Photo by Tom Campbell

As an assistant coach, Karen Cox helped her husband, Dave, win a high school state basketball championship at Plymouth, Ind. But she gets more joy in her role as grandmother to nine, including Miles Price, 5.

For Dave Cox, BS ’74, and his wife, Karen, BS ’75, the years have marched by to the swift metronome of a bouncing basketball.

But has it really been that long? Was it really 16 years ago that Leslie Swihart started coming to their Plymouth Young Dribblers summer basketball camp?

Swihart was still in diapers when her mom wheeled her into basketball camp in a stroller to watch her older sister learn the game of basketball.

Swihart would climb out of her stroller to chase down loose basketballs as they ricocheted around the Plymouth, Ind., gymnasium.

Even then, Dave, a biology teacher and head coach of the Plymouth High School girls basketball team, and Karen, a seventh-grade math teacher and one of the assistant coaches, knew Leslie could be something special. After all, she had the bloodlines. All three of her sisters had played basketball for Plymouth.

A shot in time

But none had the opportunity that now stared Leslie square in the face at the 2008 Indiana girls basketball state championship in Indianapolis. All grown up now, her baby blues had been transformed into a fiery glare of purpose and determination. With the score knotted at 46 and nine seconds on the Conseco Fieldhouse clock, Swihart drove the lane with the same tenacity she showed when she chased down those loose balls in camp as a pre-Young Dribbler.

She was fouled as she released a short jumper in the lane with 3.5 seconds to go. Now she had two free throws. Make just one and Plymouth would have its first girls state title.

“Don’t worry,” Dave Cox told her. “There’s no pressure; we’re already tied. The worst that can happen is we go to overtime.”

Cox said what Swihart needed to hear. But it wasn’t exactly what he was thinking. Dave and Karen had been here before, bringing Plymouth to the brink of a championship in 2001, only to be thumped by Indianapolis Cathedral, 54-39. The coaches and players, he admitted later, were just happy to be there, to be a part of the spectacle of the state finals.

But this time was different. Cox badly wanted to win this time. How badly? In the week before the finals, Cox even had his team practice the extended 90-second TV time-outs his team would experience for the first time in the finals.

He left nothing to chance.

“We wanted to win this for the players and their families, the coaches, and for everybody who ever had played for us,” he says.

Swihart had enough adrenaline coursing through her body to bench-press a Buick. Her first free throw hit the back of the rim so hard it caromed all the way back to the free throw line.

Just one more chance.

Swihart diligently repeated her preshot routine: Right toe on the line, feet shoulder-width apart, left foot slightly back, knees bent, ball balanced in the fingertips, three dribbles, release, follow through. The ball bounced hard off the front of the rim, kicked straight back off the glass and slipped down through the net like it does in the dream of every Hoosier schoolkid. Dave and Karen exhaled as all of Plymouth screamed in delight.

As the final horn trumpeted Plymouth’s 47-46 victory, two separate hug huddles formed on the court. The players laughed and piled on each other near center court, while the coaches celebrated near the bench. One by one, Dave Cox thanked his assistants, some of whom had been with him since Swihart was in diapers.

And, finally, Dave and Karen found each other with a hug that seemed to last forever. “We did it.”