Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, March 1, 1992 TAG: 9202280034
SECTION: CURRENT PAGE: NRV-1 EDITION: NEW RIVER VALLEY
SOURCE: RAY COX SPORTSWRITER
DATELINE: DUBLIN LENGTH: Long
When she was barely big enough to catch a ball, she'd be the only girl in pickup games in the Garland driveway.
One would assume the big boys gave her all the necessary breaks, right?
Surely you jest.
"Occasionally, my brother [Ryan] would get mad at me and hit me," Garland said.
Parental intervention was kept to a minimum. They knew what was going on, though.
"The guys showed no mercy," said Larry Garland, Terri's father.
Not that hoops were that big a deal to her in those days. She was a member of a team long before she developed the competitive intensity that is her trademark today.
"My dad just took me down and signed me up when I was in the third grade," she said.
To the ultimate chagrin of many a future foe, though, little Terri kind of liked the new game.
"I can remember it well," Larry Garland said. "She scored one basket that whole year. But she was the fastest girl on the floor. From one end to the other, she was the first one down the floor. She'd run from a spot on the floor to one of the blocks and just stand there, as if to say, `This is my spot, throw me the ball.'"
Garland has upgraded her game since then.
As her senior season winds down, her resume continues to grow:
A 5-foot-7 point guard, she led Pulaski County to a Group AAA runner-up finish in 1991. No Cougars team had ever been to the state, much less won a game there.
She was chosen to the AAA All State team and the All Timesland team a year ago, the first Pulaski County girl to be so honored.
She played (and did well) with some of the state's best players last summer during the AAU season, finishing fifth in the nation in the 16-and-under category.
She is in the Timesland top 10 in four of five regular-season categories.
The sad part of all this for her basketball foes is that she could have wreaked similar havoc in a different arena.
"She is a very good athlete," Cougars coach Rod Reedy said. "She could have excelled in any sport."
The truth be known, Garland has some regrets in that regard. Perhaps one of her deepest regrets - it may be her only regret, since she apparently isn't prone to that sort of thing - is missing out on some sports.
Such as?
"Football," she said.
Alas, she's had to content herself with stardom in a powder-puff tilt before an audience of 1,000 or so at Dobson Stadium, the Cougars' home field, this past fall. She snagged a couple of touchdown passes.
She's also known to have snagged some fish in her time. She's an outdoor sportswoman of some skill.
The finny dwellers of the deep are safe now, though. At least for the time being. This is basketball season and nothing gets between Garland and her hoops.
In the off season, she's busy with other athletic endeavors. Golf fever overcame her last summer, and she'll never decline an invitation to play softball.
Which is probably what you expect from a girl who played her first baseball as a 9-year-old for an 11-and-12-year-old boys' team.
"She's too little," her mother said before her first game.
Larry Garland, the coach, put her in the outfield anyway. The first batter up hit a fly ball to the outfield. Terri ran it down and caught it.
"You know, Terri's best quality is probably her competitive spirit," Reedy said. "She'll play when she doesn't feel good; she'll play when she's hurt; she'll play when she's sick."
Pulaski County has a well-rounded team, which is one of the reasons the Cougars were favored to be one of two Roanoke Valley District teams (Cave Spring is the other) to return to the Northwest Region tournament this week.
Cindy Martin and Lena Jones are solid inside players and the team has good depth. But everybody knows it's Garland who makes them go.
At the end of the regular season she was second in Timesland with a 4.2 assist-per-game average, sixth in field goal percentage (42.7), third in free throw percent (70) and second in scoring (16.9).
Which, if she were of a different sort, might tempt her to be a little conceited. That's not the Terri anybody knows, though.
"If you look at her in warmups or standing around out on the court, you'd never know from the way she carries herself that she was a really good player," Patrick Henry coach Patricia Sheedy said. "You never hear her complain, you never hear her talk trash. She's just a very, very nice young lady."
She is a very nice young lady who includes in her activities membership in a youth choir based at the Presbyterian Church in Pulaski. The group travels all over this area of the state as well as other states singing at various churches.
No question, this has been her most harmonious tour on the basketball circuit, too. All the numbers are up.
"I take a lot more shots than I used to, and that helps," she said. "If you don't take many shots, you can't make them."
Garland has always been known for her slashing drives to the basket, but it is her outside shooting that has really improved. Part of the improvement came last summer when she was playing against the brutal competition in AAU ball.
"I was almost forced to shoot from the outside," she said.
Garland signed in the fall to play basketball for Virginia Tech, and she said that has taken a lot of pressure off her.
"I had some interest from Radford, Richmond, plus some Ivy League schools - Princeton and Cornell," she said. "But when I visited Virginia Tech, I really liked it. Plus, it was close. I didn't want to have to go to New York; that was too far."
Whether it's the Ivy League or the Metro Conference, it's a long ways from getting hammered in the family driveway.
by CNB