The apartment on the Northwest Side is as silent as the snow falling outside. No laughter of children here. Sometimes the quiet simply makes her heart ache.
Phone calls to her home in Detroit remind Delores Jones of the reason she left, the reason she gets up before sunrise for 6 a.m. practices with the Northeastern Illinois basketball team. The reason she studies late at night until her eyes no longer can focus on the text.
The reason is her 6-year-old son, Darrian, who is living with Jones’ mother in Michigan.
“Leaving was so hard. I felt like this was my responsibility and I just left my responsibility with my mom,” Jones said. “But she made me see I’m still being responsible by coming here and getting an education. My mom dropped out of high school because she was pregnant with my brother.
“She is on welfare and she was like, `I refuse to let you just give up now. You are not going to make it without an education. If you’re going to go to school, then I’m behind you 100 percent. But you have to leave Detroit.’ “
There are many stories about unwed teenage mothers with little hope of earning a college education, let alone playing sports.
But women’s college basketball has several of those moms who somehow carry baby bottles, school books and high-tops all in the same gym bag, from a national player-of-the-year candidate at Alabama, to starting players in the Big Ten, to Jones and teammate Radiance Clarke at Northeastern Illinois.
“In life, everyone makes mistakes, and it was definitely a mistake for (Jones and Clarke),” said Denise Taylor, the coach at Northeastern Illinois. “But these girls wanted an opportunity to get an education, and I was willing to offer them that through athletics.”
Jones was a 15-year-old high school sophomore when she gave birth to Darrian.
“Everyone makes mistakes,” Jones said. “At 15, you can only assume that being pregnant is a mistake.”
She finished high school as an honor-roll student and a talented ballplayer. She signed a letter-of-intent to play basketball at DePaul, but lasted just three days of a summer orientation program. Homesick, she went back to Detroit.
But Andromeda Jones urged her daughter to find another college, and Delores headed back to Chicago, this time to Northeastern Illinois, a tiny Division I school that could give her a full scholarship. She also liked the idea of playing for Taylor, an understanding yet demanding coach.
But it wasn’t always that simple. There was one game last year when Jones played horribly. She found out earlier that day that Darrian’s father, since married to another woman, wanted custody of Darrian even though he had paid no child support. Jones panicked. She feared her son would be taken away while she was far from home.
The matter died down, but Jones became more determined to protect and provide for Darrian. Jones didn’t know her own father until he called her to offer emotional support soon after she became pregnant. They remain in contact today. Jones wants to feel Darrian is a part of her everyday life; she wants him to understand her absence is not the same.
Jones, a junior forward, says she can’t believe how quickly Darrian has grown since his first birthday party, when more frosting ended up on his face than in his mouth. Jones cried the night before his first day of school, when she could not be there with him. Before every game, she slips pictures of Darrian into her gym shoes, for good luck.
But money is tight. It took a year for Jones and her best friend, guard Clentana Dawkins, to save for a $279 computer they purchased so they could do assignments at home. There isn’t a lot of money to run home whenever she misses Darrian.
Darrian has visited her in Chicago twice and plans to live with her next semester. She spends every summer with him, working at various jobs to get some money in the bank. And those summers are quality time for the boy in the picture with the frame that says “I Love Mommy.”
“He tells his teachers, `My mom can’t come to parent-teacher conferences because she is at school playing basketball,’ ” Jones said. “Sometimes I sit on the porch and I hear him saying stuff, to his friends. `I bet your momma can’t play basketball. We can play two-on-two. You get your brother and I’ll get my mother. You can’t hang with my momma!’
“This summer, I was playing all kinds of people . . .” she says, laughing.
Life after Marshall
Jones’ teammate Radiance Clarke is in a similar situation. At Chicago’s Marshall High School, Clarke was quick, athletic and a scrappy scorer. She was rated by scouts as a top recruit, and she was already a top student.
But Clarke blew out her anterior cruciate ligament her junior year, and got pregnant just before her senior year. Shortly after having the baby, she tried and failed many times to get the needed scores on her ACT exam for college.
Her options were dwindling, and major schools that had contacted her backed off.
“And I was afraid to go to a junior college in another state with my baby only 4 months old,” Clarke said.
Marshall offers a program for teen mothers, allowing Clarke to earn her diploma. And finally, with one more crack at the ACT, she qualified, and Northeastern Illinois called.
But even with her daughter, Latanique, staying with her parents, Clarke’s grades dropped her freshman year and she became ineligible. She was too busy running from school to apartment to home, too worn out by all the changes in her life.
“I was very disappointed with myself,” Clarke said as Latanique crawled all over her. “I decided I had to get myself back on the right track. I had another person to look after besides myself.”
Last year, as a sophomore, her grades improved and she chose physical education as a major. She was the team’s leading scorer and the Mid-Continent Conference player of the year. She also became engaged to Latanique’s father, Jeffrey May.
This year, 2-year-old Latanique lives with her, and Latanique is a hit with everyone, almost like the team mascot. Latanique is like any other kid. She loves to watch “Barney” while her mom gets ready in the morning. She loves to play with Taylor’s earrings. She devours every kind of sugar cereal, and her favorite dinner is Oodles of Noodles.
The Northeastern Illinois players, who all live near each other in off-campus apartments, take shifts baby-sitting Latanique when Clarke attends class. Clarke usually gets her studying done while Latanique naps.
“Time,” Clarke said. “There’s not enough time. You have to manage every hour of the day.”
Clarke figures her last full day off–no classes, no work, no child to look after, no practice, no game to travel to–was about three years ago, when she was in high school. For many college kids, it was last weekend.
“I try to find a positive in every negative situation,” Taylor said. “And one of the positives here is that their teammates can see what a big responsibility it is. Children do require a lot of attention. And these young ladies are at an age where they want to hang out or do whatever. They can’t now. When you have that responsibility, your life doesn’t change a little. It changes a lot.”
There are college basketball moms all over the country, playing for programs that could make it to the Final Four. Jennah Hartwig is Wisconsin’s third-leading rebounder as a starting forward. She and her husband raise their 2-year-old daughter, Ashley, in Madison.
Alabama’s Shalonda Enis often leads the fifth-ranked Tide in scoring and is a candidate for the Naismith Player of the Year Award. She is also mother to 6-year-old Chase, who visits her in the summer but stays with Enis’ mother and grandmother in Texas.
“He told me the other day he’s got four moms,” Enis said. “And I would rather him be around my family instead of me having to be on the go all the time, and having him stay with someone I don’t know. But I am getting to the point where I want to be around my son a lot. I missed out on so much of his life.”
Putting experience to use
The experience has meant so much to Enis that when her basketball career is over, she plans to counsel pregnant teens, abused spouses and needy children as a social worker.
The student-athlete is somewhat protected once she signs that national letter-of-intent. There are no provisions in the letter that allow a school to back out of its athletic scholarship agreement to a student-athlete if she becomes pregnant. But officials at the NCAA say they could not recall any cases when a school wanted to take away a scholarship because the athlete became pregnant.
Although she didn’t know she was two months pregnant, Quacy Barnes signed with Indiana. She said Indiana handled the news about her pregnancy pretty well.
“They didn’t back off,” Barnes said. “I kind of denied it, said it couldn’t happen to me. Then the months went by and I told my coaches in January I was pregnant. They never said they would take away my scholarship.
“T.J. and I will be together for good in two years. I’ll have an education and a good job. It will all pay off.”
Now a junior, the 6-foot-5-inch Hoosier is the nation’s leading shot-blocker. She also is Indiana’s leading scorer and rebounder. Her 2-year-old son, T.J., stays with his father’s parents in Michigan.
The NCAA has recognized the special needs of parents who are also student-athletes. If Alabama makes it to the NCAA championship game, Enis will be able to bring Chase with her on the NCAA’s tab, thanks to a new resolution passed in the January convention.
But financially and emotionally, the women are mostly on their own. Without the child care and financial aid of their families, most of these women acknowledge they could not go through with school.
The mother who wants to play college basketball and go to school but has no one–not the father or family–to help with the child still has a chance to make it. She can now work on a limited, part-time basis. Many schools have day-care centers that are less expensive than child-care facilities outside the college.
She also can apply for a federally funded Pell Grant, which, based on need, can total $2,300 a school year–in addition to the scholarship money. She can also get help from the NCAA’s Special Assistance Fund, which gives clothing allowances and pays for such things as dental and optometric emergencies and academic supplies. That just covers the needy student-athlete, not the child. But the allowance frees the Pell Grant money to pay for the child’s needs.
The NCAA also recently passed a resolution affecting student-athletes on welfare. State or federal aid will not count against a student-athlete’s income, meaning some can be eligible for more financial aid or Pell Grant money.
Still, those are not lucrative sources of money. That’s why many college basketball moms depend on the help of family while they go to school, as hard as it can be to leave behind the child.
“Sometimes I look at Latanique, I play with her and I talk to her, and I wish Darrian was here with me,” Jones said.
“I ask Darrian, `How do you feel about my being away?’ He says, `I miss you, but Granny told me you’re trying to get an education so we can have a good life together.’
“I dream about that day when my son is not going to want for anything, that day where I won’t wonder how I’m going to pay for this bill.
“But right now I miss him a lot–that’s my son. Basically, we’ve grown up together. Besides my mom, that’s all I’ve got.”
