So, here’s the cool thing about the WNBA. And, yes, the Chicago Sky’s season is starting again. And, yeah, yeah, I know, not interested. The Sky stunk last year, right? So what about that cool part again?
OK, here it is. Armintie Price.
Unless you’re an incredibly astute fan of women’s basketball, you’ve never heard of her. Neither have your kids. She was the No. 3 pick in this year’s draft, the Sky’s first choice, and already might be the most athletic woman in the league. The fascinating part is that this league and this team is full of players like Price whom we simply don’t know. But we should even if their stories don’t usually fall out of the pages of Sports Illustrated.
And little girls like little Armintie Price don’t usually get to tell them.
Price is from a town called Cotton Plant, Miss. Seriously.
“It’s not that big,” she says. “It’s like a road. Once you pass the road, you’re in Blue Mountain, Miss. Cotton Plant? There was probably 50 people, and I might be stretching it. It’s a little-bitty road.”
She moved there from Milwaukee when she was in 3rd grade after her parents divorced. This was before her mother, working long hours at McDonald’s trying to support her five children, lapsed into bouts of mental illness so severe that on several occasions she had to be hospitalized, leaving Armintie’s older sister to run the household.
But here’s where the story takes another turn. Beatrice Price is an amazingly resilient woman and a deeply religious one as well. As a Pentecostal evangelical, she insists her daughters dress like girls at all times. This leaves little room for basketball, and her baby girl didn’t get to play until she begged in 8th grade. It leaves even less room for basketball uniforms, an argument Armintie did not press.
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And so she played four years at Myrtle High School in a skirt.
First a long flowing skirt, which didn’t work so well, and then, after a suggestion by a kind home ec teacher, a skort, shorts with a flap of fabric sewn over the front.
“I thought I was awesome,” says Price, displaying her ever-present grin. “I felt like other people were like, ‘OK, if she’s playing like that, we need to get one of those.’ “
When Armintie left for Ole Miss, her mother told her it was her choice whether to wear a skirt on the court.
“I said: ‘Mama, I’m not going to lose God’s love or what I believe. I’m still going to serve him. I just want to be like everyone else,’
” Price recalls. “And she was like, ‘OK, as long as you don’t forget how you got where you are and that this can be gone any day.’ “
Armintie learned this for sure three years later, last August, when Beatrice died at 49 after being diagnosed with ovarian cancer two months earlier.
“My best friend, she was,” Armintie says, not letting her smile dim. “My mom was a very sweet and spiritual woman. I tend to keep myself smiling and laughing, but I feel her with me all the time. Sometimes when I want to do wrong, I’ll hear her.”
She doesn’t do wrong much. Aside from one foray to the mall in college where she tried on pants at the urging of friends, she still wears skirts every day. Tried makeup once.
“I was on the homecoming court at Ole Miss,” she explains. “I put a little on, but it’s not me.”
And per her religious beliefs, no earrings or tattoos either.
She also drank alcohol once.
“When I turned 22 in April,” she says. “Just like with the pants, I have no problems with trying things, but my religion is strong, and it’s going to be hard for anyone to break me.”
Not that she passes judgment on others.
“Everybody believes what they believe; they serve their own God,” she says. “We’ll be all together in heaven with God, so no need to pick apart and judge.”
No time for that anyway. There’s her job, for starters.
“It actually reminds me of when I first went to Ole Miss,” Price says of the Sky. “They weren’t good. They had only won like three games. And we had a new coach. Then the first year, we went to the NCAA tournament.
“This year we can actually go to the playoffs. It isn’t going to be easy, but I think we can do it. You have to be able to dream big.”
She also dreams of a life back in Mississippi, after basketball, when she will become a 4th-grade teacher and marry her sweetheart, Reginald Herrington, whom she met at church her freshman year of college. His father was the preacher.
“I know he’s the one,” she says of Reginald, who is teaching 8th-grade biology back in Grenada, Miss., with plans to begin dental school in August. “He gave me a promise ring my graduation day.”
Until then, Price will cover the court with a quickness and jumping ability veterans say they’ve never seen from a woman, her game as open as her heart. And if that’s not worth the price of admission, well, maybe nothing is anymore.
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