True Grit

Published 9:00 pm Wednesday, January 12, 2005

The moment she walked into the gym, Teresa Donahue tensed up.

At first, she couldn’t figure out what it was that caused her to do this. Then it dawned on her.

The last time she’d been in Brougham Pavilion on the Seattle Pacific University campus, she watched her daughter Tina play a basketball game after spending the night in a Seattle hospital emergency room with a ruptured ovarian cyst.

Teresa had watched and she had cried, a mother concerned for her daughter.

“I was white-knuckled throughout the game,” she said. “All I wanted to do was get her out of there.”

Tina played, though, played 31 gutty minutes with a condition that had caused her excruciating pain. And she did it of her own volition. “She knew her team needed her,” said her coach, Carmen Dolfo, “and she got in there and fought.”

You shake your head in wonder and admiration when you hear a story like this. You can’t imagine the pain she felt. “The worst I’ve ever had,” Tina said.

The cyst had ruptured during a game the night before, a game in which she turned in the top performance of her college career, 21 points, and afterward she had gone from the gym to the emergency room.

She was there from 11:30 until early the next morning, didn’t get back to her hotel room until 8 o’clock, slept all day and then played another game that night.

Grit. Some have it, some don’t.

Tina Donahue has it.

Skip ahead nine months.

It’s late December. Another season. Another game.

She sits in the gym where her mother cried for her.

On this night, there are smiles all around. From Tina. From her mother. From her father.

Tina’s team, the Vikings of Western Washington University, has just beaten Cal State-Los Angeles to finish 2-0 in a holiday tournament at Seattle Pacific.

It’s a young team and, as young teams often are, it tends to be inconsistent. This was one of those nights when it didn’t play very well, nor did Tina have one of her better games from a scoring or shooting standpoint.

But as often is the case with the 6-foot junior from Stanwood, there was more to her performance than just points, things that don’t show up in the boxscore.

There were the floorburns she picked up from her scrappy play, one time getting up from a full-body slam to grimace and limp back to the bench, where, 45 seconds later, she was up testing her leg. There was the clubbing she took to the back of the head as she went up for a layin. There was the pep talk she delivered to her younger teammates on the sideline. There were the shots she passed up to give the ball to her teammates who sometimes made and sometimes missed shot attempts. There were the hustle points she got for rebounds, steals and blocks. And, most importantly, there was her mere presence on the floor: a leader, if you will, someone who can get the job done in a number of ways.

“She’s always positive,” said Dolfo, “always asking, ‘What can I do?’ I don’t think you could ask for a better leader out there.”

And to think, the Vikings almost let her get away.

As a matter of fact, Tina did slip away, enrolling at Santa Clara University in California when she came out of high school in 2001. The Vikings had recruited her, but not intensely, because they felt she wanted to play at an NCAA Division I school.

She did. Or thought she did anyway. After three weeks at Santa Clara, she realized she had made the wrong decision.

“I didn’t like the coaching style,” she said, telling one source it was too “in your face.”

Then there was the small-town, family-oriented girl a long way from home, and the fact that her parents wouldn’t get to see her play much. So she came home, not sure what she would do or even if she would play college ball.

“I was going to come home and sit on it,” she said.

She sat for about a day before her father, Dave, gave Dolfo a call. Excited at the prospect of landing a player of Tina’s talent, Dolfo invited her up, offering her some scholarship money.

For the Vikings program, landing Tina was like that old song, “Pennies from Heaven.”

She’s turned out to be a treasure.

After sitting out her first year at Western, she played in 25 games as a redshirt freshman, averaging 4.4 points and three rebounds. A year ago, she started all 29 games, boosting her scoring to 10.1 per game and her rebounding to 4.5.

Dolfo felt this would be Tina’s breakout year. She was right. Through the first 12 games, Tina was averaging a team-leading 15.8 points, 6.2 rebounds, three assists and better than a steal a game.

The big difference from last year: She’s playing with more confidence, both she and her coach agree.

That she has turned out to be the player she is doesn’t surprise Bob Petrosik, who coached Tina in AAU basketball from the fourth through the eighth grade. “She was always playing against older kids,” Petrosik said. “She got tougher as she got older.”

Petrosik, a long-time boys junior varsity coach at Stanwood, was also aware of her basketball lineage. Her father was a superb athlete himself, starring in football and basketball at Stanwood.

Dave went on to play college football at Columbia Basin in 1978, and had the honor of helping win a mythical national championship. His football – and college – career ended after one season, though, when he got his foot crushed in a backhoe accident that left him with torn ligaments in his knee.

He came home, got married, had two daughters, and today owns and operates a drive-through expresso stand.

Tina and her dad used to square off in some aggressive backyard games. “We always played tough,” she said proudly. “He’d put my shots right back in my face. He wasn’t soft on me.”

With a quick first step, she’s perfected a cute little spin move that ends with her kissing the ball off the backboard and into the basket. “That’s the way I used to play,” Dave said. “Talk to people who saw me and they’ll say, ‘She’s just like you.’”

Maybe Tina will have an opportunity to teach that move to someone else. Though she hasn’t declared a major yet, she’d like to pursue a career in coaching. “I’d love to coach at the collegiate level,” she said. “When I was young, I thought I wanted to teach and coach. But I don’t want to teach.”

If liking little kids makes for a good elementary teacher, she’d be outstanding in the classroom. She babysits for Dolfo, who has three small children. “She loves kids, and my kids love her,” the coach said. “She was over at Christmas, taking the kids for a walk at the dog park. She’s just a neat girl.”

The past two summers, Tina worked in the children’s shoe department at Nordstrom in the Alderwood Mall. To sell yourself to kids, you’ve got to be a kid yourself. That means getting down on the floor and playing with the tots and eating the fish crackers and Cheerios they offer you.

“That goes with the territory,” said Sandy Brummel, the shoe department manager. “She’s just fun, very easygoing, and has a very reassuring manner with kids and parents. She’s great to have on the sales floor.”

Not that she brought a lot of money home that first summer. “She left most of her salary here,” Brummel laughed. “I don’t think a lot went into the college fund.”

There’s a simple explanation. Employees get a 20 percent discount. And Tina likes to shop.

“I have a shoe fetish,” she said with a smile. “I buy a lot of shoes.”

Isn’t that just like a kid?