BY GREG SELBER
Harlingen Legend
MCALLEN – Late in the game Wednesday night, zero suspense about the outcome. Down 25 against an impossibly talented foe, and still the drumbeat pulsing from the Harlingen bench.
“Keep working hard! Keep fighting, let’s GO!”
The finals of the Jostens Classic, with Navasota whipping the Lady Cards with superior quickness, strength, and size, nothing but the deadly best from a team that had advanced all the way to the Class 3A state Final Four last year. But still, the chanting came, now louder than ever.
“Hey, come on, here we go, work hard! Hard! Keep working…Ladies…let’s GO!” Clap, stomp, grimace.
Two minutes remained in the team’s one-sided loss to the East Texas powerhouse, but Nora Zamarripa didn’t care. She was teaching and coaching, planning for the near future, basketball-wise, and the distant one, life-wise.
As if on cue, gutty junior Ashley Adams, dead tired and about to drop, found another burst, diving onto the floor after a loose ball.
And right after that, ferocious offensive rebounds among the trees from subs Danyella Rodriguez and Lindsay Mendoza. The Navasota girls blinked, uncomprehending. What are they doing? We’re kicking their butts!
Right, but not. Not in the grand scheme of things, because the Lady Cards were two steps ahead of them. Not on the court, where it was total domination by an amazingly athletic team that is now 22-1 and headed to who knows where and how high. Maybe state again. But for down the road, when Harlingen is going to be battling for a District 31-5A crown, the girls will be glad they went through this.
When they could have quit, they instead summoned one last shred of energy. After an exhausting Jostens bracket through which they’d won four games in two days to reach the final, and after an emotionally draining last-second victory over Edinburg in the semis that very day, there seemed to be nothing left. Navasota had run roughshod over Harlingen, no two ways around it, blowing by the Lady Cards with frightening speed, ripping loose balls away with formidable power, and converting fast-break layups in bunches with breathtaking raw ability. The Lady Cards had looked like they were running in molasses with leg weights on; after leading 2-0 to start, they were never really in it.
So they should have just laid down and died in the waning moments. But with a Coach Z team, chances are nil for that. Nil.
“Keep it up, keep working! Get after it!”
The mantra continued until the final buzzer, until a truly tired team wearily trooped its way through the post-game din back to the bench. Zamarripa gathered up her things and accepted the trophy for second place. She was not happy outwardly, but deep in the recesses of that cat-quick brain and soul, it was celebration time.
Because Coach Z knew what her kids did not, not yet anyway. She intuited that their impressive display of heart with two minutes left, the pell-mell floorburns and the second- and third-efforts against an unbeatable foe, these were and are the keys to tomorrow’s kingdom. She’s been doing this long enough to see a teaching moment and jump on it with both feet. So 58-33 was the final, and no doubt of it. The Los Fresnos girls, having stayed behind after losing the third-place game, had packed it in at halftime, leaving the gym to go home with Harlingen down 17.
They should have stayed, because between the lines and below the surface, the underdogs were making a statement about what they’re all about, and about what they intend to accomplish before the season is done. Some junior college teams would have had trouble versus Navasota Wednesday, it was that strong.
But the Harlingen girls proved that they have been listening to the always intense and sometimes antagonistic (in the right way) coach, whose pedigree of winning basketball stretches back to when the world was young. Don’t worry, she’ll laugh at that historical aside.
“Learn, adjust, adapt, that’s what a team has to do, sometimes under difficult circumstances,” said the coach afterward. “Whatever the score, doesn’t matter, you just have to show that you will fight to the end. Giving up is not an option…well, it is, but just not one I will allow my teams to take.”
She noted that in the midst of the blowout, she never flinched. As usual.
“You have to take that life lesson, sometimes life kicks you around and there’s nothing you can do about it except keep working. Keep your focus and never give up. You’ll feel a lot better about yourself after you do it, even though at the time you may feel like giving in. But you just can’t do it, you cannot let yourself do it. That’s what it’s all about.”
It’s kind of like Germaine Greer and the feminist struggle for gender equity during the 1960s. The civil rights warriors would shake their heads and say, once again, to the males, “You just don’t get it,” meaning that the machismos out there had failed to understand the reality of their discrimination against women, subtle or otherwise.
With the Lady Cards, you either buy into the system or you don’t. The system is easy. Work your butt off, put the team first, and teach yourself to accept no excuses.
When the girls are finally able to police themselves, adjust their effort level and get back to no-holds-barred hustle…when they don’t need Coach Z to get into their face and do the adjusting for them, they will have arrived. They will have completed the ultimate task, one that goes beyond the wins and the losses and even past the cheers from the gallery. They will have squeezed the last drop out of the student-athlete experience, utilized the teaching and learning that the best programs offer up ahead of any personal glory or newspaper clippings. They will have become a Coach Z team. They’ll have gotten it.
Just like Ceci Becho, Jeanette Rodriguez and the gals did back in the early 1990s, that magical group of kids who showed they could take the constant pressure from their coach, the screaming and the killer workouts, the mind games and the psychological pounding from the original Old School mentor. Just like many of the Redbird units in Coach Z’s long and illustrious career. You either get it, or you don’t. And if and when you do, it stays with you a lifetime. Just the way Nora Williams learned it, back in The Day.
AN INTERESTING PROP
Coach Z laughed quietly, and reached into her briefcase.
“I was at an all-state meeting the other day and I kept this in here, don’t ask why and don’t laugh, everyone was laughing at me,” she snickered, producing a tremendous piece of old-time ephemera. A game program from her senior year in high school, showing the Lyford Bulldogs as one of the combatants in the state tournament in Austin.
The year was 1974, and way before Hidalgo was even a school, Nora Zamarripa - then known as Williams, eons before she would meet Doc Z and became Coach Z – was a hard-nosed, All-Valley guard for one of the greatest coaches ever, Mary Frances Watkins.
Little Lyford was 27-3 that year, making the state dance when Williams nailed a buzzer-beater against San Antonio Taft to send her mates beyond the regionals, to the rare air.
“We didn’t have three-pointers back then, but it was a three,” she smiled. “Believe me.” Earlier, Doc Z, the long-time Harlingen trainer whose real and unused name is actually, let’s see, um, oh yes…Raul Zamarripa, had shared some details of that fantastic run to the roses.
“She had missed a shot just like that the year before at regionals, and was determined to get a second chance,” he explained. “She never gave up working hard to try and get back to that point, and she did it. That’s what Nora is all about.”
Ah so, it comes clear now. Been there, done that, with a twist. A coach can cajole her players, work them into the ground, and demand excellence. But if they do not buy into her system, into her very essence, it won’t work. And today’s kids are smarter than the average bear, so they know instantly when someone is full of it. If the leader has walked the walk, it shows. Or not.
Ashley Adams is much too frail to be a basketball player, it seems. She is cute and tiny, and, oh, mean as a snake, by the way. She had just spent a torturous night trying to keep up with the greyhounds from Navasota, scoring 11 points but getting knocked around like a rag doll for her effort.
“We were a little intimidated at the beginning, I admit,” she began. “We knew it would be hard work, they’re so athletic, fast, strong, everything. The hardest part was mental, playing from way behind like that. But we decided that we’d pulled through against Hidalgo and Edinburg, so we had to keep on trying.”
Earlier in the 22-team Jostens, the Lady Cards had indeed pulled the upset over the Lady Pirates, the closest thing to Navasota the Valley has to offer. That thrilling Tuesday win sent shockwaves through the area, and it got even better Wednesday when Harlingen rallied from 16 down to nip the Lady Bobcats of EHS by a point on sophomore Bianka Martinez’ three-pointer at the tape. Adams had led the way with 19 points in that crazy comeback, tossing in threes from all angles and hitting the deck every other play to try for the steal. A Coach Z original, circa 2009.
“We knew we could do it against Edinburg even though we didn’t play well in the first half,” said the guard whose twin sister, Megan, is also a key contributor for a coming quintet that starts zero seniors. None. “We wanted to prove to everyone that we had the heart to come back and then tonight, we were just trying to show that we weren’t going to quit.”
Coach Z’s blaring voice bouncing around the gym was hard to ignore. Right?
“We are used to coach, we’re used to that,” Adams grinned. “She just knows what we can do and she wants us to do it, every second we are out there. She’s a good coach and we listen to her. We play with heart and we take what she says and we act on it.”
If anyone exemplifies what Coach Z is doing and has been doing for 25 years, it’s the diminutive Adams, who may not be big or particularly fast, but brings her lunch pail to the gym every day. Faced with an imposing challenge in the Lady Rattlers, she just went to work. They all did. Though it took awhile.
“Actually, we didn’t do much early, and they just ran right past us,” said the coach, still holding the trophy and the ancient program. “We woke up too late, but we woke up, and that’s what counts. It took us some time to find it, and just start playing. Against a team like that, we were intimidated, it was obvious. But when we just settled down, we were able to accomplish what there was to do. And that was work.”
TIDINGS FOR THE FUTURE
Not much left on a Wednesday night, Navasota corralling the title hardware and whooping it up, a well-earned party. It was a fantastic performance by a great basketball team. When Lady Rattler coach Tommy Gates had complained about what he considered a phantom traveling call in the first half, he’d earned points for bluntness if not tact.
“That’s just a quick first step, ref, you ain’t seen a lot of them around here, I bet,” he deadpanned, as the official glanced at him out of the corner of an eye.
And there is no maybe, Navasota was the better team and took the fight to the Lady Cardinals from the outset. But after a few jitters and the understandable wide eyes a team gets when it’s in against a marauding opponent, the Redbirds began to heed the plaintive and hammering demands from their leader.
“Let’s go, ladies! Work hard, keep fighting…Go!!”
The words may seem to blend into one endless exhortation sometimes, and fatigue tends to rob the athlete of their energy, skill, and most vitally, concentration when the sweat glands can produce no more. But if they’ve done the long-term heavy lifting, the backbreaking labor both mental and physical, they may not be able to overcome the night’s obstacle, as far as the scoreboard will relate, but they will leave the court knowing that the best of them still lies out there for all to see. They will know that they’ve met the Coach Z Test, and that knowledge of how to master oneself and one’s weariness will stay with them infinitely longer than any yellowed news clipping trumpeting wins and losses, points and rebounds.
It ain’t a game for Nora Williams-cum-Zamarripa. It’s a way of life, the singular, unadulterated path to take, and she’s been guiding the willing down that road for more years than we can count. Admittedly there are some folks who cannot cotton to her brand of old-fashioned elbow grease, a product that comes with its share of yelling and vitriol. In the past, some hypersensitive locals have tried and failed to run her out of town for being, well, too hard on the girls.
Coach Z is still there, doing her thing, and the naysayers are long gone. They should have known better. As the feminists intoned time and time again in the face of prejudice and male inability to come up to scratch: “You just don’t get it.”
 |
 |
