This is the fourth in a four-part series, Belles of the Ball.

Copyright 1996 Omaha World-Herald Reprinted with permission March 6, 1996 Wednesday SUNRISE EDITION SECTION: NEWS; Pg. 1 HEADLINE: The Way the Ball Bounces: 1971 Champs' Lives Mirror Changing Times By STEPHEN BUTTRY WORLD-HERALD STAFF WRITER Calgary, Alberta Growing up on a farm in southwest Iowa, Terri Brannen knew what was expected of a young girl: She would play basketball for the Farragut Admiralettes, then marry and have children or go off to college and study to become a teacher or nurse. She exceeded Farragut's lofty expectations for basketball, winning the 1971 state championship and a spot in the Iowa Girls' Basketball Hall of Fame. And after high school, she found that women could have other aspirations. Chasing a new ambition with the determination she learned in basketball, she eventually graduated from veterinary school. "I've pretty much moved beyond basketball," Dr. Brannen said, sitting on her couch with a couple of cats cuddled against her. Her basketball, a bit flat, is stored in the basement of her Calgary home. The Adettes have followed a variety of paths since that pivotal championship. Smooth teen-age skin has turned to fine lines spreading out from fortysomething eyes. From Desert Storm to divorce court to doctoral studies to delivery rooms, the Adettes have seen a quarter century of heartaches and happiness since that moment of adolescent glory. Beating Mediapolis to win the state championship is "one of the highest things that's happened to me," Dr. Brannen said. "It seems silly that a game would mean so much, but . . . it was having a goal and being able to achieve it." Scrapbooks chronicling their achievements have turned yellow, but the lessons in patience, persistence, discipline and teamwork remain clear and strong. The Adettes feel lucky to have played in an era when girls outside small-town Iowa rarely had the chance to compete in basketball or be treated as local heroes. But they aren't spending middle age boasting of athletic exploits.

They downplay their own contributions, saying they won the cham- pionship because of outstanding coaching. Other teams in '71 were more talented, they say, and other Farragut teams over the years could have won the title with a little luck. Most of the Adettes have daughters or sons pursuing their own athletic goals now as mom watches from the stands or sideline. Several have coached or played as women the games they learned as girls on Farragut's basketball court and softball diamond. Some seldom watch or play any more. But every Adette who played in the championship game, except Dr. Brannen, has a hoop outside her home. "Playing basketball," said starting guard Penny Phillips, "has just flowed on into my life after high school." Tanya Bopp Bland As a sophomore whose scrappy defense helped turn the championship game around, Tanya Bopp appeared to have a couple of more state tournaments lying ahead. But that was her last basketball game for the Adettes. She got pregnant the next fall. "I made a huge mistake," said Tanya Bopp Bland, sitting at the kitchen table in her home near Greentop, Mo. "There isn't a day that goes by that I don't regret having to tell Coach (Leon) Plummer," she said. "I cry about it sometimes, how I must have let everyone down." She left school and got married. "Today you wouldn't say you have to get married," she said. But in Farragut 25 years ago, a girl who was pregnant got married. It wasn't a healthy marriage. She and her husband divorced after eight years and two children, a son, Corey, and a daughter, Tina. She soon found a better match and married Rodger Bland, a Missouri native stationed at Fort Riley, Kan., where her first husband had been stationed. "I believe at that time God had a plan for me," Mrs. Bland said. "Somewhere there was someone who would treat me well and love me for me." On the morning of May 2, 1989, Mrs. Bland received the phone call every parent dreads. A Missouri state trooper told her Corey had been in a car-train accident. "Your first thought is that he's probably gone." Corey, then 17, survived, despite a head injury so severe that when she saw him at the hospital, "I couldn't even tell who he was." After a month in intensive care, he spent four

months in a rehabilitation hospital relearning such simple physical tasks as standing up. "I don't know what a person would have done without faith and hope," said Mrs. Bland, a Methodist. Corey recovered, but not to his previous condition as an honor roll student and rugged baseball catcher. His short-term memory remains faulty, and he needed special help in school. But he graduated with his class. The accident damaged his hypothalamus, which controls the appetite. He ballooned from 150 pounds to 220. For a while, Mrs. Bland locked the refrigerator door with steel cables. "He would get up during the night and literally eat everything in there. Can you imagine locking your son out of the refrigerator?" Corey's appetite is controlled now. He lives in a group home with other adults who have learning disorders. As a high school honor roll student, Miss Bopp dreamed of teaching English and coaching someday. Her pregnancy and marriage cut short her education, though she later finished high school and took training as a nurse's aide. Most of her life, Mrs. Bland has worked two jobs at a time, sometimes three. She recently quit driving a school bus and working at the Methodist Church to work in home health care. "No matter what I did - custodian or clerk or home health worker - I always gave it all that I had," she said. "I was a champion once, and I can be a champion again." Mrs. Bland was determined that her daughter avoid a teen-age pregnancy that could limit her opportunities. "I told her she didn't have to work so hard manually like I have." Tina is a leftfielder in softball for Columbia College in Columbia, Mo., on a full athletic scholarship. As she learned the game, Tina benefited from her mother's demanding, aggressive coaching. While in Kansas, Mrs. Bland had continued the softball career she'd started at Farragut. Her local team, the Liberty Belles, won the state women's championship. She won another state title coaching Tina's teams. In eight years as a coach, her teams had a 121-5 record, and Mrs. Bland can tell you why they should have won each of those five games. Tina, a pre-med

student interested in pharmacy or osteophathic studies after graduation, won't be able to lose sight of how valuable her scholarship is. "I tell her," Mrs. Bland said, " 'You have an opportunity that girls around the nation would kill for. ' " Becky Albright Head The 1972 state tournament was a heartbreaker for the Adettes, as they lost to Mediapolis in double overtime in the first round, dashing hopes of a repeat title. Becky Albright Head nonetheless remembers tournament week fondly. Jim Head, a classmate she had been dating for three years, gave her an engagement ring in the lobby of the Savery Hotel. In their 24th year of marriage, the Heads remain close, working together on his family's farm nine miles north of Farragut near Imogene, Iowa. Though she grew up in the country, her parents didn't farm, and she knew nothing about farming. She learned, though, and loves her life. "Probably not a lot of people get to work with their spouse." Mrs. Head led the Adettes in scoring and was named fourth-team all-state as a junior and third-team as a senior. She had a chance to play college basketball at John F. Kennedy College in Wahoo, Neb., but instead settled on the farm with her husband to raise a family. "I don't think I was that good," she said. "It was just being at the right place at the right time." She was always the most eager Adette to run Coach Plummer's stall. Opposing teams and fans hated the delaying tactic. "I loved it," she said, "because then I didn't have to shoot and miss." Three of the Heads' five children have graduated from Farragut High School, all starring in sports. Tiffany, a ninth-grader, plays junior varsity basketball, and Curtis, a seventh-grader, plays junior high sports. Mrs. Head, well-schooled by Plummer in the fundamentals of basketball, said she restrains the urge to coach her children from the stands. "There are times when you know that they could do better than that," she said. "But you don't yell anything negative." Though happy with her choices, Mrs. Head is glad her oldest three children are in college. "If my kids want to get married out of high school, I'll accept it and go on," she said, "but they know I want them to go to college." Bonnie Bickett MacKenzie Bonnie Bickett, the only senior starter among the

'71 champions, went directly to college after high school, at the University of Northern Iowa in Cedar Falls. She found her life's calling in classrooms. Not that she was a good student. "I wasn't a very fast reader," said Bonnie MacKenzie, now divorced, living in Cedar Falls and teaching fifth grade at Black Hawk Elementary School in neighboring Waterloo. She struggled in school, she said, and today probably would get special help from a school's resource center. Mrs. MacKenzie, who has taught grades one through five, finds her greatest satisfaction in helping such struggling students. "You're teaching something and you see the 'aha! ' You see their eyes, and sometimes they say out loud, 'Oh! ' That's why you come back the next day." In pursuing her master's degree, which she finished at UNI in 1993, Mrs. MacKenzie began studying "accelerative learning," a technique she has taught at education workshops. She uses music, storytelling and relaxation techniques to help students learn to use all parts of the brain. She sings and dances with the children to teach multiplication facts. She remembers a time when she waltzed with the students to teach multiples of three. "I just had this vision that I'm making an absolute fool of myself," she recalled. "I thought, 'What would someone think if they walked in right now? ' But you know, the next day the little girl who had trouble with her times tables knew all her threes." In many ways, 1996 Waterloo, a blue-collar city of 66,000 population, is a world apart from 1971 Farragut, a farm town of 500. Farragut was and is all-white. Mrs. MacKenzie first encountered other cultures at college. "I wasn't as prejudiced as I was just plain ignorant," she said of the attitudes she grew up with. Now she comfortably teaches a multiracial class in Waterloo. "I grew up a lot," she said. "You just learn about another culture." She's glad her three children have the advantages of living in a city. "They go to the university all the time and the mall and the museum. . . . I'd never heard a live orchestra in my life." Growing up in Farragut in 1971, she was unaware of sexual abuse. "That wasn't even talked about." Now Mrs. MacKenzie is required to report signs of abuse in her students. She has to realize, she said, that any class might have some children who have been abused. "You don't want to hear about it. You don't want to talk about it. But you have to." Playing basketball and winning the championship remain a highlight of Mrs. MacKenzie's life, but teaching is most important now. "I can move past that moment." A more recent thrill was when a former student "came back and wanted me to go to her high school graduation. . . . It just blew me away. And nobody is going to interview me about that 25 years later."

Penny Phillips It's only fitting that one of the Admiralettes actually joined the Navy. Penny Phillips, a junior starting guard in '71, enlisted after high school and spent 22 years in the Navy. She retired in 1994 as a senior chief petty officer and moved to Shenandoah, Iowa, where she works as a cook in the Eaton Corp. cafeteria. Miss Phillips, who never married, was stationed in Iceland, Sicily, Okinawa and Diego Garcia island in the Indian Ocean, in addition to stateside assignments. She also spent three years on shipboard, including a stint on the repair tender USS Puget Sound in the Persian Gulf during the war with Iraq. The quietest Adette now and in her youth, Miss Phillips has no war stories from Desert Storm: "It was very boring." Most of her Navy career was spent as a supply clerk, though she also was a boot camp drill instructor. "That was rewarding because you saw after eight weeks what you could get a person to do. You get them ready for a whole different lifestyle." Miss Phillips played competitive basketball the longest of the Adettes, playing for 10 years on Navy teams. She played around the world against other U.S. service teams and European teams. She also ran in the Navy, one marathon and several 10-kilometer races. She set a goal of getting her 10K time under 40 minutes. She finally ran a 39:54, then quit running. Miss Phillips remained involved with basketball as a referee when she finished playing. After years of coaching by Plummer, who wouldn't let his girls talk back to officials, she took little flak from players or coaches. "I had a lot of technicals," Miss Phillips said with a smile. Though she has no children, she has a basketball hoop in her driveway. "I put that up for the neighbor kids," she said. Janice Pierce Anderzhon When Janice Pierce Anderzhon found herself in the heavily male world of nursery sales, she knew how to establish rapport: "I'll talk sports right along with them. I just always said, 'Hey, I'm just one of the guys. ' " Except that most of the guys weren't state champions. Ms. Anderzhon had been a starting guard for the Adettes. She remembers playing a man one-on-one at a trade show in Minneapolis, where a vendor's booth had a basketball court. "I beat him, and I loved it." After graduating from Farragut

High School in 1972, she married Jim Anderzhon, whom she had dated since she was a junior. He farms north of Farragut. She regrets not going to college. "I was raised with the idea that you get married and be a good wife," she said. She worked part time when their children, Angie, now 20, and Brian, 18, were young. As they got into school, she pursued her career more aggressively, eventually taking a job as regional sales representative for Studebaker Nurseries. From her home office on the farm, she travels much of the year through Iowa, Nebraska and six other states, selling nursery stock to landscapers and garden centers. Plummer's guidance helps as she greets customers. "Two things Coach Plummer taught me that I'll always live by: One, you look at people when you're talking to them, so they know you mean business. Two, always greet them with a firm handshake." The confidence she learned from basketball helps meet the challenges women sometimes face at work. "Once in a while you run into a situation where men hit on you," Ms. Anderzhon said. "I try to handle it delicately, but you want to make it loud and clear that you're not interested." Ms. Anderzhon, who lifts weights and runs to stay in shape and occasionally plays basketball in the driveway, admits she might have been too demanding when her daughter played basketball in junior high. "It took me a long time to learn how to lose," said Ms. Anderzhon, whose '72 Adettes team had a 57-game winning streak snapped at state tournament her senior year. Her daughter, Angie, now a student at the University of Northern Iowa, didn't like basketball much. "A lot of that might have been my fault," Ms. Anderzhon said. "I was always trying to help." Janelle Gruber Bryte When Janelle Bryte hollered basketball instructions to her junior high daughter, it wasn't just Mom hollering. It was Coach. The former Janelle Gruber is the sole member of the '71 Adettes still pursuing a career in girls basketball. She and her husband and high school sweetheart, Jim Bryte, moved to Farragut in 1978 after she graduated from Buena Vista College. Soon after they arrived, Max Livingston, the former assistant who had taken the head coaching job when Plummer died in 1976, had a heart attack. Mrs. Bryte was asked to take over the junior high coaching duties temporarily. Livingston recovered and lived until 1995, but Mrs. Bryte was hired in 1979 to coach and teach math and science.

Women were still rare in coaching. "At track meets, there'd be all these men and me," Mrs. Bryte said. The men were slow to accept her as a colleague, but in the years since she has developed a rapport and been joined in coaching by more women. The Brytes moved in 1993 to Pomeroy in northwest Iowa, where Mrs. Bryte coaches junior high basketball and softball and high school track and is assistant varsity volleyball coach. Though a junior high coach can't take her team to a state tournament, Mrs. Bryte likes that age best. "They're not adults, and you can't treat them like adults. But you can talk to them. And sometimes they'll listen." Her daughter, Kelli, 16, started for the Pomeroy-Palmer varsity this year after playing for her mother in junior high. The game Kelli plays, five girls running full-court, is different from the six-girl, split-court version played by the '71 Adettes. Kelli prefers the faster game. "She couldn't handle five-on-five," she said, needling her mom. Mrs. Bryte appreciates how rare the chance to play basketball and be hailed as champions was when she grew up. "I've known several women who were really jealous about the opportunities we had, being from a small town and having all these sports." She said the experience helped her and other small-town Iowa girls deal with the changing world that awaited them as women. "We've had a chance to go out on the floor and be competitive and then walk off and be friends." Other duties of a teacher and coach also have changed from Mrs. Bryte's youth. Once she had to examine the bruises on a girl's back to substantiate a child abuse report. "To live in fear was just so foreign to me." Terri Brannen Terri Brannen still stands out among the '71 Adettes. From a team that was proud it had no stars, she twice earned first-team all-state recognition. From a team that placed most of its starters on the honor roll, she earned the highest grades. From a team where half the starters married high school sweethearts within a few years of graduation, she remains single. From a team where half the starters didn't attend college, she earned a doctorate. From a team whose girls mostly settled right around Farragut, or just a few hours' drive away, she wandered to Alaska, then to Calgary, in the foothills of the Canadian Rockies. When she was a child, the Brannen farm southeast of Farragut had the usual assortment of cats and livestock. And some not-so-usual creatures. One year the family got a pair of peacocks, which eventually produced a flock

of about 20. In the entryway of her home in Calgary, a colorful array of peacock feathers fans out from a basket. "I always liked animals," Dr. Brannen said. She still does. Her Belgian shepherd, Jessie, greets visitors. Spiderman, a black cat, and Pippin, a gray tiger-striped cat, joined her on the sofa. A more reclusive multicolored cat, Tom, was found hiding in the basement when Dr. Brannen went looking for her basketball memorabilia. On a visit to the Crowfoot Veterinary Clinic, where Dr. Brannen treats other people's pets, a cat named Sebastian prowled about. Despite her love of animals, the young Miss Brannen didn't think about becoming a vet. Her parents assigned most of the outdoor farm chores to her four brothers while she cleaned the house. "I would rather have been outside feeding sheep." The vets who tended her parents' animals were men, as were the family's medical doctors. "You never saw the role models," Dr. Brannen said. "Back then women either got married and had kids or became a teacher or nurse." When she started at Northwest Missouri State University in nearby Maryville, Miss Brannen planned to become a lab technician. Her junior year, she took some classes with pre-med and pre-vet students. "I decided I could do more than be a lab tech," she said. She got a master's degree in veterinary science at Kansas State University, then taught anatomy there for a year. Then she "got sick of school" and moved to Alaska. In the coastal town of Homer, she washed dishes at a seafood restaurant, spent time digging clams and riding horses and eventually got a job at the vet clinic. When she was ready for school again, she went to Colorado State University's vet school. She received her doctor of veterinary medicine degree in 1986 and began working at a Calgary clinic in 1989. Dr. Brannen enjoys "just being able to find out what's wrong with a pet and hopefully help it, too." She enjoys living in Calgary but misses "being able to go out in the pasture and walking around." What she doesn't miss is basketball. At Northwest Missouri State, she went out for basketball but didn't make the team, which played five-on-five full-court. She played for a while with an Amateur Athletic Union team in St. Joseph, Mo., but didn't like the full-court game. "It was lots of running, and I never liked running." She was surprised and thrilled to be elected in 1983 into the Iowa Girls' Basketball Hall of Fame. The induction ceremony, she said, made her more nervous than playing for the

championship. "My knees were shaking." Though candid about the limitations a small Iowa town placed on a girl's ambition 25 years ago, Dr. Brannen is deeply appreciative of the opportunity it also provided. Her parents' farm was less than a mile from the Missouri state line and across U.S. Highway 59 from the Shenandoah, Iowa, school district, which didn't offer girls basketball until the mid-1970s. "If the house had been across the road . . ." Dr. Brannen stopped midsentence and smiled. NOTES: Belles of the Ball. The Legacy of the '71 Farragut Adettes. A series on the heyday of girls basketball in small-town Iowa as seen through the eyes of the 1971 state champions. GRAPHIC: Color Photo/1; Jeff Beiermann; ADULT ADETTES: Six 1971 championship team members link arms on Farragut's main street with Charlotte Livingston, widow of Assistant Coach Max Livingston. From left are Penny Phillips, Becky Albright Head, Barb Meek Bosley, Janice Pierce Anderzhon, Tess Laumann Cullin, Mrs. Livingston and Barb Young Lundgren.; B&W Photo/1; Stephen Buttry; FROM VETS TO VET: Terri Brannen made the all-tournament team when the Adettes won their state championship at Veterans Memorial Auditorium in Des Moines 25 years ago. Now she's a veterinarian in Calgary, Alberta., Jeff Beiermann/World-Herald/1sf; Stephen Buttry/World-Herald/1