RALEIGH, N.C. — RALEIGH, N.C. - Angel McCoughtry is writing a book. The Louisville senior has been working on it all season, in fact. The working title is "The Angel Who Wanted to B-more," she says, and it'll be an inspirational tome about a girl who grows up in Baltimore, overcomes challenges and hardships and eventually leads her college basketball team deep into the NCAA tournament.
She carries the book around on a flash drive, the file ready to be updated whenever inspiration strikes. McCoughtry says it's almost finished, but even she isn't quite sure how it'll end.
Ideally, she says, the happy ending writes itself, beginning with the Raleigh Regional final Monday night against top seed Maryland. The winner advances to the Final Four, which begins next weekend in St. Louis.
For McCoughtry, it's the culmination of an unlikely journey, one that included a missed opportunity out of high school, a challenging year of prep school and an opportunity from a university she had barely even heard of.
"It's funny how things work out in life," McCoughtry, a versatile 6-foot-1 forward, said yesterday.
Years before Roi McCoughtry became head pastor at Holy Nation Tabernacle, he was a basketball star himself at Coppin State, a 6-5 center with a good jump shot. In Angel, Roi and his wife, Sharon, had a capricious child, one who didn't like the word "no" and often brought her mother to tears.
"I'm sort of a quiet, laid-back person, and I thought I'd have a quiet, laid-back child," Sharon said. "But she was just the opposite. If I told her, 'Let's do this,' she'd do the opposite. Now that I realize, she had all that energy for a reason; it just had to be channeled into something."
Basketball became the perfect outlet. Growing up in Baltimore's Northwood neighborhood, there was always a game nearby for a teenage McCoughtry. It usually meant playing against boys, though older, quicker and tougher.
"One thing I did hate was when [my dad] was like, 'Come in before dark,' " McCoughtry said. "Well, that's when the pickup games got good, when it was getting dark. The lights would come on and I had to come home. I would always get in trouble because I would always come home late."
McCoughtry starred at St. Frances, making a name for herself as one of the top female high school players to come out of Baltimore. She was named All-Metro Player of the Year as a junior and committed to St. John's during her senior season.
