Basketball Wives: Learning To Live & Love Overseas

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Basketball Wives: Learning To Live & Love Overseas

Post by IceManLikeGervin » Thu May 05, 2016 12:07 am

Click link for ESPN site: http://espn.go.com/espnw/culture/featur ... e-overseas
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The Machane Yehuda Market is bustling. The streets are lined with stands selling nuts, fruits, vegetables and candies.

"The Shuk," as it's commonly called, mesmerizes with all its action -- merchants chat with their customers, musicians play to halted crowds and stray cats roam the grounds. Tourists and natives pour through, squeezing past each other, bustling up and down the iconic street market, moving from vendor to vendor. This is the chaos before the peace, before the whole market shuts down Friday night for the Jewish Sabbath, before a blanket of tranquility covers the city.

The Shuk feels like the beating pulse of Jerusalem on this afternoon, as it is on almost every Friday afternoon.

And smack dab in the middle of all this is Courtney Douglass, sitting, smiling, crepe in one hand, eating lunch, captivated by the activity surrounding her.

To say that Douglass seems out of place would be an understatement. Her look, if not her accent, is a dead giveaway. She's a 5-foot-6, light-haired, blue-eyed, 26-year-old from Chaska, Minnesota, transplanted to the Middle East.

She has no connection to Israel other than that her husband, Stuart, has played basketball professionally here for three years. After her initial struggle with the language and the culture, she has grown to love Israel and all of its rough edges, and now she even considers herself an advocate for the country. She hopes to be here for 10 more years at least.

"In high school, or even in college, I never would have moved or changed my whole life for another person, for a guy," she says in between bites. And yet that's exactly what she has done.

Not only did she move -- she moved halfway across the world.

There's a common misconception that every spouse of an overseas American professional basketball player would like to dispel: that the lifestyle is glamorous. The perception that this career leads to money, fame and luxury is just an illusion. For a very small percentage of players, that dream might come true, but for the majority, it doesn't.

"This lifestyle is not for everyone," said Sheena Robinson, who's been overseas for six years and whose husband plays in Istanbul, Turkey. "Everyone thinks it's a 300-day vacation, but that couldn't be farther from the truth."

The job is high-stress and offers little security -- an injury can cut a career short -- and, depending on where they're playing, athletes can be traveling constantly for eight to 10 months of the year. Politics and the job's unpredictability -- not to mention the differences in food, culture and language -- can make life difficult. Players can be cut at any time, and one-year contracts are the norm. Oftentimes it's uncertain whether one's salary will be paid on time, if at all.

"At any moment, from year to year, you just never know where you're going to end up," said Shakaola Dean, who spent nearly three years overseas. Her husband, Taquan, just finished a season in which injury and payment issues forced him to split time between Turkey and Iran. "It's ever-changing. You have to learn to able to give up some of your control and just go with the flow. It took me some time."

But there are benefits. Players often get paid better than they would at the same level in the U.S., and their contracts can sometimes provide luxuries they wouldn't get back home, such as a free house and car. There's also the exciting element of traveling and seeing the world, every year experiencing a new destination, a new culture.

For some families, that lifestyle is fantastic; for others, it requires a lot of adjustments.

Douglass met her husband when they were freshmen at the University of Michigan, where they each played varsity basketball. After school, he was offered a contract to go play in Pamplona, Spain, in the country's second-division league.

Douglass decided not to go with him. She had just been offered a role as an assistant coach for Northern Kentucky University, and the thought of moving to a small European city in a new country for the year with her boyfriend, who had no job security and a small salary, did not appeal to her in the least.

One year of a long-distance relationship came and went, then a second. It became increasingly difficult to maintain the relationship, and she knew she needed to make a decision. By then, Stuart had moved to Israel and became a naturalized citizen of the country, improving his job prospects abroad.

"By far, the hardest decision I had to make in my life," she says. "On one hand, I had no idea what life was going to be like. On the other hand, the only thing I knew was that I loved Stuart and I wanted to be with him."

But within weeks of moving out to Israel, she started having doubts and second thoughts. She had quit her job and taken a leap of faith for the good of their relationship, but she very quickly found the lifestyle to be much more difficult than she had imagined. This was surely not what she had signed up for.

"I cried a lot those first few months being out here," Douglass said. "We were in a really cramped apartment in a small town, and it was my first time living with someone else. Hardly anyone spoke English. I didn't know the language and I didn't know the culture."

Life overseas is different for everyone. Spouses who had a career in the states before moving may have a different perspective than those who didn't leave a job behind. Having kids plays a role too.

Jenny Mbakwe, another Minnesota native, lives in Tel Aviv with her husband, Trevor, who plays for Maccabi Tel Aviv. They live in a chic apartment on the water with their son Makhi, 8, and their 2-week old daughter. Makhi was 5 years old when Trevor began his professional career.

"He plays a big factor in all our decisions," she says of her son. "We have to consider what cities and schools will be best for him."

When they first moved abroad in 2013, Trevor was playing in Rome. They were unable to find an international school for Makhi and had to enroll him in an Italian one instead. As a mother, Mbakwe was in pain watching her son struggle. She tried to help as much as she could.

"It was hard for him," she said. "He was spending half his time in math or in other classes just trying to understand the language."

Their family has lived in three countries in three years. After spending a year in Italy followed by a year in Germany, she has, for the first time, been able to send Makhi to an international school where the main language is English.

Israel has become their son's favorite destination by far because he can at least communicate with other kids his age. He's doing well in school and has built friendships.

"It makes a big difference," Mbakwe says.

Trevor and Jenny Mbakwe and their son Makhi celebrate after Trevor's team, Maccabi Tel Aviv, won the Israeli Cup in 2015.
Others have decided to expand their families while living overseas, discovering a whole new set of difficulties.

"For my first daughter, I was in a hospital in a small town in Italy," says Baylee Carroll, whose husband, Jaycee, has played for nine seasons, five of which have been in Madrid. "The equipment was a little outdated and they didn't do epidurals, and they put me in a room with 10 other women. I thought it was normal because it was my first birth. We were young and dumb, and I thought it was the greatest thing ever. Now we look back and it just seems so absurd, the hospital that I gave birth in."

Meredith Doellman, who has lived abroad for nine years and has two kids, had to decipher -- immediately after giving birth -- whether her Spanish-speaking doctor was saying, "Your baby is bleeding on his head," or, "Your baby is bleeding in his head."

"I was freaking out," she said.

And many -- if not all -- spouses who followed athletes abroad must deal with some kind of isolation. Amanda Woodside, who lived in six countries in five years, followed her husband Ben to the Eastern European country of Georgia. She didn't leave the house because the team didn't have confidence in her safety.

"Every time I wanted to leave the house I needed to call a driver. I didn't have any independence," she says. "We just felt like we were in solitude, we kind of felt like a prisoner just cooped up in the apartment. It was hard to go somewhere without coordinating a driver. I went home early that year to work."

The situation a player lands in almost totally determines his family's experience overseas. Every country, every team and every league has its benefits and its pitfalls.

In Israel, the salaries and competition aren't as good as in other counties, but the money almost always arrives on time. The country is small enough that players get back the same night after road games, and the cities are close enough together that wives of players on different teams can meet up, unlike in most other countries. Also, the league allows five foreigners per team, so the chance of landing on a team with another American spouse is higher.

The top Spanish league, ACB League, on the other hand, is known for having great pay and great competition. But with greater competition comes a more rigorous travel schedule. Players often only see their families only one or two days a week. Additionally, there are only two foreigners allowed per team.

"In Spain, all the wives have their lives, and have their jobs, and have their friends -- they don't need an extra friend," said Carroll. "They look at me as this girl who's just here for a year or two at most, just passing through."

But almost every spouse agrees that the biggest surprise is the unreliability of the paychecks. Almost everyone has had an experience where a team was late with payments or didn't pay at all. Dean, who worked as a nurse practitioner in Atlanta for several years, never imagined that such a thing could happen.

"It's really hard to play in the NBA, and I don't want to take anything away from them, but in the NBA if you don't get paid, you will not step on the court," she says. "Overseas, if you don't get paid, you're still expected to show up and play."

Compounding matters is the fact that many spouses can't work while abroad because they have trouble acquiring work visas, let alone finding a job that doesn't require them to speak the local language or that will hire them for just a few months. Those difficulties are one of the reasons that Eryn Panko is home in Pennsylvania after living the better part of 13 years abroad. Her husband, Andy, is several thousand miles away, playing in the top French league for SLUC Nancy. She decided to stay in the U.S. this year to work and send their kids (a 9-year-old son and a 5-year-old daughter) to school. It's the first time they've spent the year apart since they got engaged in 2001.

Panko is now 41 and 14 years removed from her last full-time job. Before getting engaged, she lived and worked in New York as a fashion accessory designer, which was her dream job at the time.

"I saw it as a big deal to quit my job and go overseas. Andy recognized that too. I just thought that basketball dreams have a shelf life, and I wanted to support him. I thought it would just be for a few years," she says. "I was a little naïve, you have no idea."

Now she's giving it another go in the job market, this time as a health educator, doing medical screening and consulting for a hospital in Lancaster. But she was worried about finding a job.

"It's not like I can just tell future employers that the reason I didn't work was because my husband played basketball for 15 years," she said. "When I was 36, 37, I would go back home for the summer and work internships, but it's not the same."

If her husband ends up signing on for another year of play abroad, the family will likely follow him, she says.

Douglass will be the first to tell you that she's fortunate, as she's one of the few spouses she knows who's been able to find work overseas. She works for PeacePlayers International, a nonprofit that her former college professor introduced her to. She says it's one of the top reasons she's been able to acclimate to Israel.

The organization uses basketball to unite and educate children and their communities. She has been working as a coach and administrator for the past two years since arriving, helping kids become better players while also facilitating dialogue and tolerance between Jewish and Arab youths and young adults.

She knew nothing about the political climate in Israel before she arrived, but that's helped her just focus on the kids and basketball. It's an experience she never would've had if she had not taken the leap of faith to come overseas.

"I'm doing what I really like to be doing, which is helping kids and coaching," she said. "Plus, I get to be with Stuart."

Courtney Douglass works for Peace Players International, a nonprofit that uses basketball to unite and educate children and their communities.
It's two months after her visit to The Shuk, and Douglass is driving back to her apartment in Ashkelon after a workout session. Along the highway, crops are sprouting amid the dry, flat desert. She laughs, "This is not Minnesota."

In addition to working for PeacePlayers, she's playing professional basketball as a member of a team in the top women's league in Israel -- an unintended benefit of moving abroad, she admits.

"When I came out here, I didn't think about playing basketball," she said. "I came out here to be with Stuart and to support him. Through a friend, I got connected with a team, and then just moved on from there."

She makes a right turn before pulling up to her waterfront apartment complex on the Mediterranean Sea. With another season, another year coming to an end, she feels that her bond with Stuart is stronger, that it's battle-tested after surviving all difficulties of overseas life. She's aware that this city was not the one she called home last year, and more likely than not, it will not be the one she calls home next year. But she's OK with that.

"It just comes with the lifestyle and it comes with the job," she said. "After a while, you just get used to it and you accept it."

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