“I can tell you a story,” Kim Schroeder offered. “She was in third grade and … “
“Oh no!” interrupted her husband, Alan, a 31-year Dayton police officer. “Don’t tell that story!”
With some coaxing, the Schroeders finally agreed to recount the day their little girl, Amanda, began to morph into The Hulkster.
It happened at a St. Anthony’s CYO game and, as Alan put it, a girl on the other team was “thumping on” Amanda.
“She was getting tired of it and all of a sudden I saw it in her eyes,” he said with a slight shake of the head and a small smile. “Back then, when she was about 7, she had a mean streak to her and quite a temper.
“I told my wife, ‘I’m gonna have to go get her,’ and I moved down to the edge of the court. I could see she was getting ready to do a Hulk Hogan leg drop on that girl.”
The big-stached wrestler used to administer his coup de grace after he bounced off the ring ropes, leaped high into a sitting position and brought his massive leg down on the throat or chin of a supine opponent helpless in the middle of the ring.
That trademark move meant lights out and Amanda still remembers how she and her friends would practice those wrestling moves at home.
“I had to come out of the stands that day and grab her before she dropped a leg or a knee on that girl,” Alan laughed. “I walked her over to the coach and said, ‘She’s not gonna play right now. She has to sit down.’ She was going to get that girl. She was ready for the leg drop.”
This time it was Kim who interrupted: “But she’s totally different now. She grew up. She’s really changed — she’s a good girl now.”
She certainly is good.
The 6-foot freshman forward for Sinclair — who is averaging 27.4 points per game — is the No. 2 scorer in all of junior college Division II basketball. She’s No. 1 the nation in free-throw percentage at 91.3 percent.
Her recent efforts — 32 points against Wittenberg, 30 versus Danville, 32 against Rio Grande, 37 on Columbus State — have won her Ohio Community College Athletic Association (OCCAA) player of the week honors three of the past four weeks.
In the classroom, she’s doing just as well.
“Our grades just came out and she’s one of our top performers on the academic side, too,” Sinclair coach Victoria Jones said. “She’s got a 3.9 GPA. That’s got her on the Dean’s List and has her on track for Academic All-American.”
Because she’s also been active in the community — she and the rest of the Tartan Pride spent Thanksgiving serving meals at the annual Feast of Giving community dinner at the Dayton Convention Center — the Sinclair Athletic Department just named her its Buckeye Charters Student Athlete of Distinction for November.
Each month the school honors an athlete who is a leader in what it calls “the 3 Cs” — community service, classroom and competition.
It’s because of that latter category that Schroeder — along with the team’s formidable inside tandem of Aaryn Evans and Madison Connolly-Banks and several other steady players — has led Sinclair to a 12-2 record with an offense that averages 86.4 points.
And before Amanda, there was her older sister Madison, who left a four-year scholarship at Ursuline College outside Cleveland and came back home to lead the 2014-15 Sinclair team. And that had Jones mentioning another big drop — not of leg, but of luck.
“That was my first recruiting year,” Jones said. “And I’ll tell you, it was good to see her drop into my neighborhood. That got this all started.”
Sister blazes trail
He remembers a knock on the bedroom door and her walking in with her mom.
“Madison was crying,” Alan Schroder said. “I went, ‘C’mon, we don’t cry.’ And she goes, ‘But I’m not happy!’
“I remember sitting up in bed saying, ‘You tell me where happy starts and I want to get in line for it.’ I’m 55 years old, paying for school, working every day. I want to know where all the happy starts.’ ”
After leading Carroll High School to the state title game as a senior and leading the Greater Catholic League (GCL) in scoring and rebounding, Madison had gone to Ursuline and done well her first season. A 6-foot forward, she led the team in rebounding and blocked shots, was fourth in scoring (7.3) and was named to the Great Midwest Athletic Conference’s all-freshman team.
“I know it really isn’t about fun in college basketball, but still I wasn’t having fun,” Madison said the other day. “Ultimately, I just wasn’t happy there.”
But her dad knew that “Don’t Worry Be Happy” mantra comes with a price tag:
“I said, ‘If you’re going to give up a $45,000-a-year scholarship to a top-notch school, we’re going to go down to Sinclair and take a look.’ At first she didn’t want to go, but then we met Coach Jones and we liked her and she made an offer. And Maddie ended up loving it.”
Her mom already had an idea that might happen.
“I graduated from Sinclair in ’87 and I knew there was a place for her there, too,” said Kim, a surgical technician at Dayton’s Heart and Vascular Hospital at Good Samaritan.
As she led the team in scoring and rebounding her one season with the Pride and won all-conference and Academic All-America honors, Madison found that elusive happiness.
“Coach Jones made it fun and the team was really close,” she said. “And it worked out perfectly when I left. I transferred to Wright State for nursing and almost everything transferred over.”
Although she had offers to a few smaller division NCAA schools after Sinclair, she chose to give up basketball.
“With some of those other schools, I would have had to change my major to play, but I knew I wanted to be a nurse,” she said. “It was sad to leave basketball. I miss not having teammates and seeing them every day, but I also knew it was time for me to grow up.”
Since then, Katie, the eldest of the Schroeders’ three girls and the mother of 3-year-old Mason, has also enrolled at Sinclair.
As for Amanda, like Madison she led the GCL in rebounding as a senior and was No. 2 in scoring. She had some offers from small four-year schools but said she was “kind of iffy” on where she was going to go or even if she would play.
Amanda wanted to be a dental hygienist and it was a course of study Sinclair offered, so she was open to the possibility:
“My sister had gone here and she talked to me about it. Then I talked to Coach Jones and I liked her and her staff.
“Coach Jones is a real firecracker. She can be strict and on you and Coach Perk (Trendale Perkins) talks and jokes around and relaxes you. They even each other out and you like playing here.”
As she recruited Amanda, Jones — who played at the University of Dayton after starring at Patterson Co-op — told her she would move her to the wing if she showed she could handle the ball and shoot 3-pointers. The Pride already had Evans and Connally-Banks, two of the better rebounders in junior college basketball, so they needed a big outside threat.
For Amanda, that was a challenge.
“At Carroll I was an inside post player and I never shot threes,” she said. “I was told, ‘We don’t want you shooting outside,’ and I maybe only took 20 (threes) in a whole season.
“So over the summer I worked on my shooting and my ball-handling.”
She made some real strides, Jones said: “She’s shooting great and she’s handling the ball well enough that I’m OK with it. It’s worked out pretty well.”
Alan agreed: “Some people say, ‘Why isn’t Amanda at a bigger school? Why not this? Why not that?’
“But what I tell them is that sometimes a fit is a fit. You can have a $500 pair of shoes, but if they don’t fit what does it matter?
‘Sinclair has been a good fit.”
Changing her game
Alan has always been drawn to athletic competition, be it team sports at Belmont High, Golden Gloves boxing, MMA or the Ironman Triathlon.
Away from his police job — he works primarily in East Dayton — he has coached his daughters’ youth basketball teams and continued to train them later.
“Maddie came to me in her eighth-grade year and said, ‘Dad, I want to make Carroll varsity as a freshman. Do you think I can do it?’ ” he said. “And I asked her, ‘You want me to answer that as a father or a sports person?’
“She said as a sports person, so I said, ‘No, you can’t do it.’
“And she goes, ‘That’s mean.’ And I said, ‘No, you asked and I told you.’
“Well, her mom got mad at me, too. She said, ‘Why did you say that?’
“And I said, ‘Okay, we’ve got a big tournament game coming up later today in Cincinnati. I promise you Maddie will touch the floor 20 times with her knee, her butt and her back in the game.’
“My wife disagreed, but by halftime Maddie had tripped, fell and gotten knocked down again. She still played great, but she was tall and thin.
“And I said, ‘As a freshman playing against seniors, she’ll just get pounded on. She’s not built for that now.’
“But two days later I said, ‘We can make it happen, but we have to hit the gym.’ We went to Lohrey (Recreation Center) and over to Roosevelt and to Carroll. We did some CrossFit training, too, and she did make it as a freshman. She ended up having a good career there.”
With Amanda, the task before Sinclair was turning her into a deadly long-range shooter after a prep career inside.
They went to various gyms — especially the Greater Dayton Recreation Center at Roosevelt Commons on West Third Street — and the plan always was for Amanda to shoot for an hour or longer as her dad rebounded.
“They’re both stubborn. There have been some conflicts,” Kim deadpanned.
Alan nodded: “I’m her rebounder until she gets mad. She thinks I have to rebound every shot, even when the ball bounces right back beside her. If she doesn’t get the ball thrown back perfectly, she’s like, ‘Well, what are you here for?’ ”
Standing outside the Sinclair dressing room after the Wittenberg game the other night, Amanda had a different take. “Sometimes he rolls the ball back to my feet. I have to bend down to get it and when I come back up and shoot, I’m out of sync and miss. Then I get frustrated, too.”
Back near the gym, Alan added a shrug and a grin to a divergent view: “I only take so much disrespect … and then I just leave. Her mom had to pick her up the last time from Roosevelt and Maddie’s probably had to do it 10 times.
“As I go out the door I tell her, ‘I don’t know how you’re getting home. You’re gonna have to call somebody to come get you … or you can just walk home.’”
Sometimes legs aren’t for dropping.
They’re just for walking.
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