March Madness has us thinking about threes, dunks, and triple-doubles… but March is also Women’s History Month, so we’re thinking about basketball in a slightly different way. So we've got two stories all about women's basketball. This episode was hosted by Sarah Jane Johnson. Storytellers: Toya Chester tries to score 1000 points in her college basketball career. Dame Wilburn learns how to play basketball. Podcast # 912 To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Full Episode
Welcome to the Moth Podcast. I'm Sarah Jane Johnson, and on this episode, women's basketball. March Madness has us thinking about threes, dunks, and triple doubles, but March is also Women's History Month, so we're thinking about basketball in a slightly different way.
We're thinking about Title IX, how women athletes are still fighting to get the same respect that men are, and about all the great March Madness moments that women created, from Charlotte Smith's buzzer beater in 1994 to Candace Parker's epic first time dunking in the tournament, to Kaitlyn Clark reigning threes, we want to highlight how incredible sports can be for everyone.
So we've got two stories all about hoop dreams and what happens when they come true or don't. Whether you're rooting for South Carolina, UConn, or my alma mater, LSU, go Tigers! We hope you'll enjoy. First up is Toya Chester. Toya told this at a Boston main stage where the theme of the night was on thin ice.
A note that this story was told in 2020 and due to our reduced socially distanced audience, things are a little quieter than you might be used to. Here's Toya live at the Moth.
So I grew up in what I thought was a decently sized town in central Massachusetts. I say decently sized because unlike most of the cities around me, we had a high school, we had Searstown Mall, and we had traffic lights. Now, my family was the first family to settle in my town after slavery, so all the black families, most of them, we were related.
But the Chesters, I'm a Chester, we were known for something different. We were athletes. And as stereotypical as that sounds, it's true. I myself played softball, soccer, and basketball. I couldn't go anywhere with my grandfather without someone coming up and yelling, hey Chet! Shooting stories about back in the day and asking me, do you know how great he was? Of course I know how great he was.
I heard the story of him running the track meet and then hopping the fence to go and hit a home run in the baseball game before the track meet was even over. I was proud and I knew that I had a legacy to uphold. Basketball was my sport and my grandfather knew that. He bought me a basketball hoop, he set it up at his house. He didn't play with me, it's my grandfather.
But he tried to show me a few moves here and there, the hook shot, I never mastered that one. But basketball was everything to me. It was the early 2000s, it was a real culture for me and my friends. Me and my best friend, Taylor, we would ride her bike. Well, she pedaled. I sat on the handlebars. And we would go down to the park, and we would challenge the boys to a little two-on-two pickup.
When we got a little older, you know, we were trying to be cute. We'd wear the jersey dresses. It was an actual dress, but a basketball jersey. It was our life. And, you know, everything, basketball was everything to me. So one time, my mom, she took me to New York City, and we went to the NBA store. I had never seen anything like this.
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