CANYON, TEXAS — Last Sunday in the MIAA championship, Ida Edwards hesitated as she drove to the basket, cupping the ball in her left hand, and then exploding past a Washburn defender.
Edwards was having an unusually off night. The league leader in field goal percentage, she made only 5-of-17 shots. Her worst shooting of the year in maybe the biggest game. The Lady Hornets played from behind from the start.
Every bounce, every break was going Washburn’s way. And then, right as Edwards went up to score, came the whistle.
The call: Carrying.
Edwards turned around in disbelief, eyes wide, mouthing, “What?”
As Edwards readied herself to argue the call, she thought better of it. She dropped the ball, ran back down the court, and prepared to play defense.
“Good. Oh that was good,” says Caroyln Edwards, Ida’s mom, as she’s retold the story.
“Because in the past, she’s known for doing that. She says she doesn’t do it, but I see it. I would have seen a time where that call, when she got that call, she would have argued with the referee. She would have argued with him. She would have actually argued with him about that call. But, I’m so glad. With that look, if that’s all she did was just give him a look, that was wonderful.”
Emporia State plays Saint Mary’s in the first round of the NCAA South Central Regional today in Canyon, Texas, and Ida Edwards, as she’s always been, will be the most talented player in the gym.
Ida jumps higher than any player on the court (Earlier this year a ball got stuck in the rim. As the referees went to get another ball to knock the game ball loose, Ida jumped up and knocked it out). Ida is always the best rebounder (she had 19 boards twice this season), best shot blocker (at Missouri Southern, Ida came from the weak side, jumped from behind a teammate and blocked shots three times), and unquestionably the best athlete.
Last week in the semifinals of the MIAA tournament, Ida dribbled into traffic directly at a defender, stopped on a dime and in one motion spun quickly past the hip of the defender and laid the ball in at the front of the rim. It was a move, ESU assistant coach Jory Collins says, that women should not be able to make.
“Me playing with her, if I’m going to guard her, I’ve got to bring it like I’m playing guys,” Collins says. “If you go in there thinking you’re going to play with her just because she’s a girl, then she’s going to make you look stupid. She’s got that kind of ability.”
Teammate Lacy Corker says, “Even if Ida has her worst game, it’s still probably better than half the people on our team’s best game.”
But unlike the past, Ida’s worst game is a rare occurrence.
“This year I have bad moments,” Ida says. “I don’t have bad games.”
At her fourth college, a sixth-year senior, Ida’s play and passion has finally met her talent.
But before you understand the new Ida, you must meet the old Ida.
***
Ida Edwards’ bad habits — and she would pick up plenty — started in her hometown of Yazoo, Miss.
Yazoo is a small town, where everybody knows everybody, and everybody especially knows the star of the basketball team.
It didn’t take long to label Ida as a star. She started playing varsity as an eighth grader, and she immediately loved the game — as Carolyn says, “Ida would rather play ball than eat” — but she didn’t respect it.
Ida’s high school coach would let her get away with just about anything. She could be late to practice with no repercussions. She could skip practice if she wanted, while her teammates would get punished for doing the same.
“In high school, you’re good and you really don’t have to work as hard to be good,” she says. “I still had that type of attitude as I could do this and I’ll still get coaches to look at me.”
Ida’s carefree attitude translated to the classroom, where she did just enough to get by, an approach that would come back to haunt her.
“I hated that,” Carolyn says. “And then there was a lot of peer pressure on her, because she was really smart, but some of her teammates were not. And if you ask me, at that time, she was being a follower and not a leader. So she wanted to fit in so she didn’t do the aides, because her friends weren’t doing the aides. They were struggling in the classroom. She definitely didn’t want to stand out. That’s the only thing I could think of, when you’re able to do things and you don’t do it.”
Despite her indifference to her studies and sometimes practice, Ida played herself into a scholarship at the University of Kentucky, where she would never step foot on campus.
***
Ida is asked to tell the story of how she got to Emporia State. “Whew,” Ida says and smiles. “You want to know the whole story?”
She started at Holmes Community College, nearby Yazoo in Goodman, Miss. Her test scores and grades were not good enough to qualify at Kentucky, and the junior college route was her only chance to keep playing ball.
“I was pretty bummed about it,” she says. “My momma gave me a hard time about it. Of course, she was preaching to me the whole time, ‘I don’t have all the time in the world,’ which I think I do, she tells me. My mom, she always preached books first. It was always books first before basketball.”
After her freshman season, the Holmes coach left for Pensacola Junior College in Florida and Ida followed. Ida was the star, got all the preferential treatment, and again the top schools came calling.
Louisiana Tech, a D-I women’s basketball power, wanted Ida. She visited, loved it and signed during the visit.
But once again, Ida’s studies stood in her way. She didn’t qualify, and was forced to go Division II. She signed with West Texas A&M, and a semester later she would have to transfer again, but not because of her studies.
West Texas A&M’s assistant coach Brett Schneider recruited Ida to play for his dad, then-head coach Bob Schneider. Bob is Emporia State coach Brandon Schneider’s dad.
That summer, in 2006, Bob retired and it was expected that Brett would take over as head coach. The school decided to go another way, and Ida decided she didn’t want to play for another coach.
Brett gave Ida his brother Brandon’s number. After spending the fall semester at West Texas A&M, Ida transferred to Emporia State.
***
Carolyn could tell by her phone calls with Ida that she was not happy in Emporia.
“She had some things to say about the weather, the town,” Carolyn remembers.
“She exaggerated about the size of the town, because she told me it was just a town, just a small little town with nothing to do. Of course when I got there and she took me a couple places, I realized this town is two or three times bigger than where Ida came from.”
Mostly, though, Ida grew impatient waiting to play. Because she transferred, Ida could only practice and she would have to wait a year before she could play in a game.
After getting off the phone with Ida, Carolyn would pray that her daughter would stay in Emporia and give the school a chance.
“The way she complained about Emporia the first year, I was just biting my fingernails,” Carolyn says. “I was hoping she wouldn’t say, ‘Momma, I don’t think I’m going back.’
“I didn’t want to force her to let me make the decision, saying, ‘No, you’re not going to move. We’re not transferring again.’ I didn’t want to do that. I wanted to, but I knew I couldn’t, because like I said, if it would have ended up where something happened at the school or she didn’t end up doing what she wanted to do there it would have been my fault because I forced her to be there.”
Ida’s immaturity was evident to her coaches. Collins, who Ida followed to Emporia State from West Texas, said Ida had issues handling her responsibilities in her personal life. She struggled with finances and remembering to pay rent.
“She’d never had to do that before on her own,” he said.
Ida also had to adjust to being held accountable on and off the court. She would go easy on sprints or play lazy in practice, and Schneider would not allow it like her coaches in the past had done.
“Brandon, if he sees anything you’re doing, he doesn’t hold back on his words,” Ida says. “Whether you’re good or not, he’s going to let you know what you’re doing wrong.”
Ida thought playing in games would be the cure all. But when she finally took the court in the middle of last season, she had not broken her old habits.
“I mean I had bad games last year where if I lost my composure, it’d be for the whole game,” she says. “There was no coming out of that. ... I missed some shots last year or things didn’t go my way or the referee would make a call, and I was down the whole game. I couldn’t come out of that.”
Ida would show her talent in some games. She made 10-of-12 shots and scored 20 points at Northwest Missouri. And then she would give up in others. A week later against Northwest Missouri, she scored two points and had five turnovers in 15 minutes.
“She didn’t handle adversity very well, whether it was in practice or in games,” Schneider says. “Keeping her poise and composure. Those are things we’ve really had to work on. Playing on both ends of the floor are things that we really had to spend a lot of time watching a lot of film, getting on her butt in practice and just never letting up.
“Ida I think respects our staff for the fact that we are going to coach, and we’re going to coach, and we’re not going to let her get away with anything even though she’s one of the more talented players in the league and that we’ve had. She knows that we care about her. And when you care about somebody, then you hold them accountable.”
***
Last year, here in Canyon, Texas, Ida was having a bad game in the Regional semifinals, one of those games where she would eventually just give up.
“We were down against Northwest in the semifinals, their post player she was kicking my butt for a minute,” Ida says. “She scored back to back on me, and I was down about it. We went into halftime down. They had the momentum. I was down on myself bad in the locker room, and I knew it was hurting the team because obviously she was scoring.”
Ida’s teammates encouraged her at halftime, told her they needed her in the second half. They could not win the game without her.
“We came out the second half and my defense was better and I think at that point I realized that the team counted on me for a lot of things, not just points but defense and rebounding and everything,” Ida says. “I kind of came out at that point.”
It was here in Canyon, one year ago where Ida finally had her breakthrough.
The Lady Hornets would come back to beat Northwest Missouri, thanks to a big second half from Ida. They would lose to Washburn in the Regional final, and Schneider remembers Ida being really hurt after scoring only eight points.
“We had a conversation about that, and I knew that she wanted to come back and have a good year,” he says. “She was disappointed in how that thing ended. She’s come back this year and Ida knows that I trust her to be in the foxhole now. I don’t have to worry about her. She’s going to be there. I can trust her, and I know she’s going to quote-unquote have my back. That’s something I couldn’t have said a year ago about her.”
With Michelle Stueve, Emporia State’s all-time leading scorer gone, the Lady Hornets became Ida’s team this year. She would win all the awards: MIAA player of the year, All-conference, All-Region, a candidate for All-American. But more important than anything, Ida won her teammates trust.
Instead of going half speed, she’s the leader of the pack in sprints.
Instead of pointing fingers when things are going poorly, Ida’s teammates say she’s the one encouraging them to keep going.
When Pittsburg State rallied from double digits this year and took a second-half lead, Edwards got in the middle of the huddle during a timeout.
Clapping, she looked her teammates in the eyes, and said, “Y’all, we’ve been in this situation before. We all right. We all right.”
Emporia State came back to win on a last-second shot from Cassondra Boston.
“We’ve had times this year where teams have come back on us, and I could have just stopped,” Ida says. “I think my composure and my body language and all that, it kind of wears down on the team. Once the team sees I have given up, it wears down on them. ... I think once the team saw that, we were still up. They still had confidence we could win, and they didn’t see that last year. I would have given up with three minutes left on the clock. The old me would have given up once they took the lead.”
***
On the weekend of senior night, Carolyn Edwards made her first trip to Emporia to watch Ida play for the first time since her junior college days.
Ida showed her mom Emporia. They went shopping on Saturday, all leading up to the game against Fort Hays State.
Ida couldn’t wait for her mom to see her play. That used to be all she would talk about on the phone every week.
But before they headed to White Auditorium, Ida gave her mom a tour that would not have taken place in Ida’s first year at Emporia State. She took her mom to see the campus.
After completing a 12-week internship this summer, Ida will graduate from Emporia State with a recreation degree.
“I actually think how you say it goes in one ear and out the other, she’s finally making me think that she was actually listening to some of those conversations I had with her,” Carolyn says. “Because she’s just as talented off the court in the classroom as she is on the court. She is. She has a mind, and I’m not saying that just because she’s my daughter.”
Carolyn watched her daughter show off her talent on the court that night as well. Ida scored only nine points but she had 16 rebounds and the Lady Hornets won the MIAA title outright for the first time since 2001.
“She didn’t think it was a good game,” Carolyn says.
“She felt like I jinxed her. ... They look good to me, the team does. They play good together.”
Ida took Carolyn to the airport the next day to head back home to Yazoo, where the Edwards family still lives.
“That’s our home,” she says.
For a long time, Yazoo was the only place Ida could call home. But Carolyn knows that’s no longer true.
“I’m glad she has found a home where she’s comfortable at Emporia,” Carolyn says. “But now, it’s going to be up in a little bit, and I could tell she’s sad about it by the way she was talking when we were on the way to the airport on Sunday when I was there. Yeah, she loves it. She loves it. She tries to be hard and everything, but she loves it. She does.”