Basketball star Michelle Snow stopped by the Inweekly offices today with Escambia County Commissioner Lumon May. She graduated from Pensacola High in 1998 and played AAU ball against my oldest daughter Cat. Her PHS team won the state championship and Michelle was named “Miss Basketball” in 1998.
A two-time WNBA all-star, Michelle now plays ball in Europe, where the money is better and she can still enjoy her summers. She was in town to visit family.
“I plan to play ball a few years, but would like to come back and work with area kids,” Michelle said. We talked about AAU basketball, developmental teams and how hard it is for players to win scholarships to major colleges. “It’s easier to run naked through the woods during the summer and not get a mosquito bite than to make the team at the major college level.”
Like NFL star Fred Robbins has tried to help area football under stand the demands of college and professional athletics, Snow wants to do the same for our female athletes.
Snow was a psychology major at the University of Tennessee, where she played for legendary Coach Pat Summit. “She made us sign a paper every year that we would attend classes and pass them,” Michelle said. “Coach would walk into the classrooms and check on us. We had a 100-percent graduation rate.”
I asked her how Coach Summit was doing. Summit was diagnosed three years ago with early-onset Alzheimer’s disease and had to retire from coaching. “She’s doing better,” she said, “I saw her three months ago and it was really hard to take, but she’s better now.”