Trying to Force Overtime : At 38, Donna Simms Is Looking for One More Shot at a Professional Career

Donna Simms never listened to the naysayers, the ones who told her that waiting for the rebirth of women’s professional basketball in the United States was like waiting for a bus at the Atlanta Olympics.

In other words, don’t hold your breath.

Well, guess what? Within a year, two women’s pro leagues are scheduled to begin play in cities across the nation.

Finally, after years of training and hoping, Simms is in position to realize a dream she was forced to abandon in 1984, when the last U.S. league failed.

“I was always telling people the women’s pro league is going to return,” said Simms, a Woodland Hills resident. “It will be more organized, with more exposure and more money.”

But it remains to be seen if Simms will cash in. At 38, she is older than every player drafted by the eight-team American Basketball League, which reneged on an agreement to give Simms a special tryout after she was unable to perform at the ABL’s regular tryouts because of an injury.

With that opportunity dashed, Simms is pointing toward the start of the Women’s NBA early next summer. The ABL begins play in October.

In the meantime Simms’ basketball clock is ticking, and she knows it. Simms wasn’t comforted when an apologetic ABL executive told her she could try out again for the league next year.

“You can tell that to players who are 22, 24,” she said. “I’ve been training 11 years. That makes it a bigger dilemma. [Younger players] have years and years to play.”

Simms was once one of the brightest stars in U.S. women’s basketball, earning regional All-American honors at Queens College in her native New York City before embarking on a short-lived pro career. She played in the Women’s Basketball League and the Women’s American Basketball Assn., ventures that folded quickly because of financial difficulties. In between, she spent a year playing for a pro team in Israel.

The lanky 6-footer was a rival of Nancy Lieberman-Cline, a fellow New Yorker who helped Old Dominion win national championships in 1979 and 1980 and later gained fame by becoming the only woman to play in a men’s professional league--the now-defunct U.S. Basketball League.

Simms says she beat Lieberman-Cline in all three of their one-on-one meetings, but that doesn’t count for much. Lieberman-Cline is in the Basketball Hall of Fame. Simms is trying to prove she remains a high-level player, even though her most-recent competition was in a Glendale recreation league.

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Steve Hams, vice president of operations for the ABL, says it’s difficult to assess Simms’ ability because she has been away from the game for so long. The league has concentrated on signing recent collegiate standouts who have forged an unprecedented interest in women’s basketball among American sports fans.

“To me, Donna is very impressive and a great story,” Hams said. “I certainly admire her at how she has maintained her enthusiasm and commitment to the game. But I really couldn’t say how she compares to other players.”

Simms had a chance to prove herself to ABL administrators. But 11 days before the league’s weeklong tryouts began May 28, she strained a calf muscle. Simms talked organizers into delaying her tryout until May 31, but she quickly aggravated the injury.

The tryouts at Emory University in Atlanta drew 550 women, all former college standouts. They competed for 44 spots in the ABL, since the league had already struck deals with 36 players, including 10 members of the U.S. Olympic team.

Salaries in the ABL range from $125,000 commanded by drawing cards such as Olympic team center and former USC star Lisa Leslie, to the league minimum of $40,000.

For Simms, who never earned more than $15,000 a season as a professional player, the money being offered by the ABL was more than enough incentive for her to consider leaving her job as a substitute teacher in the L.A. Unified School District.

“I’ve been subbing for 11 years, hoping every year that I would be able to quit and play in a pro league,” she said. “It’s a dream that I started, but because the bubble burst twice, I was never able to fulfill.”

Not wanting her dream to end because of a calf injury, Simms approached ABL co-founder Bobby Johnson at Emory and asked if she could get a tryout at a later date. Johnson said he sympathized with Simms’ misfortune and contacted Hams.

Hams said the league intended to give Simms a tryout in San Jose, home of an ABL team, before the June 19 draft but reversed its position after learning that other players also could benefit from special tryouts.

“The larger situation was there were lots of players in [Simms’] position who were injured at the time of the tryouts,” Hams said.

However, Simms had purchased a plane ticket and arranged for time off from work in order to try out for the league. When those plans fell through, she wrote a letter to Johnson, appealing for another chance.

“I feel very hurt that I will not even get the opportunity to go to training camp,” Simms said. “I feel locked out. . . . The main thing is I wasn’t able to show what I can do. I’m confident enough in my skills and physical ability that I feel I could start in this league. I’m sorry that it’s not going to happen.”

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Simms still clings to the hope that she can get into an ABL training camp, although it’s not likely to happen. She displayed the same determination and fighting spirit to help her overcome recent adversity.

In the last 2 1/2 years, Simms has coped with the deaths of her oldest sister, Sharon, and her parents, Ruth and Herman. In addition, she was displaced by the 1994 Northridge earthquake, which caused damage to her Woodland Hills townhouse. She moved back earlier this month.

“The thing about Donna is that she has heart,” said Simms’ sister, Bobbye.

The day after Simms’ other sister, Sharon, died in December, 1993 of complications from a head injury, Simms won the women’s division of a triathlon at a Westchester health club.

“I had spent the previous day crying my eyes out,” Simms recalled. “I had a headache from crying so much. [But] I said I was going to win for her. . . . I don’t know how I did it.”

The loss of her mother was no less traumatic for Simms. Ruth Simms, who died last year after being partially paralyzed by a stroke in 1988, was her youngest daughter’s biggest fan.

But before she became a basketball fan, Ruth Simms had tried to steer Donna toward tennis. The family lived a short stroll from the West Side Tennis Club in Forest Hills, N.Y., former site of the U.S. Open and where Simms took lessons at her mother’s behest.

“Believe me, my mom dragged me,” Simms said. “But I didn’t go for it. There was no jumping or anything. It was too boring compared to basketball.”

Simms began to play basketball seriously in eighth grade after a physical education teacher noticed her--she was already close to 6 feet--and suggested she give the sport a try. Simms blossomed into a standout center at Forest Hills High, wearing the No. 33 jersey of her idol at the time, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar.

Although she was recruited by out-of-state schools offering scholarships, Simms chose to stay close to home and attend Queens College, which had a good women’s basketball program. She was a four-year starter at forward, but she regrets not exploring other options as Lieberman-Cline did when she signed with Old Dominion in Virginia.

“She did the wise thing by choosing to go out of state and take a big scholarship,” Simms said. “I was paying my own way at a city university. On one hand, I was glad I was loyal to my hometown team. But on the other I felt bad that I didn’t go to a bigger school where I would have been promoted better.”

Simms averaged 20 points and nine rebounds as a senior in 1979 and led the nation in free-throw shooting percentage (85.3%). She was named one of 10 finalists for the Wade Trophy, representative of the top player in the Assn. of Intercollegiate Athletics for Women, then the governing body of women’s basketball.

Simms received a bigger thrill after the season in the form of a telegram informing her that she was the No. 1 draft pick of the New Jersey Gems of the Women’s Basketball League, which had just completed its inaugural season. She played one season for the Gems and was in the middle of her second season in the WBL with the New England Gulls when the league started to fall apart.

“Toward the end of the [1980-81] season the players realized the checks were bouncing higher than the balls,” Simms said. “We demanded to get paid or not play, but we continued to play. Women players were so naive and had such love of the game, as long as they put us on a plane, paid for our hotel and meals, we continued to play.”

It wasn’t until many of the players realized they could no longer pay their rent that they finally took a stand, Simms said.

“The owners did not come up with good checks, and we folded the league,” she said.

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After dealing with the disappointment, Simms picked up her spirits by playing in New York’s NBA Summer League in 1981. Her best memories are of catching passes from Nate Archibald and guarding Earl Monroe, both NBA stars.

Years later Simms had another encounter with an NBA player, losing a one-on-one game at a charity event to Julius Erving, whose number she wore in college and in two U.S. pro leagues.

Simms taught physical education for a year at a Queens high school before she was contacted in 1982 by an Israeli pro team, Elizur Tel-Aviv. She tried out before signing an attractive contract that included a salary and an apartment. With Simms leading the team with averages of 25 points and 12 rebounds, Elizur Tel-Aviv won the Israeli League championship.

Simms probably could have established a career in Israel, which gave her dual citizenship because she is Jewish. But after nine months she grew homesick and returned to the United States.

“I loved [Israel], but I missed my family and friends,” she said.

Simms’ hopes for another U.S. pro league materialized in 1984 with the formation of the Women’s American Basketball Assn. But after playing a few months with the Atlanta Comets, she watched another league fold because of financial troubles.

Because she had played professionally, Simms initially was denied a chance to try out for the U.S. Olympic team in 1984. She hired an attorney and took USA Basketball to court, winning an injunction. She was cut at the tryouts.

Moving west, Simms enrolled in graduate school at USC in 1985 and earned a Master’s degree in exercise physiology. She held down several jobs, working as a personal fitness trainer and teaching tennis and racquetball at USC.

She maintained her basketball skills for a while by working out with the USC women’s team. She found pickup games and recreation leagues, anything to help keep her sharp in the event a U.S. pro league started up. Her regular workout routine includes running, weightlifting and shooting baskets on her own.

Now that women’s pro basketball has returned, Simms wants to be part of it. She figures she’s earned it.

“I’ve been waiting for this for a long time.”