University of North Carolina Athletics
THM: Breath of Fresh Air
January 22, 2005 | Women's Basketball
Jan. 22, 2005
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The following story originally ran in the February issue of the magazine.
By Adam Lucas
The child was small when she was born. The youngest of seven siblings, she was also the most fragile. For the first 13 months of her life, she was in and out of Rock Hill's Piedmont Medical Center on a regular basis.
The family would be sitting in their home, and suddenly the little girl would gasp for air. She had one of the worst cases of asthma doctors had ever seen, simply couldn't fill her lungs with oxygen. Her father, Charles, would wrap his arms around her and run out of the house, so desperate that he simply hoped fresh air would help his daughter's respiratory system. She'd wheeze, he would do CPR--standing right there in the yard--and her mother would call the doctor.
The answer was inevitably the same: "Bring her to the hospital right now."
In the hospital room, doctors and nurses would watch the tiny baby under an oxygen tent. Intravenous tubes ran across her body, medicine pumping through her veins.
She was small and frail. Her mother, Chenna, noticed something peculiar: even with the tubes, even with the shots and the treatments and the lungs that struggled to process her air, her daughter never stopped smiling.
Twenty years later, Ivory Latta is no longer a child. She is on the basketball court, her socks hiked up old-school style, pinballing from one end of the court to the other. Now she's hunched over, eyes on the ball, clapping her hands, making life miserable for the opposing point guard. Then she's racing downcourt and finding a wide-open teammate for a layup. Never stopping. Always running. She is not acquainted with the concept of the "tired signal."
"I don't know what it is, but I just don't get tired," she says. "I'm like a little Energizer bunny. I could play 40 minutes and still have energy after the game to jump around and do whatever. I've been like this all my life."
Well, not exactly all her life. From birth to the age of four, she was hampered by asthma, a respiratory disease that can be controlled but not cured. At least, that's what the doctors say. The Latta family will tell you differently.
"It just went away," Chenna Latta says.
Went away? Asthma? Have you read the books? Asthma doesn't go away. It lingers, striking when you least expect it.
But at the age of four, little Ivory Latta would tell her family, "I'm healed and I don't have asthma anymore." They smiled, patted her on the head, humored her. Imagine their surprise when it turned out she might actually be right.
Today, it flares up only if she's exercising outside on abnormally cold days. She rarely carries an inhaler. Her explanation for the medical reversal: "I just grew out of it."
The vibrant, enthusiastic 20-year-old bears only one resemblance to the delicate infant she once was: she is still smiling.
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Some of the most creative basketball minds in the world reside in South Carolina. They have to. Once Ivory Latta made the York High School varsity squad--she played three games for the junior varsity as a 7th grader before being bumped to varsity permanently--they had to do something to defend her.
Most teams played a triangle-and-two, a defense usually employed when the opponent has two talented scorers. Three defenders play a zone (the triangle) and the other two play man-to-man against the two scorers. But when York opponents used it, they put both man-to-man defenders on Latta and took their chances with a four-on-three disadvantage across the rest of the court.
Once, against Fairfield Central, three defenders were assigned to her: two were supposed to double-team at all times, and the third was supposed to pick her up when she shook one of the original duo. That's "when," not "if."
It must have worked. Latta only scored 40 points in the game.
She became the all-time leading prep scorer, boys or girls, in South Carolina history, tallying 4,319 career points. As a senior, she averaged 44.6 points per game, including a 70-point explosion against Belton Honea-Path.
Watching the tape of that game, the first thing you notice is the bleachers crammed to their very capacity, with many fans standing along the baseline. While Latta is in the game, no one moves, unwilling to risk losing their seat.
"It was standing room only and the fire marshal stayed away," Charles Latta says.
The second thing you notice is that it may be the only 70-point game in history in which the scorer wasn't hunting her shot. Latta could have had six or seven more assists if her teammates had converted easy scoring opportunities. She wasn't trying to score 70 points. It just happened within the flow of the game.
By the time she was posting 70, her legend had already spread throughout the state. It even reached Latta, SC, a couple of hours east of McConnells along the North Carolina-South Carolina border. That's where another point guard was building quite a reputation, as Raymond Felton had become one of the most sought-after recruits in America.
"I heard there was this girl you just had to see play," Felton remembers. "She was scoring 40 or 50 points every night."
Along with several of his teammates, Felton is a regular at women's home games at Carmichael Auditorium, where he has a special appreciation for the Tar Heels' point guard.
"She's little but she's got a lot of heart," he says. "And she can flat-out play."
That first comment--that she's little--is something that comes up frequently in any discussion of Ivory Latta's basketball abilities. There's a suspicion that her listed height of 5-6 may be one of those basketball exaggerations. Exactly how tall is she, Felton is asked.
"She's listed at 5-6, right?" he says.
Right. But how accurate is that?
"Well, maybe 5-4 or 5-5."
Head coach Sylvia Hatchell isn't quite as generous.
"I'd say maybe 5-4," she says. "I kid her all the time. I'm 5-6, almost 5-7. She says she's taller than me and I say no way. I look down on her."
Latta is flummoxed when these conversations are relayed to her.
"I'm 5-6!" she exclaims, that ever-present smile widening. "I am! I don't know why everybody talks about my height. I'm a legit 5-6."
There's only one problem, Ivory: parents always know. Asked about her daughter's height, Chenna Latta draws in her breath.
"Ohhh, Ivory is going to kill us," she says. "She wants to be taller. But when she went to the doctor he said 5-5."
The parade of coaches who took the time to locate McConnells, SC, didn't much care about a few disputable inches. They just wanted Latta on their teams. All the big-time programs made their pitch.
Recruiting Ivory Latta, though, didn't just mean chasing one person. It meant winning over the whole family. Two parents, two sisters, four brothers, a handful of coaches, a few teachers, a principal, pretty much everyone in a town where the 2000 census reported a population of 287.
But Latta loved the Tar Heels. By the time Hatchell came to McConnells to make her official in-home recruiting visit, the star point guard who would eventually be the Morgan Wootten National Girls Player of the Year had already pledged her commitment to Carolina. Hatchell still had to make her presentation, however.
"When I did the home visit there must've been at least 75 people at her house for the visit," Hatchell says. "At that time, that was the most people I'd ever seen at a visit. I went to church with her and then went back to her house and all her family was there, some school administrators, all her teachers. When I gave the presentation we always give at our visits I felt like I was giving a lecture or a seminar. There were people standing in the doorways and laying on the floor. They all clapped and cheered when I told Ivory we were officially offering her a scholarship. Then when I finished I got a round of applause."
The Latta family was used to hosting big crowds. Their daughter had originally been a baseball star, and was such a talented pitcher that coaches had trouble finding boys willing to catch her fastball because of complaints that she threw too hard. Townspeople who didn't know her reputation would walk up to the diamond, notice the player in uniform with a cap covering her hair and say, "Wow, would you look at that boy throw the ball?"
But school requirements forced her to switch from baseball to softball in 7th grade, and she disdained the slower pace of that sport. Around that time, her father made an investment in his daughter's future. He contracted with a paving company to turn the dirt court in their back yard into a regulation concrete court. First, he made it a regulation halfcourt. A year later, with the court teeming with participants, he called the paving company back and told them he needed them to finish the other half of the court.
That 94-by-50-foot piece of McConnells became the hub of his daughter's basketball career. She traveled across the country every summer playing in AAU games. But she always came back home, where word trickled out that the best games in the area were at the Latta family court on Sunday afternoons. Chenna Latta would mix a cooler full of Gatorade and sit it by the court. Sometimes, the family would grill hamburgers or hot dogs. Usually, their daughter was the only female player. Everyone else was a high school or college-age male. Ivory Latta received no exemptions--the players were just as physical with her as they were with any of the boys.
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Charles Latta sometimes watched the games, but he wasn't concerned about the safety of his daughter. He just wanted to see the latest highlight.
"We'd sit by the court and laugh when she made a fool out of them," he says.
Her reputation apparently traveled from McConnells to Chapel Hill. On one of her first days after enrolling at Carolina for the session of summer school prior to her freshman year, she found herself without a ready game one afternoon. The answer seemed simple: head over to Woollen Gym, where the best pickup games on campus can be found.
"We had an off day and I just wanted to play some pickup ball," she says. "I was the first one picked. I was really surprised. I looked around like, `Are you sure you don't want him or him?' Some of the guys said, `Are you sure you want that girl?' The guy who had picked me said, `Yeah, just wait and see.'"
She smiles, casting her eyes downward when asked about the outcome of that game.
"It went well," is all she will say.
Do you think you'd be the first pick again?
"Yes sir, I'm pretty sure I would be."
Not everything during her freshman season at Carolina was as easy as those pickup games. During her high school career, she almost never heard the phrase, "Don't take that shot." Hatchell's challenge was to harness her point guard's prodigious scoring abilities while making sure she preserved the dynamic nature of Latta's game.
For the most part, it worked. Latta averaged 14.0 points per game last year and missed the All-ACC first team by just one spot. She tinkered with her shot mechanics, making her release slightly quicker.
This year, with a team built more for speed and a slight altering of Carolina's fast break that enables more athletic players like Nikita Bell and La'Tangela Atkinson to get some post-up opportunities on the break, her numbers have increased. Her shooting percentage is up almost ten percent, and her assist/turnover ratio, which hovered close to 1.0 last season thanks to some reckless forays into the lane, stands at 1.7.
Impressive improvement for a sophomore. She'd like to play in the WNBA eventually but has a life plan that's not entirely focused on basketball. She's taking the science courses necessary to aid her in her goal of becoming a pediatrician--"Whew," is how she describes the rigorous course load, but she says it with (of course) a smile. "I live for working with kids," she says. She frequently serves as a counselor at the various basketball camps that populate Chapel Hill in the summer and is almost always the star attraction. At the Eric Montross Father's Day camp last summer, she impressed the camp's namesake so much he immediately singled her out when pondering which counselors he wanted to return in 2005.
College students can be moody, with seemingly trivial details causing them to spiral into temporary gloom. Latta simply isn't built that way.
"I don't really have bad days," she says. "I can be upset about something but it doesn't make me have a bad day. I just think about something happy and it makes me happy for the rest of the day."
She says this while preparing for a photo shoot. The photographer positions her in the middle of the Carmichael court, bright lights shining down on her forehead.
"OK," he says, "we're going to do some close-ups of different mood shots. Give me happy."
She smiles broadly.
"OK, now mad."
She purses her lips for approximately half a second, then breaks into giggles.
"OK, now just your normal face."
She laughs loudly, her squeals bouncing off the empty Carmichael bleachers. She looks at the tiny audience that has gathered, which includes a couple of basketball staffers and a writer.
"This is so much fun, y'all!"
Adam Lucas is the publisher of Tar Heel Monthly and can be reached at alucas@tarheelmonthly.com. His book on Roy Williams's first season at Carolina, Going Home Again, is now available in bookstores. To subscribe to Tar Heel Monthly or learn more about the book, click here.
