Got a text message from my old pal Jim Martineau the other day. He sent a photo of a 12-year-old clipped newspaper column that is still hanging on his office wall.
It was basically a time capsule.
Martineau is the women’s basketball coach at Clackamas Community College. I visited with his team in 2014. It was a fairly ordinary JUCO basketball season, and I’d come to watch his point guard, a 21-year-old named Laci Effenberger, play what would be her final regular-season game.
“She’s here for a second chance,” he told me that night.
Effenberger scored 23 points. She had six rebounds and six assists. She was outstanding and easily the best player in the gym. Her team beat Mt. Hood Community College, 88-40. It was a joyful night. But what I remember most is that Effenberger sat with me before tip-off in a mostly empty gym with tears in her eyes as she recounted the road that led her there.
Effenberger grew up in Ketchikan, a small town in Alaska. Population: 9,000. In high school, she became good enough to make one of the state’s best AAU traveling teams and played in the End of the Trail tournament in Oregon City, where a line of Division I coaches were scouting players.
And so the story goes, Effenberger got the attention of all the coaches. Not with her play on the court, necessarily. But because of an errant pass by someone else. In one game, someone threw a wild pass near the baseline. The line of coaches was seated there.
I’ll let Martineau tell the rest.
“There’s a guy sitting there in a chair eating a hot dog and drinking a soda,” he told me. “He gets drilled with the ball, and his hot dog goes flying, and there’s soda everywhere. Just a mess.”
A curious thing happened.
“The play goes on, but then all of a sudden a girl appears, goes over, leans down, and starts helping clean everything up,” Martineau said.
That was Laci.
She’d already had two major knee surgeries in high school, but left her family in Alaska to finish her senior year in Oklahoma. The move eventually earned her a scholarship to Angelo State, where she blew her knee out again on the second day of practice.
Torn MCL.
Torn ACL.
Torn meniscus.
There were five knee surgeries in three years. There was a sixth surgery to remove a set of screws put in her right knee. Then, a seventh surgery. As all that was happening, Laci’s relationship with her parents splintered. She moved to Seattle for a change of scenery, where she eventually found herself homeless.
“Mom,” she said into a payphone, “can I come home?”
She came home, of course.
Years before, amid that mess of soda on the baseline, Martineau had introduced himself to Laci Effenberger. He was impressed with her play and character. She was a Division I prospect, but he told her, “If you don’t have a place to play, give us a call.”
I realize that another college basketball season is starting. The high-major college players have dollar signs in their eyes. The top prep players are chasing scholarships. But I’m thinking today about the role that community colleges still play in the ecosystem.
Earlier this week, I sat down with Chad Johnson, the former six-time Pro Bowl wide receiver who renamed himself “Ocho Cinco” in the NFL. He’d been a terrible high school student. So bad, he told me, “My grades couldn’t get me into the corner store.”
Everyone remembers Johnson going to Oregon State, where he spent four pivotal months wowing scouts. But before that, he’d been at Division II Langston University, where he was kicked out of school for not attending class. That led him to Santa Monica Community College, where he played two seasons of football.
It took him three years to play two seasons. He was ineligible due to academics during that second year. But where would Chad Johnson be had it not been for that community college giving him a second — and a third — chance?
I asked him on Monday.
He said, “You want the truth?”
I told him I did.
“Dead or in jail,” he said.
I don’t know where Laci Effenberger would be without Clackamas Community College. I was there for her final JC regular-season game. Her parents sent a bouquet from Alaska. Her coach, Jim, and his wife, an assistant on the team, had helped give her a second chance. They hugged her during introductions. She parlayed that opportunity into a scholarship to Cal State East Bay, where she became a starter. Laci graduated with a degree in sociology.
She later met DaVonté Lacy, a former Washington State basketball player. They got married and traveled the world while he played basketball. They’ve lived in Germany, Greece, and Slovakia. They now have a son, Lennox, who is 1.
Hold up.
Laci Effenberger married DaVonté Lacy?
Laci Lacy?
I reached out to her on Friday.
“We always say it’s a name so nice you have to say it twice,” she told me.
Then, Laci got emotional talking about her old college coach, Jim, who is still toiling away on that JC campus.
“He has no idea the impact he’s had on my life,” she told me. “When you’re at that age, it feels like things are the end of the world. It was a pivotal moment in my life. I was going to go one way or the other way. I’m so grateful I went Jim’s way.”
So, yeah.
Big-time college basketball matters. It’s important stuff, with a lot of revenue attached. Meanwhile, Jim Martineau is in year No. 29 of coaching community college hoops. Another season is near. He’s pulled double duty as the school’s AD for the last 17 years.
Laci told me: “Basketball always found me.”
Then she said, “We all need a coach Jimbo.”
Martineau grew up in a ranching family in Eastern Oregon on too many acres to count. He’s dedicated his adult life to herding young people on that little campus.
They ought to give him a medal.
Burnout is real in higher education. I’m glad people like Martineau are still out there. Sometimes, I wonder how they do it. How do they keep going? Year after year? Season after season? I was thinking about that this week, then I remembered Jim sent me that old newspaper clipping hanging on the wall of his office.
I know why he did it.
Laci does, too.
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Thanks John. We all need to hear stories and everyone needs somebody like Jimbo in their lives.
John, you have a gift!