Girls hoops: King's Fork's 'Sugar,' has sweet game despite adversity

She is a basketball-playing blur, her thin braids pulled back and bobbing on the back of her neck.

A head fake, a wicked cross-over dribble, and she’s gone.

For years she has been known as Sugar, and TaShauna Rodgers, a junior at King’s Fork High School, has the sweet game to match.

Away from basketball she is as carefree as her game with a broad smile.

That’s easy to see.

Then, there are more difficult things to see.

Look closer.

There’s Sugar playing tackle football with the boys.

There she is, whacking a golf ball, true and straight, in front of Tiger Woods.

At 14, beside her mother’s hospital bed. And three months later, told her mother has died, dribbling a basketball to forget.

There’s Sugar’s elderly father, in his 80s and unable to watch her play.

There’s Sugar, still dribbling, pulling up for a long 3-pointer and smiling when it goes in as a dozen family members and friends hoot their approval at a King’s Fork home game.

Look closer, and see Sugar.

The story goes that Wilson Rodgers — Uncle Junie — took one look at his infant niece and thought out loud, “She looks just like a little sugar.”

The nickname stuck.

Sugar always was outgoing, and as a youngster usually she was outside playing with the boys in her Williamstown neighborhood in Suffolk.

“I liked to run around and jump out of trees and everything,” Sugar says.

Football, basketball, baseball, whatever the boys were doing, Sugar was doing, too. When they signed up for tackle football, so did Sugar. Often, opposing teams didn’t know they were trying to bring down a girl until she took off her helmet.

She played sports all day during the summer, and on warm days during school she would head home, change out of her good clothes and march outside to play.

At age 9 a neighborhood friend offered Sugar a chance to play golf. It wasn’t long before she was excelling.

Sugar traveled to tournaments along the East Coast and dreamed of becoming a pro. At 10, she played in front of Tiger Woods at one of his foundation’s junior golf clinics in Norfolk.

Golf, though, didn’t really stand a chance.

After all, her mother Barbara Mae was a good athlete and played basketball at the old Booker T. Washington High in Suffolk, and her Uncle Junie played, too.

Sugar’s driveway featured the neighborhood’s only basketball goal, and often Sugar and her brother DeShawn, along with the neighborhood boys, could be found there in the driveway.

“They’d make you fall down and scrape your knee and go boo-hooing,” Sugar says. “It just made you tough, ready for the real world.”

And certainly ready for middle school.

Sugar starred on her recreation team and then as a member of the Suffolk Blazers, an AAU squad. By the time she reached King’s Fork Middle, Sugar was a smooth-dribbling, sweet-shooting phenom.

“All of us P.E. teachers knew we had somebody pretty special,” says Tim Goetz, who taught Sugar in middle school, then coached her as a freshman and sophomore at King’s Fork High. “As far as basketball, she had skills that the better boys in the sixth grade had.”

As an eighth-grader Sugar averaged nearly 30 points, 20 rebounds and 10 assists per game.

While Sugar was blossoming into a basketball star, her mother Barbara Mae was battling an illness.

The illness — one that Sugar’s family declines to specify — hit her suddenly, when Sugar was 14. Barbara Mae was hospitalized and unable to work and unable to care for Sugar.

Sugar’s father, Oscar Allen Saunders Jr., and Barbara Mae — more than 20 years apart in age — never wed, and at the time of Barbara Mae’s illness he was married and living in Portsmouth.

Her mother’s illness weighed heavily on Sugar.

“I just couldn’t go to school or talk,” she says. “We were real close. She was like the only person I could talk to.”

Sugar’s AAU coach, Rebecca Skinner, allowed Sugar to move into her apartment and keep attending school in Suffolk. Skinner had two young boys, and Sugar became part of the family.

Like Skinner’s sons, the newcomer had to follow the rules: Do your chores, keep your grades up and attend church every Sunday.

“She’s always been a good child, but it was difficult sometimes because she wasn’t mine,” says Skinner, now 29 and a recreation specialist with Suffolk Parks. “It was tough for her with everything that was going on, but we seemed to adjust.”

Three months into her illness, Barbara Mae was in a Suffolk nursing home.

Sugar still was playing for Skinner’s AAU team during the summer before her freshman year at King’s Fork High. She visited her mother the same day she was to leave for a basketball tournament in Florida.

“She couldn’t really talk,” Sugar says. “I hugged and kissed her, and then I just sat in there for a long time and just watched TV.”

A day later, Sugar was in Florida when Skinner received word: Barbara Mae had died. She was 56.

Skinner, her fellow coaches and a few players’ parents gathered in a hotel room to pray before calling Sugar in to break the news to her.

“She pretty much broke down,” Skinner says, “but she was tough.”

Her mother’s death wasn’t a surprise, but says Sugar, “It was a little shocking because I thought she would live a lot longer.”

The team had a game later that day, and Sugar chose to play. She remembers scoring 35 points.

Sugar cried most of that night and couldn’t sleep. The next day Skinner drove them back home. Sugar slept for most of the 12-hour trip.

Sugar shook off her sadness by playing basketball.

Her AAU season was over, but she spent the rest of the summer shooting hoops with neighborhood friends or at recreation centers in Suffolk and Portsmouth.

“Basketball just got my mind off it,” Sugar says. “You get out on the court, you’re just thinking about basketball, nobody talking about, 'Oh, I’m sorry that your mom passed.’ ”

Two months after her mother’s death Sugar showed up for her freshman year at King’s Fork High.

Goetz, the Bulldogs’ coach, knew he had a star in the making.

Sugar made the starting lineup and scored 23 points and made four 3-pointers in her varsity debut.

During the past three seasons Sugar has established herself as one of South Hampton Roads’ top girls basketball players. This season she leads the area in scoring at 22.1 points per game, and in her three seasons the Bulldogs are 67-9 and have won back-to-back Southeastern District titles.

Sugar plays on an elite Boo Williams AAU team and during the summer helped it win a national championship. Seven of her teammates, all seniors, have committed or signed to play for schools in the ACC. Sugar wasn’t in the starting lineup but played so well that she was named tournament MVP.

Colleges have noticed.

Sugar, who turned 18 in December, has scholarship offers from Georgetown, Old Dominion, Virginia and Virginia Tech. At 5-foot-10 and thickly built, she is a match-up nightmare for many opponents, too quick for larger forwards and too big for smaller guards.

Add to that a confident on-court swagger and some nasty playground skills picked up while playing against older guys and Sugar has “a deadly combination,” says Garry Murphy, who took over as the King’s Fork coach before this season.

“She’s so unorthodox in the way she plays her game, her size and her skills,” Murphy adds. “You don’t want to describe it as street ball, but you don’t want to say it’s exactly fundamental, either.”

Adds Williams, a revered youth basketball coach, “If you’re in a street game, Sugar’s who you want on your team.”

 

The walk, the quick smile, the jokes.

The similarities between Sugar and her mother are unmistakable for Linda Rodgers, Barbara Mae’s sister.

Sometimes when Sugar turns just right, Linda stops short.

“You look just like your momma,” she tells her niece.

Sugar smiles at the memories of Barbara Mae, the way all the neighborhood kids gathered at the Rodgers’ house to play, how Barbara Mae was the “candy lady,” selling treats to everybody.

“Chips, sodas, juices, anything you could name,” Sugar says. “I remember eating up all the candy and snacks.”

Sugar was the youngest of Barbara Mae’s three children, and the two were inseparable.

“You saw Barbara Mae, you saw Sugar,” Linda Rodgers says. “You saw Sugar, you saw Barbara Mae.”

Those closest to Sugar marvel at her resiliency, her ability to move on after loss. Her beloved Uncle Junie, Sugar’s biggest fan, died after a stroke last March. Sugar moved in with Linda in August.

Sugar’s father, 82 and living in Portsmouth, talks to Sugar, visits her often and says he is immensely proud of her. But he never has seen his daughter play in high school.

“It’s tough not to,” he says, “but I can’t move fast enough with those crowds.”

That’s OK, Sugar says.

 

A glance in the stands and she finds a host of family members and close friends, including Aunt Linda, Skinner and her husband Andre, and close friend and teammate Ransheda Jennings’ mother Sharon.

“Her little cheering squad,” Linda calls it.

“Barbara Mae was a good person, and she cared about how Sugar’s life was going to turn out,” Linda says. “There’s been some trials, but through God and a lot of prayer we weather those storms and are much better for it.

“Sugar needed somebody to tell her we loved her, that somebody was going to always be there. When you’re a family, you’re a family.”

The family watches Sugar play with joy.

They see Sugar — and see Barbara Mae.

 

Jami Frankenberry, (757) 446-2295, jami.frankenberry@pilotonline.com