Journeys. They are the leitmotif of our ultra-confessional world and the raison d’etre of reality TV, where, no matter what your talent, you won’t get to showcase it without some heart-tugging “journey” to reveal.
Raeshel Contreras didn’t need an extraordinary back-story to get to Ireland last September to play basketball. The girl had plenty of game.
She was among the top 30 division one three-point shooters in America in her final college season and, in her first year with Prybol Killester, tops the Irish premier league in scores (23 points per game) and steals (3.6 per game). She has also helped Killester to the cup final next Sunday where they will meet defending champions Team Montenotte Hotel of Glanmire.
Yet Contreras's journey from angry, volatile kid to a balanced, bubbly young woman is just the kind that would have X Factor producers salivating. It is etched on her skin in eight "pretty meaningful" tattoos. Her first ink came at 16, for a cousin who was shot dead.
There’s “Daughter of a King” for her beloved dad who reared her alone and fuelled her sporting dream. There’s a lipstick kiss from a favourite niece behind one ear and a quote on her side from the adored coach she lost. But her favourite is on her leg. It depicts two birds in flight and is inscribed “Sometimes you’ve got to fall before you fly”.
She got it for her dad when he went to jail for 18 months but it is seems thoroughly apposite for herself. “He just got in a bad situation but he’s really good now,” she stresses. “He’s still on bail, goes to court every month, but he is back working and it was nothing too serious.”
Custody battle
Half-Mexican, half-African-American, Contreras’s parents split when she was only four and their protracted custody battle left her estranged from her mother for years.
There was still plenty of stability. Her dad worked in his family’s removal business and they were surrounded by many supportive relatives in a “normal neighbourhood” in San Franciso, yet she was “a really angry kid”.
“I didn’t care about anything, didn’t think I’d be held accountable for anything. I was actually a smart kid but I had a bad attitude and was always getting kicked out of class or wouldn’t even go,” she says.
Basketball was her sanctuary. From an early age she shone with local club Mission Rec Rebels. Her team won three state titles in a row, were runners-up at “nationals” and their coach, Oscar Jiminez, became a second father.
Sport promised a passport if only Contreras could ditch the sass and get the necessary grades, but she constantly failed to apply herself. Despite a fractious period in middle school, she still bagged a basketball scholarship to a prestigious private high school but they kicked her out when her results weren’t good enough.
A tough local public school was her only alternative. “You literally had to fight your way up. The coach was good but the team was a lot of girls like me going ‘whatever!’ I did start to calm down a bit because my coach told me I had to if I was thinking about college.”
Her grades were still only good enough to make a local junior college – a two-year precursor to better universities. The dream hung by a thread.
Foothill Colleges’ girls surpassed expectations to reach the state championships so division one colleges did call. She opted for the University of Hawaii but lost that offer when, once again, she came up short academically.
“I’ll never forget that phone call from my coach. She was saying ‘Raeshel you’ve dug yourself in a hole now. What college is gonna want you after you’ve messed up all these times?’”
She doesn’t offer excuses but could. Half-way through her second year Oscar Jiminez suddenly got cancer and died. She couldn’t touch a ball for two weeks solid.
“Then I kinda came back. If I’d quit at that moment, everything everyone said about me – ‘she’s good but a waste of talent’ – would’ve been true. Things started to click. I was thinking ‘I can’t keep being like this. Things have never worked out for me but I can’t quit now!’”
Smoothie bar
Contreras was 20. This was make-or-break. She did quit ball for a whole year but only to study and graduate. She worked in a local smoothie bar to get by and her college coach Jody Craig kept vouching and networking for her.
More division one colleges called, including Colorado State, but she settled for the University of South Dakota in the tiny outpost of Vermillion (population 10,000).
Six hours flight and a world away from California, she often trudged to class through snow-drifts yet loved it from the get-go and her fists slowly unclenched to the world.
“I overcame myself. I don’t know how or where, it was kind of self-analysis,” she reflects. “I realised there were good people in the world that I wanted to be like. It was actually an easy transition in the end.
“I’ve a lot of friends who ended up in jail or died. When I’d go visit my mom in the projects there’d be like violence everywhere. That’s why I always felt like I had to prove myself.
“It was definitely a form of defence, like if you look weak there they’re gonna come at you! It sucked, but that was just how it was. Then I went to South Dakota and it was just all this love and happiness, family and friendship,” she laughs.
“What did I want for myself in the future? It would definitely be like South Dakota – no violence, no anger, just all positive. So that’s what I decided to be from now on.”
The Coyotes won their conference in her first year to make the first round of NCAA nationals and, in her second, won their league.
Killester, whose family atmosphere seems custom-made, has been her next stop. They are coached by Karl Kilbride, whose dad Hugh is assistant. She boards with Hugh’s in-laws, coaches in local primary schools, gushes about her new team-mates and giggles about the bafflingly endless offers of tea.
Her best friend Kamilah Jackson benefited from the same high school and University of Hawaii scholarships that Contreras squandered. She now plays in Portugal and relates her language difficulties and the pressure to perform.
Whole different person
Contreras has neither problem and the rifts in her personal life have happily mended. “Mom was an alcoholic but she’s in a much happier place now, she’s great. She has a good job and is a whole different person. Our relationship got so much better when I went to college.
“Sport can turn your life around,” she says. “Your dreams are never over, you can always change. You can’t get too down on yourself, you just need people to help you.”
Basketball provided her lifeline and when it’s done,“I’d like to do something with kids because if I didn’t have a couple of people in my life I’d never be where I am now. Why not be that person for other kids?”
Her old youth team, the Mission Rec ’92s, was pretty legendary in the Bay Area.
“Seven of us went to division one schools,” she relates with pride. “Three are overseas, two are pursuing their Masters and one is becoming a dentist. We’re still close since the fourth grade. We know we made Oscar proud.”
