In the fall of 2004, Angel McCoughtry's parents weaved through Blue Ridge mountain roads as they took their daughter to her new life at the Patterson School in Lenoir, N.C.
Their goal was for Angel - who begins her WNBA career Saturday when the Atlanta Dream plays host to the Indiana Fever - to immerse herself in schoolwork at the secluded prep school and become academically eligible to play college basketball the next year.
But the 17-year-old found it hard not to focus on what she had left behind. There were her friends and family in Baltimore, where she had grown up playing basketball at St. Frances and with boys on an elementary school court in the Northwood neighborhood. There were her dreams, now dashed, of playing for the University of Maryland, which concluded that her game hadn't progressed enough to be a Terp.
The homesick McCoughtry said she sometimes cried that year when she was alone in her dormitory room. But today - two months after a stellar career at Louisville was capped by being selected No. 1 in the WNBA draft by Atlanta - McCoughtry, 22, says her turbulent year in the Blue Ridge foothills was worth the heartache.
Nothing since then has been as trying, says McCoughtry, whose team visits the Washington Mystics on Sunday afternoon at Verizon Center. Or as empowering. She said she learned for the first time that she could survive, even flourish, on her own, hundreds of miles from home.
"I lived in a room [at Patterson] with no TV, and I remember just staring at the walls," McCoughtry says. "But it made me more mature."
McCoughtry, a rugged, 6-foot-1 forward with a knack for defense and inside scoring, went on to a Louisville program that had not advanced beyond the second round of the NCAA tournament. She became the school's all-time leading scorer and rebounder, leading the Cardinals to a victory over Maryland in the Elite Eight last season. Louisville fell to unbeaten Connecticut, 76-54, in the national title game.
If she gained solace from beating top-seeded Maryland, McCoughtry wasn't letting on. "I had really wanted to go there," she says. But she said the stakes were so high for Louisville - the chance to advance to the Final Four - that she focused more on winning than on proving a point.
Her father, Roi, head pastor at Holy Nation Tabernacle Church, recalls Maryland coach Brenda Frese once telling Angel that "her jump shot was not where it should be. Brenda was keeping it real with me."
