By Bo Allegrucci
Salina Journal
If you happened upon a Brown Mackie women's basketball practice, or arrived early on game night for pregame warm-ups, your first thought would be more of a reflex, and it would be a question: Where's the rest of the team?
There are only six players on the court, and one of them has her right knee bundled up so stiff she couldn't play if her right eye depended on it. Anyone in their right mind knows you can't play college basketball with just five players. Right?
Then you open up the program and discover there is no rest of the team, and suddenly you realize there is no rest for this team. They are but six college freshmen from the demographic edges of the earth, and they have found themselves lost somewhere between juco basketball and a playground pickup game.
It's a Brewster farmgirl (Miranda Starns), a Lincoln red-head (Sierra Machnicki), two Oklahoma City high school teammates (LaChelle Hyatt and Whitney Holm), the daughter of an Ogala Lakota (Robbin Webber), and a San Antonio Army girl who transferred from Cloud County (Monica Burgess).
That's it ... your 2007-08 Brown Mackie Lady Lions ... the gang's all here. They're all that's left to right a long-sinking BMC ship in completely uncharted waters, and their captain is a 23-year old rookie head coach who never played college ball.
Their friends and family all laughed at them in the beginning, and the only thing his myriad coaching mentors could say was "Good luck, kid".
"This is the way it is and there's no point in complaining, so we don't make excuses," said coach Keith Ferguson, the son of veteran Smoky Valley High School coach Bill Ferguson. "We have some real talent on this team and we expect to go out and compete every night regardless of the circumstances. No one else is going to outwork us -- these girls work their butts off everyday because they have to, and they do all the little things to get it done in practice and in games."
Each and every moment of their unusual first season together has become a tedious test of discipline, endurance and luck -- on and off the court. If one player lets her grades fall too far, or slips outside on the ice just wrong, or doesn't wash her hands for supper and falls victim to the flu, there may be no rest of the season.
They spend most of their practices conditioning, drilling and game-planning instead of banging in the paint or full-court pressing on the perimeter. Scrimmaging 5-on-5 isn't even an option, and heaven forbid an ankle rolls or a hamstring pulls or an elbow catches a face on the eve of a game.
"At least we never have to worry about playing time, or who's gonna' start tonight," said Webber, who grew up on the Pineridge Indian Reservation in South D akota and is the only BMC player or coach who has any experience with this sort of thing. Her summer teams occasionally played tournaments with six or seven players growing up, and the 5-foot-5 combo-guard attacks all game long at 150 mph as if Brown Mackie is 12-deep.
"We're getting more experience and learning more about the game -- and ourselves -- than any freshman at any other school right now. We don't have the margin for error or the room for freshman mistakes like other teams, so we have to be more consistent with everything we do. It forces us to get better every day."
"Better" by Brown Mackie women's standards would've been winning one whole game without any help. At a junior college where the men's team has won two national titles inside of a decade, the women had just one victory the previous two seasons, and that by forfeit. This new pride of Lions, however, is currently 11-12, which is groundbreaking for BMC and almost unthinkable for any team anywhere outnumbered 2-to-1 on paper.
They've beaten perennial powers Highland and Johnson County for the first time in school history, and that's largely because school history was insignificant to this dirty half-dozen and their coach.
"We came here because we wanted to build something from scratch and make our own mark on a program," Hyatt said, speaking on behalf of all the Lions. "We didn't know there were only going to be six of us at the time though, and when we first found out, we were all like 'there's no way'. We finished our first game with four players and lost bad, but we got used to each other and we aired everything out on the ride home that night. From there we were like 'OK, we can do this with six'."
As for Ferguson, he always knew he wanted to be a head coach, and he saw an opportunity to launch a career where everyone else saw a shipwrecked mess. He had prior experience with program-resuscitation as a grad-assistant for a 2006 Kansas Wesleyan team that went .500 after a 17-91 stretch, but this was different.
"I didn't ask too many questions about the past, and I knew there was potential here because of what the men's team has accomplished," Ferguson said. "You can get around a lack of tradition, but I got the job last May, and we were hurt by the fact we didn't have a full year to recruit. Then we had three or four girls leave during the first month of school for various reasons, and now here we are."
Ferguson replaced some of his deserters with Machnicki and Starns, whom he found mixed amongst the Brown Mackie student body in August, but the Lions were unable to add any more depth for the second semester despite persistent attempts.
"I was really motivated, and I think we all were," Starns said. "It was a chance for me to play college basketball that I would've never had otherwise, and it's a chance for all of us to prove something to everyone."
But then in December, Burgess tore the meniscus in the same right knee she had already rehabbed from a blown ACL at Cloud County, and the BMC women went from having one sub to having none.
No chance, right? Yeah, try 'no problem'. At home against Lamar Community College Jan. 5, Machnicki fouled out early in the second half and Hyatt likewise in the final minutes, reducing Brown Mackie to a hockey team on the wrong end of a power-play. Webber finished with 27 points, and the superstar-ish Holm nearly had a triple-double as BMC won by 20.
How's that for power? They spent the final 15 minutes in a 2-2 zone defense and finished the game in the nothing-but-a-triangle offense. Ferguson exhausted all his timeouts to keep from exhausting his players, and they cleared out on free throws to set up the defense instead of tiring themselves with rebounding or transition D.
"Teams were taking us lightly anyway just because we're Brown Mackie and we've never won here, and then they see us with six players and they're already looking ahead to the next game because they know they got us beat," Holm said. "We like that. We like when they underestimate us because then we can show them what the new Brown Mackie is going to be like."
This group is in it for each other now, and one wouldn't dare let the other five down. Burgess has had a hard time forgiving herself for breaking the only team rule: don't get hurt and don't get sick. She still attends every practice and rehabs on the side while the others take the floor.
"Now we have a starting six," Burgess said, "And any girl who comes in here next year's going to have to show a lot of heart and prove she belongs with this team."
Not all of this year's injuries have been anatomical either. On the afternoon of Jan. 11, Machnicki was heading out for that night's home game with North Platte Community College when she learned her grandfather had just passed away.
She could barely gather her thoughts or sort out the emotions on the spot, but with Burgess on the shelf, she knew she had to play. This is the same grandpa (and grandma) she had been living with in Bennington since she came to Brown Mackie in August, but even grandma understood.
"It was hard to try to make that decision and focus on playing the game, but my grandma told me to play because it's what my grandpa would've wanted," Machnicki said. "She knew the situation with our team and I think she felt it was the right thing to do for everyone."
The funeral was the following Wednesday, and the Lions had another home date with Hesston that night. Machnicki rushed straight from the service to the gym and arrived just in time, and most of her family came to watch the second half. Even though the Lions lost that game to a Hesston team subbing in five fresh players every five minutes, the evening had a healing touch.
Hyatt also lost a grandfather recently, and she too dashed home to her family in OKC for the funeral, then right back to her team in Salina for a game. That's just the way it is for this group this season. They don't have time to feel sorry for themselves or each other, because they've long since been obligated to themselves and each other.
Basketball and life have intertwined in a way no one could've imagined for this new era of Brown Mackie women. Like the female Lions who do most of the hunting on the African safari, these girls have work to do and games to win. They have a corner to turn, and they make moves, not excuses.
You have to see it to believe it, and when you see the people who are these players and the players who are this team, you can't help but ponder the potential of a program whose heart and soul started with a skeleton crew of six.