable of committing to much of anything. Coach didn’t seem to have any inkling of what I might say, but she was definitely aware of how pathetic I had been at practice lately. I closed the door behind us. She looked at me, expectantly.
“I just…” I glanced at her, then down at the tops of my sneakers. I told myself to look up again, to be mature. I met her gaze. “I think I’m going to have to quit,” I said. “That’s all. That’s what I needed to say.”
She leaned forward, closing the distance between us, and let out a long breath. My commitment to quitting was strong, but not ironclad. Although I was a sophomore academically, I was in my freshman season with the basketball team because I had spent the previous year on the injured list, after being granted a medical redshirt. I was diagnosed with a stress fracture in my right foot during the fall of 1999, before basketball practice even started, and I eventually had season-ending surgery that December, with the team doctor inserting a screw into the bone to keep it from fully breaking. As a result, I spent my first year at CU hanging out with my teammates and getting all of the benefits of being a college athlete without having to do much of the serious training. The list of perks was long: status of being a college athlete, free gear, behind-the-scenes access to football games, meals at training table, and, most importantly, the emotional support and companionship of a team. The coaching staff redshirted me, which meant I retained that year of eligibility.
As I stood in front of Coach Barry that October day, I was healthy again, at least physically. I could run and jump and shoot; I just had zero motivation to do so.
I had convinced myself I didn’t like basketball anymore. In fact, I took it one step further: I had never liked basketball. My father, Chris, was the one who loved the game; I was just mimicking him this entire time. And now that I was in the thick of it—hours and hours of mandatory practice, six days a week—I was being exposed as a fraud…
“I think quitting is a mistake,” Coach Barry said, lifting her head. She seemed about to say more, but paused, perhaps wanting to see how I would respond. I leaned into the wall and bounced my shoulders a few times, looking at the ceiling.
“My heart is just not in it,” I said, and I could feel my eyes burning, the twisting of the faucet behind my tear ducts. “I’m scared to death of practice. It’s the last place in the world I want to be. Nothing is going right.”
This last part was true; I was playing terribly. Coming out of high school, I had thought I was so damn good. I was one of the better scholastic players in New York State, but now I couldn’t even finish a drill without being told I had done it the wrong way and needed to do it over—and why was I so pathetic? (The last question was my own addition, the kind of destructive self-talk I gave in to as I walked to the end of the line during drills.)
Coach Barry stood and took a step toward me. She half sat, half leaned on the desk, clasping her hands on her lap. “This is what we’ll do,” she said. “You’ll give me two more weeks, and I’ll change how I coach you. I think that’s the problem here. Just give me two weeks.”
My lack of perspective was frightening in that moment. To me, two weeks felt like an outrageous sentence handed down by an angry judge. We practiced six days a week in the preseason, sometimes twice a day. Two weeks meant twelve to fourteen practices, totaling about forty hours of basketball. And do you know how many drills can be packed into that amount of time?
In my young mind, time was distorted. Even now, years later, I can still feel how panicked I felt about a period of time—just two weeks—that, now, I would consider manageable for just about anything. And I can distinctly remember how those words—fraud, weak, failure, quitter—rattled like rocks around my brain.
In 2013, The Guardian, a British newspaper, published an article under the headline “A stopwatch on the brain’s perception of time: Research by neuro-physiologists shows that our emotions affect our awareness of the passing of time.” In it, the paper dissects a study by French doctors who sought to understand how dopamine, which is usually lower in those dealing with depression, might affect our perception of time.
Above all, the brain’s perception of time involves processes linked to memory and attention: witness the impression that time is passing more quickly when we are busy, or doing something amusing or exciting. Time flies even when we are in love. In contrast, a watched pot never boils. Minutes drag by when we are bored…