March Madness has us thinking about threes, dunks, and triple-doubles… but March is also Women’s History Month, so we’re thinking about basketball in a slightly different way. So we've got two stories all about women's basketball. This episode was hosted by Sarah Jane Johnson. Storytellers: Toya Chester tries to score 1000 points in her college basketball career. Dame Wilburn learns how to play basketball. Podcast # 912 To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Chapter 1: What is the focus of this women’s basketball podcast episode?
Welcome to the Moth Podcast. I'm Sarah Jane Johnson, and on this episode, women's basketball. March Madness has us thinking about threes, dunks, and triple doubles, but March is also Women's History Month, so we're thinking about basketball in a slightly different way.
Chapter 2: Who are some iconic figures in women's basketball history?
We're thinking about Title IX, how women athletes are still fighting to get the same respect that men are, and about all the great March Madness moments that women created, from Charlotte Smith's buzzer beater in 1994 to Candace Parker's epic first time dunking in the tournament, to Kaitlyn Clark reigning threes, we want to highlight how incredible sports can be for everyone.
So we've got two stories all about hoop dreams and what happens when they come true or don't. Whether you're rooting for South Carolina, UConn, or my alma mater, LSU, go Tigers! We hope you'll enjoy. First up is Toya Chester. Toya told this at a Boston main stage where the theme of the night was on thin ice.
A note that this story was told in 2020 and due to our reduced socially distanced audience, things are a little quieter than you might be used to. Here's Toya live at the Moth.
Chapter 3: What is Toya Chester's basketball story?
So I grew up in what I thought was a decently sized town in central Massachusetts. I say decently sized because unlike most of the cities around me, we had a high school, we had Searstown Mall, and we had traffic lights. Now, my family was the first family to settle in my town after slavery, so all the black families, most of them, we were related.
But the Chesters, I'm a Chester, we were known for something different. We were athletes. And as stereotypical as that sounds, it's true. I myself played softball, soccer, and basketball. I couldn't go anywhere with my grandfather without someone coming up and yelling, hey Chet! Shooting stories about back in the day and asking me, do you know how great he was? Of course I know how great he was.
I heard the story of him running the track meet and then hopping the fence to go and hit a home run in the baseball game before the track meet was even over. I was proud and I knew that I had a legacy to uphold. Basketball was my sport and my grandfather knew that. He bought me a basketball hoop, he set it up at his house. He didn't play with me, it's my grandfather.
But he tried to show me a few moves here and there, the hook shot, I never mastered that one. But basketball was everything to me. It was the early 2000s, it was a real culture for me and my friends. Me and my best friend, Taylor, we would ride her bike. Well, she pedaled. I sat on the handlebars. And we would go down to the park, and we would challenge the boys to a little two-on-two pickup.
When we got a little older, you know, we were trying to be cute. We'd wear the jersey dresses. It was an actual dress, but a basketball jersey. It was our life. And, you know, everything, basketball was everything to me. So one time, my mom, she took me to New York City, and we went to the NBA store. I had never seen anything like this.
You walk in and they have this display of basketballs with the imprint of the player's hand on it. So you can put your hand on the ball and just see how big Shaquille O'Neal's hand actually is. It looks like a tennis ball in this hand. So then you go through the store, you go in the back, up the stairs, around the corner, and this tiny section is the WNBA.
And in my small Massachusetts town, I have never seen this much women's basketball gear in my life. But the thing that stuck out the most was the WNBA basketball. And you know it right when you see it, not just because it's smaller, it is, but it's the orange and white stripes. It's just iconic. I knew I couldn't ask for one of these basketballs.
I mean, my mom, she was one of those moms that would take me to the amusement park. I'd go on the roller coaster, we'd get off, and she'd bring me to the screen, you know, the screen that shows you the picture of when you go down that first hill and she would look at me and she would say, Toya, you better look at that screen real good because you're not going to take one of these pictures home.
But this day, she bought me a basketball. And it was perfect because I needed one of those balls, the WNBA balls, because I was going to play in the WNBA. I mean, why not? I was a Chester, and I was great at sports. I even played on our town's first all-girls basketball team, and we went undefeated against all those boys. I was on my way.
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Chapter 4: What obstacles did Toya Chester face in her basketball career?
And not that you can't go pro in Division III, but let's be honest, you're probably not going to. But I loved it, and I was having fun, and I wanted to do what every college basketball player wants to do. I wanted to score 1,000 points in every college gym, There's a big sign and it's all the players that have ever scored a thousand points. And at my school, there was only six or seven.
I wanted that. I wanted to see Toya Chester and the number of points that I scored. So I was first in all the sprints, but at the end of my freshman year, I only had 220 points and that's not on track to make a thousand. So I tried harder in sophomore year. I made captain. Junior year, I'm going good and we get to senior year and I am cruising.
We have a winning season and we're going to the playoffs. It's the last game of the regular season before playoffs. And yours truly only needed 12 points to make a thousand. I was ready to go. So we're playing at MCLA, which is really far. It's in North Adams. and we're driving to the game, and I'm holding out hope, to be honest, but I know that my mom is not gonna make the game.
It's far, it's four hours, which is, you know, normally fine. She'd go to as many as she could go to, but it's the game that I'm gonna score a thousand points, you know? I mean, when this happens, the coach, you score your thousandth point, the coach will call a timeout, and then your mom pops out of nowhere with flowers and balloons, and it's a whole thing, but...
It's okay, I'm gonna just tell her about it after the game. So we're driving, we get to almost Vermont, we pull up to the school, go into the locker room to get ready, and we look around and there's pieces of paper scattered around like they were left behind. We pick it up and it's our plays.
The other team had written out our plays and they put the names of our plays and the names of our players and what our favorite moves were. And we thought, okay, this is perfect. We'll be clever. We'll change all the names of our plays to mess with their heads. It wasn't working. By the time we get to the second half, I only have six points. And I was averaging 21 points a game.
So I should have been already hit a thousand. So it's the second half. I'm a forward, so I'm playing down low. A girl gets the ball at the top of the key. She's their three-pointer. She's going to shoot it. I hear, Toya! I turn. I look. I go to run. I'm running up there. I jump up so high. I'm about to block her like Ben Wallace. I never jumped this high in my life. My feet are at her shoulders.
And she ducked. She didn't shoot the ball. She ducked. And so I land on her back and she stands up. And so I fly off of her back. And I land on the floor and I smash the back of my head. It was so loud. It's all I could hear. The gym's silent, but in my head, all I can hear is my head smashing. And I'm thinking, I just cracked my head open. So I reach back. There's no blood. I'm good.
So I go to hop back up, but I don't make it all the way. I hear my coach. She says, Toya, get up. And I say, I can't move. She said, get up. I say, I can't move. I had hopped up so fast that I threw my back out. Now, at this point, I'm crying. Now, whether it's because my back hurts or I know I'm not gonna hit a thousand points, I don't know, but the tears are streaming.
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Chapter 5: What lesson did Toya Chester learn from her basketball experience?
I did learn a lesson that day, though, and I guess that's important. I learned that when you fall down and you hurt yourself, don't get up too quickly. You might throw your back out. It took me a long time to forgive myself for throwing my back out. But what is there to forgive? I scored 994 points in my college basketball career. It's almost a thousand. Thanks.
That was Toya Chester. Toya is an electrician who teaches aspiring electricians in the Boston Public Schools. She has a husband, some kids, and a couple of dogs. If you'd like to see photos of Toya playing basketball in college, head over to themoth.org slash extras. We were curious to see if Toya was rooting for anyone this March Madness. Here's what she had to say.
People are always asking me my thoughts on professional sports, on college sports, what I thought of the game, who I think is going to win, who's my favorite player. And my answer is always, I don't know. And then they say, oh, you don't like sports? I love sports, but I like to play sports, not watch them.
I hear you, Toya. We'll be back in a second with another story from the court. Welcome back. In my high school in the 90s, my March Madness was getting ready for spring training and track and field. I was one of the first female high school pole vaulters in the state of Nebraska, which is one of my favorite sentences to say out loud.
And while we may not have been flying sky high those first few years, I was very proud to be a part of that history. And it was all because of Title IX, high schoolers advocating for ourselves, and our coaches believing in us. In 2019, I went back to Nebraska where I took a different kind of leap and told a story in front of a few hundred people at the Moth.
There in the audience was my track coach, Mr. Sather, sitting in the front row all those years later. So to everyone who lifts up women and girls on and off the field, thanks coach. Up next is Dame Wilburn. Dame told us at a Detroit Grand Slam where the theme of the night was out of bounds. Here's Dame live at the Moth.
That's good. So I don't know if you can tell it by looking at me, but I'm not necessarily an athlete. Now... If you back up to when I was in ninth grade, I was actually, if you can believe it, less athletic than I am now. My mother and I didn't really see eye to eye on a lot of things, and two of them happened to be the two things she was good at, which was school and basketball.
And I was terrible at school and anything that required movement. My school was a Detroit Waldorf school and they were trying to figure out how to assimilate us into the general population because they were getting ready to close the high school down and we had been an enclave to ourselves for a long time. So for whatever reason, Waldorf decided to form a girls basketball team. Now,
I didn't want to be on the basketball team. I just figured that I wasn't going to get A's in school, and I wasn't going to do homework ever. So maybe this was just another way of getting on my mother's good side. Now, what I planned to do was ride the pine. Like, I was going to join and get a uniform and then sit down. And then never... get on the court ever.
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