Read Online In My Skin by Brittney Griner - Free Book Online

dunk. I averaged 22 points and almost 11 rebounds and 6 blocks a game that season. And by the end of the spring, I had grown to six foot six.
    I was feeling pretty good about my body. I was getting stronger, and being an athlete gave me a sense of focus. It’s crazy: the same thing that got me picked on in middle school—my body—was now a plus for me, just because I played basketball. So I wasn’t, like, “Oh my God, I wish I would stop growing!” I was okay with it, especially because I wasn’t in physical pain anymore. All throughout the seventh and eighth grades, I had tremendous pains. My knees ached so badly I would cry. Even if I just lightly bumped something, I would feel a sharp jolt that put me in tears. Meanwhile, I had no idea it was growing pains. Pretty ironic, right? With all the other crap that was happening in middle school, all the emotional agony, here I was in physical pain, too. My dad actually took me to the doctor in eighth grade to have everything checked out, to see why I was growing so quickly and make sure I didn’t have any kind of disease or a tumor pressing on my pituitary gland. They did all sorts of tests, and everything was fine. My growth plates were just wide open. The doctor said, “Yeah, she’s going to grow a lot.” My dad is six two and my mom is five eight, and the doctor predicted I’d be around six three. (Wrong!) The funny thing is, the pain in my knees stopped when I got to ninth grade, but that’s when I really shot up fast.
    THE SUMMER AFTER my sophomore year, I switched AAU teams and played for DFW Elite in Dallas. The Hotshots didn’t really travel outside Houston, and I wanted tougher competition. DFW Elite was sponsored by Nike and was one of the top AAU teams in the country, so we went to all the major events, like the Nike National Invitational Tournament in Chicago. A bunch of my future Baylor teammates played on that squad: Odyssey Sims, Brooklyn Pope, Jordan Madden, Kimetria Hayden, and Makenzie Robertson. Anyone who knows anything about women’s college hoops knows that Makenzie is Kim Mulkey’s daughter. So you can imagine all the buzz that created, with people saying Kim had an unfair recruiting advantage. I didn’t know much about the recruiting process and how it all worked, but I had seen and heard enough to know I wanted to avoid all the craziness you read about—the phone calls and texts from lots of schools, the pressure of weighing the pros and cons of different programs, the campus visits, the media speculation. I had enough drama in my life already. The last thing I needed was a parade of coaches in my head.

“BIG GIRL IS COMING TO BAYLOR!”
    I f I hadn’t gone to Baylor, I probably would have chosen Texas A&M or maybe Tennessee. But that’s all hypothetical, because the truth is that I only had eyes for Baylor. Once I really started paying attention to colleges, during my sophomore season at Nimitz, I began to realize how many things about Baylor I liked. One of my good friends on the Houston Hotshots, Kelli Griffin, had decided to play there. She was two years ahead of me, so I already knew a little bit about the school. The location was perfect for me; Waco is only three hours from Houston, and I liked the small-town feel of it and the compact size of the campus. I knew Baylor assistant coach Damion McKinney because he had previously been involved with my AAU program in Dallas, DFW Elite. He’s an awesome dude, and I felt really comfortable around him. I liked Kim, too. I had a decent sense of her personality just from being around Makenzie with the AAU squad and watching the two of them interact. I saw some of the same traits in Kim that I saw in my dad—they’re both intense, tough-talking authority types—and even though I resented how strict, how overwhelming, my dad could be, I was also used to putting up with it. And from what I could tell, Kim