5.
One of the things that happened to
Redwood City the minute the team
started winning basketball games was
that opposing coaches began to get
angry. There was a sense that Redwood
City wasn’t playing fair—that it wasn’t
right to use the full-court press against
twelve-year-old girls who were just
beginning to grasp the rudiments of the
game. The point of youth basketball, the
dissenting chorus said, was to learn
basketball skills. Ranadivé’s girls, they
felt, were not really playing basketball.
Of course, you could as easily argue that
in playing the press, a twelve-year-old