Game Over 
Brooklyn Heights
The gym rats want her to keep dunking. Her coaches want her to play “vanilla.” So what does fifteen-year-old Fort Worth phenom Brooklyn Pope want? To give the other team a stomachache.
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THE STOP SIX NEIGHBORHOOD, SO NAMED FOR ITS position on the old Dallas—Fort Worth train line, is a little like a basketball incubator. There is a hoop on almost every block. Most guys at Dunbar High School wear basketball jerseys whether they’re on a team or not. At the Martin Luther King Community Center gym, which sits just a few blocks south of Brooklyn’s house and a few blocks north of Dunbar’s gym, there is always a game of pick-up being played. The girls who grow up playing here don’t always learn the fundamentals of the traditional girls’ game, sometimes referred to as “thump-thump” basketball, where the ball gets tossed around for a long while before somebody takes a shot. Playing against their older brothers and male classmates, they learn to play fast and tough, picking up aggressive moves that sometimes earn them fouls in girls’ games.
It’s a more modern style of play that has been developing elsewhere and is slowly changing the women’s game. Gordon Loucks, who covers high school basketball for Texas Girls Basketball Report and has watched between three hundred and four hundred teams a season for the past eighteen years, said he witnessed a change starting around 1997, when the WNBA held its first game. “There’s definitely influences coming down from the WNBA,” Loucks says. “We’re in the drive to be more appealing and entertaining. There’s less fundamentals, more athleticism. That’s the sad part to watch, because you’re losing what a lot of us hold pretty dear. But there’s not a lot you can do about it.” Of course, some say the change is good for the girls: A more intense game translates into ticket sales, a greater fan base, and careers in professional leagues.
The evolving style has certainly benefited girls’ basketball at Dunbar. When 31-year-old coach Andrea Robinson took over the Lady Wildcats three years ago, the team hadn’t made the playoffs in a decade. All the attention was on the boys’ team, which had won 27 consecutive district titles under Coach Hughes. But Robinson’s teams found success—Dunbar made the playoffs in her first year—and their crowds have grown. Now the Stop Six girls grow up dreaming of playing on the Dunbar varsity squad the same way the Stop Six boys do. This year, playing a fast-paced style with Brooklyn, sophomore LaShandra “LaLa” Hill, junior Victoria Davis, and junior Jerin Smith setting the tone, the Lady Wildcats were 29–4.
But going into the semifinals, none of the Lady Wildcats had had much experience in high-pressure games. Meanwhile, their opponents, Dallas Lincoln, were last year’s state champions and hadn’t lost a game in Texas in three years. Lincoln had five seniors on the team, and forwards Simone Cooks and Dominic Seals would be going on to play Division I college basketball next year. The celebratory “Na Na Hey Hey Kiss Him Goodbye” song was probably already cued up on the Lincoln bus. Even Dunbar’s fans believed their team would probably lose in Austin and then go home happy to have had a winning season. One observer willing to give Brooklyn and her teammates a chance was Coach Hughes, who’s been to the state semifinals thirteen times. He told the naysayers, “Sometimes a team is so young they don’t know enough to get nervous.”
And from the opening tip of their Friday night contest, his comment seemed prescient. Before a raucous crowd of 4,575, Dunbar jumped out to an early lead. Brooklyn, in her number 32 jersey (same as Magic’s), wore her hair tied up in a softball-size poof of a ponytail near the top of her head and contacts to replace her lucky Coke-bottle glasses. She had her game face on from the outset: Her eyebrows diving toward her nose and her nostrils flared, she yelled at her team on the court, trying to keep up the intensity. During the second quarter, with the game still tight, Brooklyn had a chance to dunk on a fast break, but she took the layup instead.
Deep into the second half, however, Dunbar’s aggressive defense had worn down its opponent, forcing 22 turnovers. With two minutes and sixteen seconds left on the clock and her team up by nineteen points, Brooklyn picked up a loose ball at mid-court and hit her stride on another open break. For a moment, you could hear the little squeals of anticipation coming from the spectators. Brooklyn went up for the dunk and came up just short, but as the ball slipped off her fingers, she managed to tap it forward over the rim, where it bounced off the backboard and through the net. On the way down, she grabbed the rim with her hand, and the crowd was hushed as the thunngggg hung in the air.
Seated next to me at the Frank Erwin Center was Rick Sherley, the executive director of the Texas Association of Basketball Coaches. The whole game he had remained tight-lipped about Brooklyn. “I’ve heard of her” was all he’d said. But now he turned to me and laughed. I asked if he had ever seen a girl attempt a dunk during a high school game, and he shook his head.
“How long were you a coach?” I asked.
“Thirty-two years,” he said. Then he leaned over. “She’s got another three years to get better?” he quipped.
Outside the locker room after the game, a reporter from the Fort Worth Star-Telegram asked Brooklyn why she’d tried to dunk. Why hadn’t she gone for the layup, as her coach had instructed? “I wanted to give the next team we play a stomachache,” she said.
BROOKLYN’S DAD LIKES TO TELL the story of how his daughter first got “discovered.” A hoops fanatic, Tony Pope Sr. is six feet four and would have played for Coach Hughes back when he went to Dunbar, but doctor’s orders after a bout with rheumatic fever kept him off the team. Instead, he passed his love of the sport on to his two sons, Tony Jr. and Tim, and to his only daughter, Brooklyn. He became so impressed with her early talent that when she was only nine years old, he brought her to a local Amateur Athletic Union club, Team Ichiban, a rigorous March-to-September all-star group directed by Gene Watts. Over the years, Watts has earned a name for himself for developing talent. (Most recently, he trained UT star and 2004 ESPN.com National Freshman of the Year Tiffany Jackson.) Taking Brooklyn to Team Ichiban would be a reality check. If Watts said Brooklyn was good, she was good.
She was already five feet eight when she walked into Watts’s gym. The coach put her out in a scrimmage with a team of thirteen-year-olds and passed her the ball.
“Let’s see what you’ve got,” he said.
Brooklyn took her defender down the court, weaving in and out and then spinning under the basket before banging a shot off the glass. As the ball dropped through the hoop, Watts blew his whistle and called a time-out. Then he brought all the girls to center court and asked them to estimate the new player’s age.
“Thirteen,” they guessed.
“She’s only nine years old,” he told them.
But while Brooklyn was good enough to play with girls four years her senior, there was a catch. “Her attitude was horrible,” Watts remembered. If things didn’t go her way, he said, she threw a tantrum. “I kicked her out of practice about every day for the first two months just to get her to understand no one is above the program.” The other players told her about the dangers of “helium” and “hype” and how she’d better be ready to meet someone who would be better than her. Whether it was the lessons or just maturity, Brooklyn gradually came around, playing two and a half hours a day with either Team Ichiban or her school’s team. She started memorizing the maxims about staying humble, hoping the stale-sounding phrases would sink in.
Brooklyn’s mom, Janice, admits that while Tony was teaching their daughter to dribble, she was wishing that Brooklyn would show more interest in gymnastics (which Brooklyn vetoed) or classical piano (which she flat-out didn’t have time for). But even in second grade, when Brooklyn was wearing matching socks and hair bows to go with her dresses, she’d be out on the playground at lunchtime, barefoot, throwing a ball into a trash can. When her grade-school teacher asked the students to write about what they loved most, Brooklyn wrote in large, perfectly formed round letters, “I like basketball 24-7. 24-7 means 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.”
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