One of the more successful high school girls basketball teams in the Valley doesn’t have its own gym. It doesn’t have a school, and it often goes days — if not weeks — without practicing.
The HOPE (Home Oriented Private Education) Home School Lady Patriots scramble for games, parents provide transportation and cover expenses for tournaments (at least five in a season), and the eight players who make up a team that has gone 55-10 over the last two years are often a curiosity to outsiders who simply don’t get it.
This is the life of a home schooled athlete. It is a life they have chosen, to be sure, but one that berths undeserving misperceptions about who and what these young ladies and the parents, coach and administrator who support them are, and why they stand for what they do.
“When people ask what school I go to and I say I’m home schooled, they just give me a look like, ‘Oh. Home schoolers,’” sophomore guard Cindy Ochoa said. “But we’re just like anyone else. We play whoever wants to play us. We’ll play anybody.
“And once they see us play, they know we’re not really home schoolers.”
This season alone the Lady Patriots have defeated Class 5A programs and competed in Class 3A tournaments en route to finishing as one of the top 10 home school teams in the state. It’s a program that has scoured south Texas for games, ready and excited for an opportunity to prove it is worthy of scheduling, even if the gaudy record speaks for itself.
When people ask Karley Patterson what school she goes to, she responds by saying she is home schooled, which receives far too often a raised eyebrow, perhaps accompanied with an eye roll.
“People think we have so much time on our hands,” the sophomore forward said. “The truth is we can go weeks and days without practicing. But it’s cool to show that you don’t have to go to public school to be someone. We’re not no one.
“We mean something.”
LIMITATIONS
There are no issues with HOPE Home School on the court. But off, it provides some headaches.
The greatest hurdle is locating a place to practice. This season alone, they rotated between three practice locations — Abundant Grace, Calvary Baptist and Mission Parks and Rec. “Home” games have also been bandied about at two locations, the Palmview Boys and Girls Club and the Mission Boys and Girls Club.
“We’ve had to go straight into games without having practice that week, and that can make things difficult,” said third-year HOPE sports coordinator Larissa Solis, who has home schooled two older kids who are now at West Coast College in California and also has two younger ones, 11 and 9 years old, home schooled as well. “It limits you.”
For the players, it’s seen as a lost opportunity. They are a strong team, yes, but how much better could they be if they could practice on a normal basis?
“It’s really hard,” Karley Patterson said. “A lot of times that’s why we don’t have practice, because we don’t have a gym to go to. We could be so much better … we could be very good.
“It’s tough when you don’t have that experience with each other.”
There’s also the issue of travel. The Lady Patriots do not have the luxury of driving to tournaments as a team on a bus. Parents tote players to and from games. And while the program had an approximate budget of $4,000 this season, that can go quickly. Half of that went to new uniforms, while the rest was primarily divvied up between insurance, gym time for practices and game officials.
As far as food and gas to and from games, which is significant since only six games this season were played at the team’s “home” gyms, those expenses come out of the parents’ pockets.
There’s also the nuisance of having to set up a competitive schedule when many public schools already have theirs set. HOPE Home School has the luxury of not being a part of the University Interscholastic League, so it is not restricted in who or where it plays, but it cannot set as tough of a schedule as it would like.
While the Lady Patriots are generally pleased with their finish in the top tier Division I bracket of the 178-team state tournament that wrapped up Saturday in Frisco, who’s to say how far they could have gone if the competition was a bit more stiff?
But players say the plusses outweigh minuses.
First, there is the flexibility. Most HOPE players have school from about 9 a.m. to around 1 or 2 p.m. From there, the rest of the day is spent at practice or attending to other extracurricular activities; senior post Lilly Bradford, for instance, is a gifted ballet and jazz dancer who enjoys those events, but only after she squeezes in some time taking history and college algebra classes at South Texas College.
Second, even considering the lack of practice time, there are plenty of games. The team played 38 games this season, winning 31; five years ago, the boys program played 51.
Games are essentially the team’s practices.
“It’s different, I guess, but I like it a lot,” Bradford said. “There’s just a lot more time. There’s a small part of me, maybe, that wishes I’d be in public school, if nothing else than to get the experience, but overall I’m really glad my parents decided to home school me.”
A NEW WAY TO LEARN
Home school is rarely about the athletics. It’s almost always about the education.
“For home schooling, it really comes down to the parents’ choice on how to do things,” said Lady Patriots coach Garry Dippel, who home schooled daughter Theresa and son Stephen, each of whom now works in north Texas. “Our attitude was if these kids are going to be screwed up, we’re gonna screw them up. Socially, academically … whatever.
“A lot of home school parents really want to have hard Christian values, but you have the extremes from really conservative to really loose.”
Sabrina Patterson, mother of Kelsey, Karley and eighth grader Koby, started home schooling her kids when Kelsey, the oldest at 17, was about to enter kindergarten. From there, it was on a year-to-year basis, as she admits she was not 100 percent committed to the system all the way through.
“It was something God just laid in my heart to do,” she said. “I was kind of resistant about it, but God worked out the details and we prayed about it and prayed about it. I was only going to do it one year, but … here I am.”
Kelsey started reading at an early age, and Patterson realized not long after that home schooling would be best for her children.
“At 4 1/2, she was already reading short stories,” she said. “From there, I was like, what am I going to send her to school for? What is she going to be doing there?
“It evolved from there.”
Patterson started immersing herself in the different educational systems, adapting her teaching methods to how each individual child learned. Kelsey is a visual learner, Karley is kinesthetic and Koby is auditory. In going to home school conferences in and out of the state, picking up on different philosophies, Patterson became attracted to classical conversations, a scripture-based educational curriculum.
Every Sunday, for 30 weeks during the year (15 in the fall, 15 in the spring), Patterson and her husband Jon, who coaches the HOPE boys basketball team, take their kids to San Antonio for Monday classes in classical conversations. They started doing this three years ago, first because they wanted to introduce it to their children and then because the kids wanted to keep going with it.
As a result of this approach, Patterson started identifying better with her children, and vice versa.
“If I was to just send them off to school, go do my own thing and be successful, it would be easy,” Patterson said. “I wouldn’t know what my kids are doing — they’re supposed to be supervised and they’re supposed to be learning … just to connect with them and get to be still and know who they are, it’s just a growing process for us as a family. It’s very real.”
Anybody can home school their kid, Patterson said. The state does not require anyone to have a degree to do so, and while other states require you to use their curriculum, that’s not the case in Texas, which features a plethora of learning tools, from secular to Christian-based.
All the state requires of someone who wishes to home school their child is to adhere to its minimum standards: arithmetic, reading, writing and good citizenship.
THE COACH
A former baseball standout for then-Pan American University from 1978-1980, Dippel holds the program’s single-season record for batting average with a .443 in 1979 when he was an All-District VI selection for a 52-12 team.
But his greatest accomplishment, he will contest, is his job as volunteer coach.
A financial advisor the last 30 years, Dippel, who also serves the community by officiating football and softball, coached the HOPE Home School boys team for five years, taking a year off after his son, Stephen, graduated. He returned to coach the girls team under one condition — all he wanted to worry about was the games. No longer did he wish to coordinate when or where to practice, what equipment to get or coming up with fundraisers.
Done deal.
“Anybody would love to coach these girls,” he said. “They’re super. Wonderful.”
Dippel has a reputation as a players’ coach, someone who knows how to respond to people and how to put people at ease in competitive situations. He is almost the perfect coach for this particular bunch, with the right amount of competitive drive but a strong grasp on perspective.
“Coach Dippel has done awesome with us,” Kelsey Patterson said. “He knows how to work with players and girls and we’re really blessed to have him.”
It helps when you have talent, too. The Patterson sisters are regarded as two of the premier talents in the Valley, having played on the vaunted AAU Hoopsters team, coached by Valley View head boys basketball coach Arnold Martinez. Kelsey is a natural scorer and shooter, comfortable with the ball in her hands, while 5-foot-11 Karley is long and athletic, using her size to get easy buckets near the rim.
Pair them alongside the 5-foot-11 Bradford and another strong inside presence in 6-foot sophomore Caro Lopez, and it’s not hard to see why the Lady Patriots have been successful on the court. They have size, lots of it, and boast the shooting and ballhandling to complement that.
Mix all that in with Dippel’s let ’em play style, and it’s no wonder they handled 5A PSJA High with ease and have a healthy rivalry with Class 3A Lyford.
“This group has been one of the greatest groups we’ve had,” Dippel said. “We have girls who are serious about basketball, and then there are others who are just good athletes. They do a really good job.”
FIGHTING PERCEPTION
Home schoolers do not stay locked in a closet all day, either being taught by their parents or being distant, awkwardly shy from the world. In fact, each player on HOPE’s girls team was social and comfortable in front of an audience, a trait even many public school kids take some time getting adjusted to.
There is, however, more self-discipline involved. Home schooled kids tend to have other activities going on, which is why some parents choose to go this route so that more time is available. Whether it’s taking college courses or even wanting more time to play sports and compete for AAU traveling teams, there are distinct advantages.
“It’s a lot of self-initiative,” said Lopez, a seventh-day Adventist who, from sunset Friday to sunset Saturday, cannot compete athletically as the denomination is distinguished by its observance of Saturday as the Sabbath. “It can be tough, but you just have to know where your priorities are. It can be easy if you have discipline.”
Even for athletes, Dippel, who grew up playing sports and even fostered a brief minor league baseball career, said there are good things in store.
“If I was a kid, knowing what I know now back then, oh man, I would love to play this way,” he said. “The only reason I went to school was for sports. I didn’t go to school just to go to school.
“It’s kind of a dream.”
This will likely be the final season of coaching in the Valley for Dippel, who recently sold his house in McAllen to move to Dallas to be closer to his two kids, especially as he is about to be a grandfather. Rarely a moment goes by that he doesn’t talk about how great the girls and the program are. More than a matter of being disrespected or underappreciated, there is an effort within this community to simply be understood.
“We just want people to know we are normal,” Dippel said, with a big grin and a gentle laugh. “We just do things a bit differently. My thinking, though, is, ‘Why wouldn’t anyone home school?’ I think back to my high school days and how many real, close friends I had, and you have maybe a handful. Generally, they’re your teammates.
“That’s the way life is. Really, if these kids went to a school, they would be cut. It’s a numbers game. That’s not the case with us; sometimes we wonder if we’re even going to be able to have a team. It’s a big deal to have enough players, so it’s a big deal to have kids just play and be a part of a team.”
Dennis Silva II covers high school basketball for The Monitor. He can be reached at (956) 683-4551 or at [email protected]. Follow him on Twitter @densilva2.