SHE’S JUST ONE OF THE BOYS : A Young New Zealander With a Sweet Jump Shot Takes a Place in CIF History

It’s easy to miss as you roll through this little pumice-mining town in the Sierra Nevada mountains on the eastern edge of Yosemite National Park, but there is a high school here.

Dwarfed by the high rise of a snow-covered, pine-dotted mountain on one side and the magnificent expanse of blue water that is Mono Lake on the other, sits a modest, yellow building that blends, inconspicuously, with the grocery store, the restaurant, the trailer park, the cluster of motels, the string of gas stations and the dozens of homes on the banks of Highway 395 that make up the town staked out by prospectors Leroy and Dick Vining in 1852.

On a second pass, you might notice that Lee Vining School (just 41 of the 63 students are high school students) prides itself in at least a couple of its sports teams. The field beside the school is buried under snow, but there are goal posts standing along with one blocking sled and two sets of bleachers that would seat, oh, 60 people on each side if those people huddled together against the chill.

But this is basketball season. Better known in these parts as ski season. Last Saturday, Lee Vining played its last basketball game of the season on a gorgeous, sunny but cool, afternoon. The game was postponed from Friday night because of a snowfall that made for ideal ski conditions.

One of Lee Vining’s nine basketball players skipped the game to go skiing.

“At least he’s not a starter, but you see what we’re up against,” Coach Mark Chaplin said with a shrug.

Now, you can see how Lee Vining High School came to have the distinction of being the only school in the California Interscholastic Federation with a girl on its boys basketball team. And that girl, Jackie Chesley, is a starter.

Burt Umstead, athletic director of Lee Vining High School, saw a 5-foot 7-inch person with a good attitude and good grades happily swishing 15-foot jump shots in the gym one day, and that was good enough for him.

Chesley, one of the school’s two foreign exchange students, explained to him that she had learned to shoot like that while playing netball at a girls boarding school in New Zealand. Umstead explained to her that under CIF rules, because Lee Vining had no girls’ basketball team, she would certainly be made welcome on the boys basketball team.

Then he explained it to the coach who, according to this evolving legend, cringed.

OK, he admits that he wasn’t real hot on the idea when he first heard it, but that was before he saw her shoot. “I really didn’t have to be talked into it once I saw those 15-footers hitting nothing but net,” Chaplin said.

Chesley shoots him a teasing glare and counters: “He was appalled! Appalled!”

As she claps a hand over her mouth and blushes, seemingly appalled at her own brashness, her coach, her athletic director and her team captain/boyfriend, Tom Kashirsky, all poke fun at the way she says “appalled.” It’s a New Zealand version of an English accent and it amuses them. They jump to the way she says “Paul” as in Paul Holton, the team’s very capable 6-2 center.

She tries to fend off the friendly banter, but she’s outnumbered and by now she’s hiding her face in her hands.

Not that Jackie Chesley is shy. Actually, all things considered, she’s quite adventurous.

She grew up in Tokomaru Bay, a small community on the east coast of the north island of New Zealand, an area rich in the Maori tradition. She didn’t learn to speak English until she was 4.

After three years in a girls’ boarding school, she ventured all around the world for her senior year in high school, knowing only that she’d be in California. She’d live with people she had never met in a town she had never even heard of.

And then to be the first girl in the state to play for a boys basketball team? Facing fans and newspaper reporters? She certainly never intended to do anything like that.

But she figures it all fits in with the spirit of the exchange program. This is about new and different experiences. She’s not supposed to be careful or carry a low profile.

One of the requirements before she was chosen for the program was a proficiency in public speaking. She has presented, for the Lee Vining community, a slide show and lecture about New Zealand, complete with a demonstration of Maori dance.

She is also a confident young woman who makes almost all A’s and is taking a college physics course by correspondence from Cal because she’d like to be accepted to the Royal New Zealand Air Force to study electrical engineering.

Very ambitious.

So why is she hiding her face during a casual interview at a restaurant on the day before the game?

As Debby Parker, her foster mother for this year explains: “Jackie has adjusted to an awful lot of things, but I don’t think she’ll ever be really comfortable with the casual way we have around here. She just can’t get used to teen-agers calling adults by their first names.

“She is used to everyone being much more formal and proper. She takes a pretty serious approach.”

Chaplin was pleased with her serious approach to learning basketball. It was clear to him from the start that she was not doing this as a lark.

They knew that she was a natural athlete after she made the first team all-league in volleyball in her first season of playing the game.

Chaplin said: “She’s a good shooter and a good passer, but best of all, she’s coachable. She’s not really quick enough to play man-to-man, so when she’s in the game, we play a zone. But she plays hard and she does just what you tell her to.

“She’s always paying attention, always aware of where everyone is on the court, so the second she gets the ball she knows where she wants to pass it.”

Chesley is no Cheryl Miller. There’s no flash to her game. She’s certainly not a dominant player against the boys. But she averaged 8 points a game and was second on the team in assists because she wasn’t afraid to take her shot and she was quick and sure with her passes.

When she started playing with the Lee Vining Tigers, she had to learn dribbling and defense and rebounding. On the court, now, she looks like she might be making an instructional film. No bad habits from the playground, no ad-libs. Just what Chaplin has taught her.

“It did take me a little while to feel like I really knew how to play the game, to get comfortable with it,” Chesley said. “And I had to wait for the other players to get confidence in me.

“It also took some time for me to get into condition to play a full-court game. In netball, no one plays from one end of the court to the other.”

Chesley drew a diagram showing which zones netball players are allowed to play. And she added: “It makes a difference, too, to play up here. I’m from sea level.”

Lee Vining is 6,781 feet above sea level.

She was a little bit afraid of how much rougher boys basketball might be, but she found that the boys did not rough her up at all. If anything, they backed off.

“None of the players ever said anything to me, but sometimes I would hear them say to each other, ‘Don’t think of her as a girl! Just play defense.’ ”

Most of the time, Chesley has had plenty of room to shoot. In a couple of games, when the defender has been ordered to stay right with her, she has simply run up her assist totals.

On those rare occasions when she does get a bump or when she does get dumped on the floor, she just jumps back into the fray. Her only injury this season was a sprained ankle, but it was minor.

Saturday, Lee Vining lost to Big Pine, 76-34. Chesley played the entire game, working as hard as her overmatched teammates to keep her head up.

Big Pine, the Hi-Lo League champion, finished the season undefeated. Lee Vining finished 11-11. Chaplin called it the best team at the school in 10 years.

Umstead said Big Pine was also having a great year, adding that Big Pine would bring as many players as Lee Vining High had boys.

Exactly right. Lee Vining has 17 boys of high school age. The Big Pine team came out of the visitors’ (girls’) locker room with 17 players dressed. For them, that meant warm-ups and matching shoes.

The smartly dressed Warriors circled the little gym on their first lap as the tape deck they brought along blasted: “Everybody have fun tonight . . . “

The eight Tigers shooting baskets near the home (boys’) locker room door could only watch the parade while making smiling comments to one another. Jackie was included in the easy camaraderie.

At the beginning, Chaplin said, the other players ignored her. They didn’t go out of their way to make her miserable, they just didn’t go out of their way to make her welcome.

“In practice and even in games, she’d be wide open and they would act like she wasn’t there,” Chaplin said. “That changed once they saw that she could help them.”

She was a starter by the third game and an accepted member of the team soon after that. She usually has to dress in a girls’ restroom along with the cheerleaders and then join the team in the locker room for Chaplin’s pregame instructions. And when the team is on the road, she gets special accommodations.

Chaplin was asked if he had to patrol the hallways in the hotel once she started dating a member of the team.

That brought a big laugh all around. “What hotels?” Chaplin said. “When we have to stay overnight for a game, we have the school bring out their tumbling mats and we sleep on the gym floor. Jackie gets the best deal. We find a family for her to stay with. She gets a bed and movies until 2 a.m.”

Still, Chaplin said, she had 12 points in the Baker game after one of those nights.

“Eleven,” her boyfriend corrected him.

“Oh, so now she has a personal statistician!”

What she had was her face back in her hands.

As Umstead summed up: “We have so few kids at our school that I look at kids as players. We did have a girls cross-country (ski) team, so, legally, we probably didn’t have to let her play basketball. But I’m trying to get a sports program established here, so I spend half my time trying to talk kids into every sport.”

Umstead talked 16 of the 17 high school-age boys into playing on his eight-man football team, and Lee Vining won the conference title. When he couldn’t get enough girls to play softball, he included two girls on the boys’ baseball team.

He has been known to call every parent, personally, and invite them to games.

“I think Jackie set a good example with her attitude and her sportsmanship,” Umstead said. “She’s been great for our athletic program. I think it’s been great for her, too.”