Laney Clement-Holbrook: An appreciation.

Oliver Ames' girls coach Laney Clement-Holbrook has retired. (Boston Herald photo)

Laney Clement-Holbrook was the coach of the Oliver Ames High School girls' basketball team for 47 years, and while she did not coach a team from the circulation area of my former newspaper, I will always consider her one of the individuals most responsible for prodding me to become an advocate for the equalization of coverage of boys' and girls' high school sports.

Ms. Clement-Holbrook, 68, confirmed reports on Wednesday that she had retired from her position, mere days after leading the Tigers to their third state championship under her leadership. There's no better way to retire than going out on top, and she certainly deserved it.

But why, you ask, do I consider her so instrumental in a facet of my career? Let me tell the story.

Many, many years ago, she called the newspaper one day and gave me an earful about what she believed to be unfair coverage of a state tournament game between her team and one of the teams we covered on a regular basis. And she had every right to make that call.

Memories fade a little after time, but I believe the game in question was either in 1978 or 1979, very early in my career as a full-time writer and editor for The Sun Chronicle. It was, I think, between Oliver Ames and Seekonk, and the writer we sent to the game (I didn't cover it) returned to the office thoroughly disgusted with the low-scoring affair and determined to get that point across in the story he would write about it.

It was my responsibility to edit the copy for publication, and had I approached it with a little more maturity and experience under my belt, I would have located the offending passages and edited them out to present a more benign description of the contest. One of our cardinal rules for most of my tenure there was to be fair and forgiving toward high school athletes because they were not pros and were not to be held to standards and expectations of those playing the sport for money. But because I was young and a little overwhelmed by the task of editing other writers' copy on deadline at the time, I let the story go with only basic grammatical corrections.

The next day, after the newspaper hit the stands, I got the phone call from Laney. She was not pleased. She picked out every single passage that was too damning to the athletes or the sport of girls' basketball in general and repeated them over the phone in an equally damning tone -- one that chillingly reminded me of getting chewed out by Sister Mary Rita during a moment of misbehavior in sixth grade at Dominican Academy in Plainville.

I tried to mount a half-hearted defense of the story, saying that we're paid to accurately reflect the events in the games we cover, not to sugarcoat them. But Laney wasn't buying it. Neither was I after a while, although I was loathe to admit it to her. I re-read the story in print during the course of the phone call and realized that there were several ways that I could have rewritten the story to make it reflect the lesser quality of the game without turning it into a complete damnation of girls' basketball as a whole.

So I just basically shut up and let Laney have her say. When she hung up, I figured she was someone who would never speak to me again -- by her choice. Then maybe an hour later, I got a call from the other coach in that game, Seekonk's Dorene Menezes, who made the same points and expressed the same anger. This time, all I could do was grunt "uh-huh" several times out of a sense of resignation, and then ask contritely at the end if she would still call in her scores after every game.

The scoldings did have a positive effect. It reminded me of another incident earlier in my life when I failed to show the proper respect for a female athlete's desire for equal treatment -- my high school sweetheart, at the time the center of the Mansfield High girls' basketball team, who asked me one day why I never covered any of her games for the weekly Mansfield News. 

"It's only girls' basketball," I said. The look of hurt on her face was something I will never forget, although it still took me another five years or so to actually get the point.

Following those phone calls, I made a point to give girls' sports more of an even break in the pages of The Sun Chronicle. It took a while to get everyone on board with the plan, probably because it was essentially doubling our workload to give the same coverage to both genders, but Peter Gobis and I embarked upon the noble crusade by the end of that decade, maybe seven or eight years after Title IX made it federal law preventing discrimination by schools or colleges against women athletes. And the equalization of coverage is one of the things of which I'm proudest -- even if a lot of knuckle-dragging male sports fans rejected our efforts under the mistaken notion that we were taking something away from our coverage of the boys' teams.

Over the years, Laney Clement-Holbrook noticed. She welcomed Sun Chronicle coverage of Oliver Ames even though it wasn't as regular as it was for the 10 schools we did cover on a regular basis. And along the way, Laney and I became friends, with great mutual respect for what the other had accomplished.

Laney won three state titles for OA and shepherded many great athletes through their careers. But it wasn't all sweetness and light for her there.

Occasionally I would hear stories about parental discontent in the ranks, which is not surprising. There are still a lot of parents out there who don't understand that basketball is a team sport and that it's the job of the coach to find the right personnel combinations and win games. Sports are meritocracies. You earn your playing time by what you do every day in games and practice. If you can't start, it's an athlete's responsibility to work harder and either earn more playing time, or find ways to make their teammates better. There are no guarantees of playing time, nor should there ever be. And it's not the job of Mommy or Daddy to storm into the offices of the athletic director and demand a coach's firing because their little Joanie with suspect skills isn't playing as much as the kid pumping 17 points through the bucket in every game.

But Laney persevered. She won 733 games to set a state record for girls' basketball, and was a pioneer and a tireless advocate for the tenets of Title IX. And how she was able to endure the slings and arrows of 47 seasons at the helm is further testimony to her grit. 

I sent her an email yesterday congratulating her on her retirement and telling her that getting away from the daily stress can be like a Fountain of Youth. But I suspect she will remain close to basketball (as I have). It's in her blood. It's part of her. And everyone that watched what she did or participated in her program is better for it.