Amanda Ottaway - The Rebounders: A Division I Basketball Journey

Im sitting in the stands of our home court, sprawled in Section 5, dressed in street clothes. My senior season in college is almost over. Its an odd place to be, in the bleachers looking down at the place that for four years held more of my life than anywhere else on this campus. From here, finally, I can see the court the way everybody else sees it. I see how well its been loved. The rims and their faded orange paint beckon warmly. The nets have relaxed with the weight of thousands of made shots. The empty court is glossy, symmetrical, expectant. Im seduced under the familiar glow of arena lights.

From here I am overwhelmed with an urge to squeeze a plump, smooth basketball between my fingers and shoot, to hear the satisfying chnk-whrr of a solid bank shot or the whisper of an exquisitely aimed free throw, a shot so perfect I barely feel it come off my hand, that addictive precision I chase by shooting thousands and thousands of them. I crave from some primal place inside the heart leap that accompanies a steal and fast break. I need the crush of flesh that comes with setting screens and taking charges, the dazzling clarity of a clean pass, the steady knowledge that the ball will always bounce back up into my hand.

If I walked downstairs to the locker room now to pull on my sports bra and compression shorts, my jersey and shorts, my knee wraps, ankle tape, socks, ankle braces, high-tops, and headband, and stepped onto the court, if I prepared to play the way I did five or six days a week for fifty weeks a year, things would get complicated. I would stand on the baseline and feel small and panic about how far away the other end was. The baskets would tower forebodingly. The ball would sit hard and cold and slippery in my hands. My creaky, aching body would shift and stiffenmy shoulders tense, tendons swollen, lungs empty, stomach heavy, eyes unfocused. The happy flush in my cheeks, the delicious view I have at this moment, would be shattered. Id struggle to dig up shards of the old feelings. I would forget, almost entirely, the way it used to feel to play basketball, how simple it once was to be in love with it.

The easy joy the sport brought me in middle and high school came with me to college, where it was challenged, where it blistered and bled and peeled off, where it got lost for a while, where it grew tough and leathery, like the skin of my dads old basketball in the garage of the house where I grew up, like a callus over an old wound.