LLP-854 Laying Up by Laura Waller

The semi-pro Basketball League For Women in the Chicago area had eight teams. Seven of them had male coaches, men who had played pro-ball at one time or another in their lives, and as a result knew all the ins and outs of the game to the nth degree. One team had a female coach, Christine Jackson, who had been a semi-pro player herself a few years earlier.

Now in her mid-twenties twenty-four going on twenty-five to be precise-Christine, a full-blooded black woman, had the body of a finely tuned female athlete. She was five-feet-eight inches tall, which for a female basketball player was tall enough, with mahogany flesh that stretched firmly and smoothly over well-toned muscles and bones. Her hair was neither long nor short, though when she had played on a team, herself, she had always kept the hair short.