2 months ago
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U.S.|What Ever Happened to the Lady Jaguars?
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/11/24/us/lady-jaguars-basketball-carroll-academy.html
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They were the Lady Jaguars, a winless basketball team of troubled teenage girls. The New York Times spent months with them in 2012 and 2013.
Recently, we wondered: What happened to the girls? Had they risen from their circumstances and fulfilled their visions of a better life? We set out to find them.
There was Summer, a teenage mom and the queen bee of the team.
Here she is today, a mother of seven.
There was Hannah, the youngest of them all, moving from one broken home to another.
Here she is, working and getting support at a shelter for women recovering from addiction.
There was Alleyah, the sassy sprite of a girl from the projects.
Here she is, in recovery, too, finding serenity away from the temptations of home.
There was Destiny, the feisty point guard, routinely failing drug tests.
Here she is, in need of another fresh start.
They were girls then, thrown together by factors mostly beyond their control.
They are women now, on their own, navigating today’s America.
Her name is Hannah. When I met her more than a decade ago, she was a wide-eyed and curious seventh grader with church-pew manners. She was chatty and clingy, a dreamer with a trusting heart. She played with dolls and sang in a choir. She wanted to be a veterinarian and live in a mansion.
Hannah came from a home broken by poverty and addiction. She found comfort at Carroll Academy, a court-run day school in West Tennessee for teens in trouble. The Lady Jaguars basketball team that Hannah played on was in the middle of a 312-game losing streak, stretching over 12 years, which is why I first went to Carroll Academy. She was the youngest player that season.
Now it was early 2023. The evening sky darkened over Carroll County Jail. I was in the parking lot. A familiar voice was on the phone from the other side of the thick walls.
It was Hannah, now 24, addicted to meth, caught in a sting operation a few weeks earlier.
Oh, Hannah. Is that you?
“Hi, Mr. John,” Hannah said. I recognized her honeyed, lilting voice instantly. It might have been the only thing that hadn’t changed since she was a girl. I rubbed one hand on my forehead. The other held the phone.
“You OK?” I asked.
Hannah was one of nine girls The New York Times had featured in a five-part series in 2012, and then in a follow-up series a year later. The stories were less about basketball than about growing up in a part of America often hidden in the shadows, culturally and economically.
