http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/18/sports/18sequoya.html?em&ex=1198126800&en
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December 18, 2007

Sequoyah High’s Success Energizes Tribe

By KAREN CROUSE

TAHLEQUAH, Okla. — If not for basketball, Angel Goodrich and her school,
Sequoyah High, would be as easy to overlook as the dusty farming towns that
freckle northeast Oklahoma. Goodrich, a shy sliver of a guard, is the face
of the Lady Indians, who are the three-time defending state champions in
their classification and a rising force on the national scene.

They opened the season ranked in the top 10 in Sports Illustrated’s
national poll. And this week they will participate in the Nike Tournament
of Champions in Phoenix. Sequoyah is the first all-Indian school to receive
one of the coveted invitations.

A Kansas-bound senior with a quiet demeanor and quicksilver moves, Goodrich
is the first Division I athletic scholarship recipient in school history.
To her teammates, the 5-foot-3 Goodrich is no big deal. They pull her baggy
shorts down in practice and share their Cheetos with her during breaks.
When they look at her they see a reflection of themselves, a small-town
American Indian with big dreams.

Goodrich’s individual acclaim, far from inducing envy or awe, has nudged
those around her to aim higher. Because of her, teammates with parents and
older siblings who did not finish high school talk about completing
college. In the process, the expectations of a team, a town and a tribe are
being raised like a fist in triumph.

Larry Grigg, who is Sequoyah’s athletic director, said: “There are so many
young kids watching her. They’ll set their goals to be like her. Even if
they don’t reach them, if they get partway up the mountain, that’s still
pretty good.”

When Goodrich, who was recruited by Oklahoma, Oklahoma State, Texas A&M and
Arkansas, among others, accepted a scholarship to play basketball at Kansas
during the November signing period, it was a watershed moment for her
school. Her signature formalized a covenant that would have been
unfathomable a generation earlier.

Formed in 1871 as an orphanage for Indians, Sequoyah has an enrollment of
380 in grades 7 through 12, including 202 girls. The school is a few miles
outside Tahlequah in the heart of the Cherokee Nation, which is not a
reservation but a jurisdictional service area that includes all or parts of
14 counties. The school was refashioned as a vocational institution in 1925
and later became known as a place of last resort, an institution for the
incorrigible.

In the 1980s, a Cherokee teenager from the nearby town of Stillwell begged
her parents to let her transfer to Sequoyah because she felt like an
outsider at her public school. Her parents refused, so strong was the
school’s stigma.

That teenager, Fayth Goodrich, married a man she met in the Air Force and
had three children. Angel is their middle child. Goodrich’s younger sister,
Nikki, is a 5-foot sophomore guard who is on college recruiters’ radars.

Goodrich is a trailblazer who would prefer not to leave any footsteps. She
is as famous for her reserve as she is her reverse layups.

Coach Bill Nobles receives weekly academic updates on his players, and on
the first Monday in December, one teacher wrote in jest in the margin of
Goodrich’s grade slip, “So vocal!”

Goodrich, interviewed recently in the cramped office in the musty gym that
Nobles shares with other coaches, said, “You won’t hear me say a word if I
don’t know you.”

It was the eve of the season opener Dec. 4 and Nobles had exciting news to
relay to Goodrich: She was under consideration for the McDonald’s
all-American team. Goodrich shrugged and seemed to disappear, turtlelike,
into her zipped varsity jacket.

Her sentences grew elongated and her voice more enthusiastic when she
described to Nobles a college game she had watched on TV the previous night
between top-ranked Tennessee and No. 4 North Carolina.

“Did you see the ending?” she asked him. Nobles had been watching game
film, so Goodrich filled him in.

A North Carolina freshman stood at the foul line with five seconds left and
a chance to tie the score with three free throws. She made the first,
missed the second and intentionally missed the third.

“I don’t know why she did that,” Goodrich said. “If she made the third free
throw, they could have fouled right away on the inbounds pass. Then they
would have had enough time to set up a shot at the end.”

Basketball is the one subject that draws Goodrich out of her shell. In her
first game for Sequoyah, she came close to recording a quadruple double. As
a junior, she averaged 17.9 points, 7.5 assists, 6.9 steals, 6.4 rebounds
and 1.4 blocks.

Goodrich loves to feed her teammates for open shots and hates to shoot free
throws. “They scare me,” she said. “They make me nervous.”

Standing at the foul line, with all the eyes in the building trained on
her, feels too much like being on a stage. “I just like going out there and
playing,” she said.

Her main concern about college, she said, is how to juggle basketball and
Sunday Baptist services. The adults around Goodrich have other worries.

Indians made up 0.3 percent of all female athletes at National Collegiate
Athletic Association institutions in 2004-5, the latest statistics
available. During the recruiting process, Nobles said, many coaches
expressed concern that Goodrich might not stay for four years.

“There’s still that stigma that Native Americans are not going to stick
with it,” he said. “They’re these belief structures that are slow to break
down, that they’re going to get homesick, get pregnant, get involved with
alcohol or drugs. That’s one of the things I talk to Angel about.”

A native Oklahoman, Nobles was born 30 minutes west in Muskogee. His
mother, Barbara, is part Cherokee; his father, John, was a full-blooded
coach. During his 30-year career, John Nobles’s teams won three state
titles and he was once the National High School Association’s coach of the
year.

Nobles, 46, is cross between Bobby Knight and the father of Hannah Montana.
He puts his players through the wringer with his exacting standards,
especially when it comes to boxing out for rebounds and trapping on
defense. But then, after every game, Nobles collects the uniforms and takes
them home to wash because the one washing machine on campus is always being
used.

On game days, Nobles favors tailored suits and fancy loafers fashioned from
crocodile or shark, his appearance belying his makeup, which is as down
home as biscuits and gravy.

Nobles, who teaches United States history, said he was leaving his local
Wal-Mart early in the national recruiting battle for Goodrich when his
cellphone rang. It was Tennessee Coach Pat Summitt, the winningest coach in
N.C.A.A. history. “I sounded like an adolescent schoolgirl,” Nobles said.
“My voice rose three octaves.”

He and his wife, Cheryl, have an 11-year-old daughter. He worries about his
players as if they were his own. When he received a stapled two-page list
of students who were flunking classes, as he does every week, he scanned
the names anxiously. A few athletes were on it, but none were his. The
season had not tipped off, yet Nobles felt as if his players had achieved a
victory worth celebrating.

“My first goal isn’t to win ballgames, it’s for them to have a successful
life,” he said. “I want them to go out and be independent women and not
depend on a boy or their mom.”

Nobles weaves his themes into chalk talk and casual conversation. You are
your sister’s keeper. No alcohol or drugs. Do not fear failure. Do try to
eat one thing that comes out of the ground a day.

His players, who are trying to become the first Oklahoma team to earn four
consecutive state championships, opened their regular season with two
victories before Booker T. Washington, a much larger school from Tulsa,
snapped their 41-game winning streak. Goodrich, who averaged 14.5 points in
the first four games, had 29 points in the loss but did not start because
of a sore left knee.

Sequoyah has produced one state championship boys’ basketball team and its
cross-country team has won 10 state titles. But the Sequoyah girls forge a
trail of cheers wherever they play, their fans turning out in numbers that
cannot be ignored.

“It’s the craziest thing I’ve ever seen,” said Nobles, in his fifth season
at Sequoyah.

In the past two postseasons, Indians have flown in from other states to
attend Sequoyah’s playoff games — from Oregon, California and Washington,
D.C. For the Phoenix tournament, Nobles expects roughly 400 fans to make
the trip. Stories abound of fans who arrived three hours before a playoff
game only to be among the dozens turned away by order of the fire marshal.

The team’s fan base includes people like Wynema Bush, who has no children
at Sequoyah. Bush, a wellness coordinator for the Cherokee Nation, played
six-on-six basketball in the 1970s at a rural school that routinely
defeated Sequoyah. She watches Goodrich run the floor like a gazelle and
dictate the game like a general and she said she thinks to herself: “I wish
I was her. I wish that was me out there.”

During the playoffs, Bush’s husband, David, does the radio play-by-play of
the games in Cherokee, the language created by Sequoyah, the Indian for
whom the school is named. It can be a challenge, he said, because many
basketball terms are not easy to translate. For instance, he describes a
foul as a crime.

Chad Smith, the principal chief of the Cherokee Nation, tries to arrange
his work schedule around Sequoyah games. He did this even before he
enrolled his daughter, Anaweg, a freshman who plays basketball.

Smith, a lawyer, was elected to his third term in November. When he took
office in 1999, Sequoyah’s enrollment was in decline, its budget had a
seven-figure deficit and some believed the school had outlived its purpose.

Smith disagreed. He felt a connection to the school; his father graduated
from Sequoyah in 1940. His grandparents sent his father there, Smith said,
because they could not afford to provide for him after the Depression.

In Sequoyah’s tired, old buildings, Smith saw the foundation for an academy
that would prepare men and women to lead Indians confidently and capably
into the 21st century. The school, which is financed by the Bureau of
Indian Affairs and operated by the Cherokee Nation, raised its admission
requirements and upgraded its staff and facilities.

Today, the school has a year-old basketball arena that seats about 1,800, a
two-year waiting list for prospective students and a girls’ basketball team
that is plotting a new course for Indians with every fast break.

“I think what they have done,” Smith said, “is provide the leadership,
provide the example that Indians can be very competitive, and it’s O.K. to
be competitive.”

The tempo-setting Goodrich knows what she wants to do after college. She
plans to come home to coach.

Karen Crouse reported from Oklahoma in early December.