Somewhere in Massachusetts, there is a driveway full of kids playing basketball. They’re dribbling, they’re shooting, they’re having fun. … Wait a second. Who’s the tall older guy? Wasn’t he the governor of the state? And now he’s the president of the NCAA?
“I spend tons of time playing basketball in the driveway with the kids in the neighborhood,” Charlie Baker said. “That’s the best part about basketball. All you need is a hoop and a basketball. You don’t even need somebody. I can’t tell you how many games I’ve won with last-second shots on the court in my backyard growing up. You just go out there and play by yourself from one end to the other. There’s not a lot of sports you can do that with.”
Somewhere else in Massachusetts, there is a proud mother whose daughter Sarah was just named Naismith Player of the Year for girls high school basketball. Sarah Strong would seem to have the sport in her blood, but why would anyone be surprised? Her mother is vice president of team operations and organizational growth for the Boston Celtics. And a new member of the NCAA Board of Governors. And before that, a longtime WNBA and international player. And before that, a star at Harvard. And before that, a varsity member of her high school team — in the seventh grade. And before that, the only girl on her team in a boys recreational league.
“The impact in many senses has been immeasurable,” Allison Feaster was saying about the game of basketball. “It’s really been a vehicle for me to grow as a person, to connect with different people across all walks of life around the globe. It’s allowed me to pursue parallel passions in community service and organizational growth and team building. It has really been my life 24/7 on and off the court, all-consuming but at the same time fulfilling in every sense. I don’t mean to be dramatic, but that’s really true.”
Both Baker and Feaster are in leadership roles now, with a connection to college basketball that is official and comes with formal titles. President of the NCAA. Member of the Board of Governors. But the game has been in their hearts long before they sat in an office.
This is Baker, talking about one of the passions of his life.
“The thing I always loved about basketball was because it’s only five people on each team, it’s a really unusual combination of individual effort and collaboration. I always used to say if I played basketball with anybody for 10 minutes I could tell you everything you ever wanted to know about them. I think it’s a sport that, more than almost any other, really gets to the heart of what motivates somebody and what kind of a person somebody is.”
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This is Feaster.
“If you play the game, if you dedicate yourself to the rules of team engagement, you are preparing yourself for — I won’t even say success, but I will say resilience. You are forced to face success, defeat, failure. You’re forced to communicate, you’re forced to sacrifice. I just know I am so well prepared to confront any type of adversity because I have dedicated my life to learning and to playing the game of basketball. I can’t imagine ever being too far away from the game.”
All this started way back for both of them. Why, for instance, is middle schooler Charlie Baker pushing a wheelbarrow full of hot tar through his backyard?
This will take a bit of explanation.
Little Charlie was an avid hockey player in Massachusetts. Then his father got a job in the Nixon administration, and the family was off to Washington, D.C., when he was in the sixth grade. “No hockey, no nothing,” Baker said. “They didn’t even know how to spell hockey.”
So he had to search for a Plan B for a pastime. When he suddenly grew 5 inches, the choice became clear. Of course … basketball. It so happened the kid across the street had a goal in his driveway. “We’d play against each other for hours. Completely unsophisticated, uncoached, undisciplined,” Baker said. “Just two guys whaling away at each other at all hours of the day and night in the driveway.”
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Two years later, the family moved back to Massachusetts, and Baker looked forward to playing in his own driveway. Except his dad wasn’t keen on having to move the car all the time, so he made a deal with his son: He’d give the instructions and have the materials dumped in the driveway, and Charlie could build a court in the backyard.
First came the railroad ties. Then the heavy gravel, then finer gravel, then sandy gravel and finally the hot tar. Baker, his brothers and some friends kept a steady line of wheelbarrows going. Once construction was finished, they painted the court, drew lines, and his father put up hoops on each end. “We had a friggin’ court. We put lights in the trees so we could play at night,” he said. The Baker backyard had everything a New England basketball-loving kid could want, except maybe a parquet court like Boston Garden. “No parquet,” Baker said. “Plenty of dead spots, though.”
One issue early on: The ball kept bouncing into the neighbor’s yard. The solution was to put up fish netting at each end. Perfect. “That meant that that was not out of bounds. We actually learned how to throw passes to each other off of the netting,” Baker said.
“My mother used to joke that she would come home a lot of the time and there’d be all these kids playing in the yard and none of them were hers. We were like an outdoor rec center almost.”
Baker struck up friendships on that court that carried him through his middle school and high school playing days. “I think more than anything is it taught me I could practice as hard as I wanted and I’d get better at certain things and not at others,” he said. “I needed to be OK with that and then figure out how to incorporate that into whatever role I played on the teams that I played with.”
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Then he went to Harvard. Like Feaster, he played at Harvard, just with a tad less renown. Baker was 6-6 and played on the junior varsity team, left the sport as a sophomore but came back as a junior. He appeared in eight varsity games, scored 13 career points. Defense was his forte. Shooting, not so much. Before his senior season, coach Frank McLaughlin asked him in for a little talk.
“People say what lessons did basketball teach you? One of the lessons it taught me was humility,” Baker said. “I think he meant it as a compliment, but he said, ‘Charlie you’re a much better guy than you are a basketball player. I would really like it if you’d help coach the JV team. I swallowed hard and I did that. I had a great time.”
With that, his official playing days were over, but he would never leave the game, not through his years in the health industry and government, not when he was in the Massachusetts governor’s office. And not now. There are always pickup games or shooting contests. Matter of fact, when he was the incoming governor, he had a HORSE game, at the media’s request, with the incoming attorney general, Maura Healey, who also played at Harvard. The battle went to the wire, both with H-O-R-S. “About halfway through it, they made the decision that you have to hit a 3-pointer to win the game,” Baker said. Bad news for the new governor. “She’s a friggin’ guard. She beat me on a 3-pointer.”
Healey is now the governor. No word about any rematch.
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When you’re the governor, you never know when your past might jump up and haunt you. Baker was once doing a call-in show, figuring the subject would be taxes or something. But a caller brought up the time Baker was playing in a big high school game, with his team ahead by 1 point and two seconds left. All that was needed to finish it off was to get the ball inbounds. Baker was the passer, and disaster ensued. An opponent batted down the pass, picked up the ball and scored at the buzzer to win. “I still wish I had that one back,” Baker says now.
About that court in the backyard. When the family moved, the new residents wanted to replace it with something else and figured it would be an easy job with a front-end loader to dredge up the tar. They didn’t know about the railroad ties, or the labor of love that gave birth to that court. It had been put down to stay. The back wheels of the front-end loader came off the ground on the first attempt. Turned out to be a major excavation effort, and the owner once said it cost him more to get rid of the court than to build something new on top of it.
“It’s not there anymore,” Baker said. “But I’m very proud of the fact that getting rid of it was a nightmare for somebody.”
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For little Allison Feaster growing up in South Carolina, basketball became a big deal about the first time she tried to dribble one. “I think my first role model was my big brother, who was a great shooter, and I wanted to be like him,” she said. “Later it was Dominique Wilkins. It was, I would say, love at first sight.”
Any place there was a neighborhood game, she’d be there, never mind if she were the only girl. Her game developed, as well as her grit and her horizons. Quickly. How many other seventh graders do you know who played on their high school varsity team?
“It was a culture shock because obviously the girls were doing drastically different things than I was as a seventh grader. I wasn’t driving, I wasn’t allowed to date,” she said. “For me it was learning to play a different style of basketball at a different level and also really focus in on my studies. I was obviously the little sister of the group.
“That was one of the earliest moments of having to adapt and be flexible, just learning a different culture. That’s obviously a skill that has served me throughout my career because I would have many iterations of doing the same thing.”
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When it came time to pick a college, she was attracted to Cambridge, Massachusetts. “I wanted to go to Harvard because it wasn’t a basketball school,” she said. “The many things that drew me to Harvard, basketball wasn’t at the top of the list. To really be challenged outside of our comfort zones, to grow in all senses. That experience was, believe or not, the ultimate of being challenged. It was about growth, it was about leaning into the sisterhood we had there. And still we managed to win.”
To help ends meet, Feaster worked two part-time jobs in the basketball office and the mailroom delivering campus mail. More lessons.
“It was a way to connect and meet people,” she said. “You’re building great habits for the future, developing the work ethic and just the mentality of making things happen when you need to make them happen.”
Lots of things happened for her in basketball. Four-time All-Ivy League honors, three-time conference player of the year, the nation’s leading scorer her senior season with a 28.5-point average. “I don’t think I really leaned into it or embraced it at the time,” she said of that last feat. “I thought it was not sustainable. There was no way I could sustain scoring nearly 30 points a game. We were just chugging along playing our roles, trying to win games.”
Harvard went into the 1998 NCAA tournament as a No. 16 seed her senior season and was sent across the continent to play No. 1 seed Stanford in Palo Alto. Stanford had two starters injured, but still. The Cardinal were home, and no No. 1 seed had ever lost to a No. 16, either gender. Except Stanford did, 71-67, with 35 points and 13 rebounds from Feaster. Two decades before UMBC famously shocked Virginia on the men’s side, the Harvard women got there first.
“The memory of the game, no. I don’t really remember that experience,” she said. “The preparation that went into it, yes. It’s very vivid in my mind. The preparation, the team, the chemistry, the season. Reliving that with the Harvard women’s basketball community is probably one of the greatest memories I have as an amateur or professional athlete. That’s the beauty of the NCAA tournament. That’s what the tournament’s all about.”
Later would come a successful career in the WNBA and overseas, and then a move into the front office, always with basketball at her center. She has watched with delight how the women’s college game has taken quantum leaps in popularity.
“I have such elation well beyond satisfaction that women are finally getting their just due,” she said. “When I think about the attention, the respect, the praise, the legitimization of women’s sports, it gives me comfort to know that my daughter is about to go through what hopefully will be one of the most amazing moments in her life.”
Sarah Strong played for Grace Christian School in North Carolina and now has the high school Naismith Award on her resume and a college choice to make soon. It all must be especially wondrous for Feaster, both with a mother’s love and a life given to the game.
So one question. Any mother-daughter games to report?
“No. She’s bigger, stronger, faster and I am well beyond my playing days. It’s her time,” Feaster said.
Not even a game of HORSE?
“Not even that.”
Probably just as well. Look what happened to Baker against his attorney general.
