"The Power House"

I used to hear that song every Friday night as we jogged into the gym to begin our warm up before the game and yup that’s what they called me “the power house” of the team. I played basketball since I was four years old. I started off with the YMCA and as I got older I played for various select teams. When I got to high school I was good enough to play ball for the varsity team and at the end of the year banquet my coach described me as the power house... the name stuck.

A lot of different things changed after my sophomore year in high school and my family began to fall apart. I was forced to quit the sport that I loved with all my heart and that was it for me and basketball for a long time. I couldn’t play it on the streets... I couldn’t watch it on TV... my heart would break every time I would even look at a ball.

Needless to say when intramurals came along my freshman year here at SU I was asked to play basketball several times so I finally gave in. I was rusty, yes, but I continued to work on my game and when intramurals came along my sophomore year we were a tough team to beat.

My boyfriend (Demetrice Spearman) plays basketball for the men's team. We joked around at the beginning of the summer about how I should play basketball for the school but by the end of the summer I was determined to make basketball “my everything” again. We worked hard. He helped me with my shot, jab-step, fakes, dribbling… with pretty much everything really and I started to look like the old me again. 

I went to talk to the coach about being on the team and playing pick-up with the girls and that’s when everything changed. 

The Self-Fulfilling Prophecy is a process by which a perceiver’s expectations about a person lead that person behaving in ways that confirm the perceiver’s expectations. Robert Rosenthal and Lenore Jacobson (1968) explored this concept when studying teacher’s expectations of their students. The results from their research showed that teacher’s expectations influence student performance. For example, when certain children were thought to be more capable of intellectual growth than others, although randomly selected, these students had a significant increase in their IQ compared to other children in a control group (Rosenthal & Jacobson, 1968).

The expectations I was held too did not affect me in the classroom but on the court and unfortunately the only increase I experienced was an increase in my desire to stay far away from the basketball court once again.

When I went to go talk to the basketball coach she wasn’t very excited about my interests in playing on the team. I tried to convince her of my love for the sport but I feel as though she doubted me because I was a junior and hadn’t played for a team in so long. Her doubts were understandable, I was a junior trying to walk on to her varsity team, but it was those doubts that lead to my own doubts.

I went to watch the girls play pick-up that night after I had spoke with the coach. She ended up showing up to make an announcement to the team and although I was in the gym I was not called over like the rest of the girls. I overheard her telling them about how they needed to warn their professors about a game they would be away for during finals week, but that wasn’t the important part, the important part was that as I stood there in the gym watching her talk to the girls I saw her and I also saw a team, a team that I wasn’t a part of.


That day was the last day that I picked up a ball as well as the last day that I have even worked out. Sadly, her expectations of me were that I would not be able to handle playing on the team and the idea of me actually being able to is fading further and further away. Although I love the sport, I think my basketball career is officially done with.

 Despite the fact that she has never seen me play, the coach’s expectations and actions lead to my own self doubt and behavior that has set my progress back tremendously.

Thanks, coach.

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Rosenthal, R., & Jacobson, L. (1968). Pygmalion in the classroom: Teacher expectation and pupils' intellectual development. New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston.