She never fools herself into believing basketball is just a game. That simple platitude offers refuge for losers, or at least for failures, and she doesn't intend to fail. Basketball occupies a far greater dimension in Marrietta Hatathle's mind, and in her heart. It is tangled up in her identity, her career, her family. Her people. And now that stupid bouncing ball threatens to crush it all.
The sport doesn't care, Hatathle has come to understand. She can work harder than a coal miner, gather the wisdom of 100 John Woodens, motivate like George Gipp on his deathbed. And still her success, her standing in the community and within her own skin depends on a distracted clique of teenage girls trying to play an unpredictable playground game, all while coping with life on an isolated slice of Utah desert.
Hatathle's tenure as head coach of Whitehorse High's girls' basketball team has been bumpy, and the school's leadership is alarmed enough to act. A meeting in front of administrators has been called this February morning, and Hatathle, taken aback by the unusual summons, walks wearily toward the principal's office. She is surprised how difficult it has been to inspire the girls to work hard and work together, and shocked at how her team has splintered.
But she is still head coach of the Whitehorse Raiders, and though it took one man's resignation and another's heart condition to default the job to her, her position in tiny Montezuma Creek carries the same prestige - and responsibility - that Pat Riley shoulders in Miami.
Basketball is the game, but respect is the prize. Her team may have been marginalized in the less humble regions of the Navajo reservation and reduced in Salt Lake City to a line of small type amid a jumble of high school scores. But in Montezuma Creek, girls' basketball matters.
It matters to Hatathle more than anyone. The coach wipes away tears as she recalls the day she accepted the challenge of trying to lead a team already lugging around the pride and expectations of an entire tribe, a team that had improbably reached the state championship game the year before. To a Navajo such as Hatathle, coaching is a calling she has pursued all her adult life. And if the expectations are wildly unrealistic, well, secretly she shares them, too.
"It's always been a dream of mine to coach a Native American team," she says in a near-whisper.
The dream never ends quite this way, though.
'We're always left out here'
Generously defined, yes, Montezuma Creek is a creek, just as the shabby buildings along its banks technically constitute a "town." So there is symmetry in naming one for the other, allowing each to radiate in reflected despair.
The creek water is brown and murky and slinks along, like gravy oozing through cracks in the desert floor. The low buildings nearby, some wood and some corrugated metal and some a patchwork of both, brace against an insistent wind even when there's calm. Enormous oil-storage tanks dwarf the tiny homes and amputate any sense of neighborhood. Discarded tires and unidentifiable rusted objects lie about, all at the foot of a nondescript gray mesa, which casts the entire scene in miniature.
Occasionally, a pair of stoic, middle-aged women park their pickup truck on a vacant lot along the highway and sit in the cab, waiting. Handmade plates and bowls are arranged on the windshield, apparently in hopes that riders in a passing car might notice them, fathom their purpose, pull over and purchase one. It's not a high-volume trade. But it passes for commerce in Montezuma Creek.
The only sturdy-looking, well-kept buildings in this silent outpost are the schools: Montezuma Creek Elementary next to the town's only intersection and Whitehorse High about a half mile across the way. They were built, like thousands of other schools across America, in the modern utilitarian style. Construction-paper artwork decorates many of the windows.
Inside, Whitehorse High isn't quite so typical. About 220 teenagers are enrolled there, all of them American Indians drawn from Utah's relatively empty corner of the mammoth Navajo reservation, which stretches into three states.
The school's boundaries cover hundreds of square miles, requiring a large portion of the student body to ride buses 30 miles or more each way. And because the buses won't travel dirt roads, some students are dropped off as far as five miles from home, requiring a ride - or a long walk.
It's no wonder the school only graduates about two-thirds of its students, or that it has the highest absenteeism in the state. Or that about a quarter of the faculty quits and moves away every year.
Alex Lee, a senior on the girls' basketball team, once was taught by five science teachers in less than six months.
"They all promised not to go anywhere," she says. "Then they leave, and we say, 'See, you promised, but now you are gone.' Then things change, and we have to get used to the new teacher's standards. It's hard."
A lot of things are hard in Montezuma Creek. Getting a job is hard - nearly 45 percent are unemployed. Eking out a living is hard - more than half of the residents live in poverty. Heck, getting a hamburger here is hard.
"Shiprock [Ariz., about 45 miles away] has a KFC, a McDonald's. What do we have?" complains Evelyn Billie, basketball coach at the elementary school. "We're always left out here."
So they learn to live without. Water is scarce, so all that is needed, right down to water for the school's morning coffee, must be trucked in from Bluff, 20 miles west.
In November, Whitehorse High ran out of coal; the school operated in the cold for three days.
And while bigger schools brag about their weight rooms and training centers and other perks for athletes, the Raiders can't always use what few facilities they have. Whitehorse High shares its gym with junior high teams from down the road, so the school's varsity players frequently have nowhere to practice.
Instead, they resort to simply running laps through the school's hallways.
"The high schools have a pretty good jump on us in places like Salt Lake," says Delbert Dickson, who oversees a ramshackle indoor pool at the community health center next door, and who has signed on as Hatathle's volunteer assistant coach. "They have gyms and equipment. They can find a gym right around the corner, or a park. Out here it's a lot different."
They shout, 'Yeigo! Yeigo!'
Pride and identity on the Navajo reservation are complicated phenomena, but in Montezuma Creek, they are embedded to an extraordinary degree in the success of these girls. Crowds of Navajos, some of whom travel 30 or 40 miles, routinely gather for the girls' home games. They shout, "Yeigo! Yeigo!" - the Navajo word for "with spirit," which describes the Raiders' up-tempo style.
Last season, the Raiders, coached by Justin Moon, a white man from Blanding, shocked the state by reaching the Class 1-A championship game. Their runner-up finish felt like a world championship at an institution where size, isolation and lack of athletic tradition, among other factors, normally reduce Whitehorse's athletes to tackling dummies and scrimmage fodder.
Now, expectations are higher than ever. Although the boys' basketball team needs to keep every player who shows up for tryouts, the more prestigious girls' team can be a lot more choosy. This year, 32 students sought spots on the girls' team. A dozen were cut.
The Whitehorse girls offer proof that disadvantages can be overcome, that different doesn't mean inferior, and that's no small accomplishment in a community where resentment - at the state for neglecting them, at the wealthier Navajos in Arizona for ignoring them, at fate for abandoning them - courses through many older residents like plasma.
"We'd laugh at some of the faculty who come down to 'save the Indians,' " says Moon, who left Whitehorse in the afterglow of that tournament to work in Blanding, where his family lives. "They'd last a month. They'd find out [the Navajos] don't need to be saved."
But Moon's old team could use some saving now.
Hatathle's first season in charge, after six years as an assistant coach, has been rough. The core of the state-finals team has moved on, leaving the rookie coach with one star-quality player and a jumble of less-talented - and less-ambitious - teammates.
Moon inspired focus and unity on the Raiders, but Hatathle's efforts to replicate that camaraderie have backfired.
The outsider
She felt well-prepared for this job when the school offered it to her - a mere four days before the season began.
After playing at Dixie College in St. George, Hatathle learned to coach by leading rec-league teams. She volunteered for an assistant's job when she was hired to teach at Whitehorse, and after working with the Raiders alongside Moon for six seasons, she believed she was ready to take over when the coach left. Even when the school board disappointed her, Moon and plenty of parents by handing the job to another white man named Dave Livingston, Hatathle put aside her pride and stayed on.
It turned out to be a fortuitous decision. Livingston's health deteriorated as the season approached, and a heart problem finally convinced him to step down. With little outward reaction, the players took the switch in stride. For Hatathle, though, it was a jolt of adrenaline - and an opportunity to prove she belonged.
She hadn't always felt that way. The 36-year-old coach grew up in Blanding, and though she is Navajo, with the same dark brown skin and black hair as most of her fellow Navajos, Hatathle felt she had to earn the trust of the students and parents. Hailing from another town, even one less than an hour away, got her labeled as an outsider, a city girl. "I really thought I could fit in because I'm the same color," she says.
She tried everything. She didn't speak the language, so when she took a job as a special education teacher at Whitehorse seven years earlier, Hatathle immediately enrolled in a crash course in Navajo.
"The first thing I was asked when I got here was, 'What culture did you come from?' " Hatathle says. "What do you mean by culture? Nobody ever asked me about culture until I got here."
Her daughter, a guard on Whitehorse's team, still feels that distance from some classmates in Montezuma Creek. "Sometimes they are rude, like, 'You're from Blanding; you're not from here,' " Michelle says. "I have no idea where that comes from."
Ultimately, Hatathle knew, it didn't matter whether she was an outsider in Montezuma Creek - she would be judged entirely on her ability to continue Moon's legacy of success by making, and succeeding at, the state tournament.
Because her style of coaching is relatively passive, focused more on motivation than tactics, Hatathle hired Delbert Dickson as her principal assistant. Hatathle chooses lineups and offers encouragement, while Dickson leads most of the drills at practices and calls many of the plays in the huddle during time-outs. He also happens to be the father of Derica Dickson, the Raiders' star player.
This wouldn't be a problem if the Raiders were winning, as everyone expected. But they have dropped games to less-talented teams and slumped into third place in their region.
A season that started with promise has devolved into a chaotic finish. The Raiders' lone all-state caliber athlete and the team's leading scorer on most nights is the focal point of much of the turmoil. Desperate to reach the state tournament again in order to be scouted by colleges with scholarships to offer, Dickson has begun blaming the players around her for the losses, and sulking over their mistakes. She rolls her eyes when bad passes skip out of bounds, and shakes her head when others miss shots.
Her teammates have noticed, and have retaliated. They reach a locker-room consensus: Dickson is no longer captain. Hatathle, eager to prevent mutiny so close to the season's end, supports the change. Then on Senior Night, the final regular-season home game, the coach keeps Dickson on the bench far longer than usual so the other seven seniors can play.
Dickson's family in the stands interprets the move as an insult, and it infuriates them. When the game ends, a group of her relatives surrounds the coach in a hallway and berates her for the benching. Hatathle breaks away from the group in tears.
Delbert Dickson, unaware of the incident, apologizes to the coach when he learns what his family has done. But the sequence of events has Hatathle thinking about quitting, and has school administrators intent on an intervention.
A last chance
Amid the turmoil, the Raiders face a play-in game to qualify for the Utah state tournament. It's a chance to redeem a disappointing season, and perhaps recapture the postseason magic that so enthralled the community a year earlier. Whitehorse's chances are far dimmer if the team is still bickering, if feelings are still hurt, so the school's administration has summoned Hatathle to this meeting.
Principal Kit Mantz has already dealt with Dickson's relatives, making it clear the school won't tolerate intimidation.
Now he wants to make sure Hatathle is thinking clearly, that she is strong enough to face the challenge ahead. That such a pep talk is necessary reflects poorly on the rookie coach, but the dark circles under her weary eyes make it clear that she doesn't feel like fighting over it.
The past is the past, Mantz tells the coach. Put it behind you. For the good of the school, you must convince your team to come together. Win the play-in.
The meeting is short, but Hatathle gets the message. She returns to her classroom and considers what she will say to her team that night in the locker room. Nothing had prepared her for this stress, and she isn't sure how much longer she can take it.
Now, facing her biggest game as a coach, Hatathle appeals to the girls' bloodlines, to their Navajo identity. As the girls circle around in the locker room, she starts to well up.
The people out there are counting on you, she says. Your people. It's time to show some loyalty, to them and each other.
"Play as a team, sister and family," Hatathle says, struggling to get the words out.
The players nod, shout "Yeigo!" in unison and head for the court.
