After the Last Buzzer

In February 2016, I began a five-week, 5,400-mile road trip around the eastern half of the United States to visit most of my former Davidson College women’s basketball teammates and coaches and begin interviewing them for The Rebounders. I called this research trip the After the Last Buzzer Project, because I focused on what my teammates are doing now, after the last game buzzer of our college careers, several years after our graduation from Davidson. These strong, smart, beautiful women are graduate school students and mothers, homeowners and engineers and teachers and activists and world travelers.

My teammates and I didn’t grow up thinking we would make millions by playing basketball professionally someday. That’s a thought little boys can have that little girls often don’t really have, because the options for women to be professional athletes are rarely as lucrative as they are for men. So all along, as high school and collegiate athletes, we had to be planning our next steps, preparing for life after the last buzzer. The After the Last Buzzer Project attempts to add some nuance and context to the conversation we have about female athletes -- and, by extension, women.

You can visit After the Last Buzzer here: 

After the last buzzer

and

#AfterTheLastBuzzer

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I made the following stops over the course of the project:

Baltimore, Maryland

Pentagon City, Fairfax, Orange, and Roanoke, Virginia

Winston-Salem and Davidson, North Carolina

Atlanta, Georgia

Birmingham, Alabama

New Orleans, Louisiana

San Antonio and Denton, Texas

Lincoln, Nebraska

Minneapolis, Minnesota

Cleveland, Ohio

Boston, Massachusetts

New Wilmington, Pennsylvania