Long before I moved to the Lake City in 2004, I wasn’t well known in Warsaw in the 1998-99 school year. I was better known in Milford where I lived and worked, but when I would help at Edgewood Middle School’s basketball games and track meets, I was “Mrs. Davenport’s husband, Chip.”
I already knew some of these ladies being honored tonight in the Tiger Den, though, when they set foot on the basketball court at Edgewood Middle School as seventh-grade hoopsters in the 1998-99 school year when my wife coached her second season of basketball at Edgewood.
Shawna Davenport, my wife, spent her first eleven school years as a public-school educator at Edgewood Middle School beginning in the 1997-98 school year. She also coached eighth-grade girls’ track and field in her first two years on the Warsaw Community School District’s payroll.
I accompanied Shawna at as many games as I could to keep stats not recorded on the official book: rebounds, turnovers, assists, and blocked shots specifically. I also kept official book for Edgewood’s eighth-grade girls’ team in Shawna’s second year of coaching since I was already in place, a captive audience in the gym or on the road.
I was more excited to see some of these kids’ contributions to each of their patches on a fable quilt my wife and mother-in-law sewed together than I was about the ballgames. It was a “big deal” type of language arts assignment for these seventh-grade students.
As far as basketball was concerned, I didn’t serve in any capacity as an assistant coach to Shawna. I did, however, fill in other “go-fer” roles.
While some folks will remember accomplishments among tonight’s 2004 IHSAA state runner-up honorees on the court during their storied state finals season, I, on the other hand helped basketball parents change flat tires and provided post-game snacks for the kids.
It’s clear to those who know me and to those who’ve met me I know no strangers. Shawna’s presence, and her athletic 5’9” frame in those early school years, however, were more magnetic among students and parents than my easygoing, friendly demeanor.
Little did I know in the 1998-99 Edgewood basketball season that Jaclyn (Leininger) Scott, Holly (Durcholz) Gaskins, two Edgewood seventh graders, would be part of the aforementioned Lady Tigers’ IHSAA Class 4A state runner-up squad.
Area parents were already talking about Leininger being a woman among girls’ when she entered middle school in Fall, 1998. Even so, I witnessed, in the previous year helping Shawna, the sharpshooting eighth grader from Milford Junior High named Shanna Zolman shred a very solid Edgewood eighth-grade team that still managed to capture their middle school conference title in the 1997-98 season.
Zolman’s Wawasee Warrior career grossed record-setting ticket revenues for her high school athletic department. A game where she was on pace to set the girls’ basketball state scoring record almost filled North Side Gym in Elkhart. She went on to hold the girls’ IHSAA scoring record before landing a scholarship at Tennessee and being selected in the WNBA draft in turn.
Zolman was a unicorn, and Leininger spent her middle school and high school years turning heads and racking up impressive stats while the hottest spotlights were on Zolman in Leininger’s first two high school seasons.
Let’s return to the late 1990s, please.
Shawna Davenport chose the wheel offense in 1997 when she was asked to coach seventh grade basketball before she had any idea area fans had already seen coaching legend Bill Patrick run it for Whitko and (eventually) Tippecanoe Valley high schools’ programs.
My wife’s draw to it was the movement of players, multiple pass options affording easy baskets, and the biggest flaw in human nature among most adolescent athletes.
The latter, she told me, was the most attractive feature of the wheel.
“Have you seen any 12- to 14-year-old kid want to play tight defense for more than 30 seconds?” Shawna asked me rhetorically. “We’ll wear them out and score easy buckets.”
Shawna’s first seventh-grade team had no outside shooters like Leininger, and those girls won more games than they did as eighth graders because the wheel allowed them to wear down opponents. Her first team was more athletic than the team Leininger and Durcholz led, but their shooting skills were limited to mid-range and inside buckets.
The second season, however, was comprised of not only Leininger (Miss Outside) and Durcholz (Miss Inside), but also Audrey Evans and Ashley Mauk – two guards with completely different personalities who could see the court among several other “very good kids.”
Leininger was clearly the most talented player on the court, but it was Mauk, the point guard, who if she were to ever decide, in a bizarre analogy, a random game day was Easter Sunday she was going to have each teammate coloring and hunting for eggs.
Those kids embraced the wheel offense in a level of play where Leininger could have just run her opponents ragged from coast to coast en route to their 1999 middle school conference title, but they weren’t even the toast of the county in the realm of middle school girls’ basketball.
The Valley Vikings, instead, with kids in the same grade as Leininger who could play just about any position on the court, had not – according to conjecture – lost a single middle school game, and moved on to solid high school careers, too.
I believe to this day, Leininger’s humble personality stems from her middle school and early high school days where she performed well but wasn’t the talk of the town.
Roger Grossman mentioned Rebekah Parker was considered the best player in the area, whose Vikings beat our Lady Tiger honorees in their season opener in the 2003-04 campaign.
Despite the huge spotlight on Zolman had nearly all to herself in Leininger’s freshman and sophomore seasons, and Valley’s vaunted class of 2004 hoopsters during the junior and senior seasons, it was Leininger who quietly made her way through her senior season to earn Indiana’s Miss Basketball.
Leininger – on the hardwood - didn’t flex, didn’t strut, didn’t gesture, and if she had even talked any smack on the court, it certainly wasn’t audible, nor reflective of her body language.
Things changed through the years.
Shawna stepped away from coaching for years upon the birth of Ellen (our oldest) and some immediate major maxillofacial surgery requiring her to avoid airborne objects and collisions with athletes. She earned two master’s degrees, left Edgewood Middle School in 2008 to take assistant principal/athletic director roles at the middle school level before an eventual return to the classroom with none other than tonight’s vaunted girls’ basketball opponent’s school district, Northridge.
My wife has been coaching middle school boys’ and girls’ sprinters and hurdlers and teaching seventh grade language arts at Northridge Middle School since 2019.
When I take my seat in the usual east baseline section of the Tiger Den tonight when some of these ladies are honored, my wife will have two distinct generations of athletes and students from Warsaw, and from Northridge, who only knew me then - or only know me now - as Mrs. Davenport’s husband, Chip.
Far more important than the final score tonight, is my hope that the evening makes Shawna’s heart happy, and she privately enjoys the energy in the Tiger Den on a different level for different reasons I couldn’t have imagined would happen 25 years ago.
Tonight, I’m not on the PA mic, and I’m not on the radio. I’m just….