University Southern California Trojans
Raised by Trojans
May 10, 2020 | Women's Basketball, USC Ripsit Blog, Features
Marianne Stanley mailed three letters of intent to Vallejo, Calif. in 1993.
One was for Karleen (Shields) Thompson, the multi-sport athlete who finished high school with all-state honors in basketball, track and volleyball and was then averaging 42 points per game at Contra Costa Community College in the Bay Area.
The other two were for Keisha and Ayesha, Karleen's two young daughters.
As Karleen committed to her future as a Trojan, Keisha and Ayesha, then four and five years old, respectively, signed their names with bulky and uneven handwriting that fell off the line. Stanley, USC women's basketball's head coach in the early 90s, knew she wasn't only recruiting Karleen — it was always Karleen and her girls.
It was only a matter of time before her girls became everyone's daughters, from teammates, to the coaching staff, to the sports information directors in Heritage Hall. They say it takes a village to raise a child, but for Karleen and her two daughters, it took the Trojan Family.
Ayesha, now 33, serves as an elementary school certified instructional intervention teacher in Atlanta, while Keisha, 32, lives in Los Angeles and works as a makeup artist and personal assistant in the entertainment industry. They both graduated from Xavier University in 2011.
Karleen is currently the associate head coach of the University of Virginia's women's basketball team after coaching for the WNBA's Los Angeles Sparks, Houston Comets and Atlanta Dream, but her favorite role is "Nana" to Tyler and Kameron, Ayesha's identical eight-year-old twin boys. If one of the grandsons wins Leader of the Month at school, Karleen will leave when practice ends and drive all 511 miles overnight between Charlottesville, Va. and Atlanta to sit through a 30-minute elementary school award ceremony.
"She's a full-time mom first," Lisa Leslie, basketball legend who played alongside Karleen at USC, said. "But also a coach, a GM and a careerwoman."
"Auntie Lisa" helped Karleen raise her daughters, taking them on the weekends or between shoot-around and game time. She was the helping hand when Karleen needed to rest, the sound voice when the girls needed to talk to someone and the caretaker when Karleen joined the Houston Comets and the girls had to finish out high school in LA.
"To watch a woman persevere with my own eyes and work as hard as [Karleen] has, she's probably been more valuable to me than I have been to her," Leslie said.
Now, Leslie looks to Ayesha and Keisha as excellent role models for her two children.
When Karleen became pregnant with Ayesha soon after finishing high school in Snyder, Tex., she thought her athletic career was over. The major university she had signed with was no longer in the picture, and she moved with her children's father to Albuquerque, N.M. where she had Keisha.
Karleen credits her late cousin, Stephen Shelley, with opening up another path that ultimately led her to USC's starting guard position alongside Leslie and Tina Thompson. Shelley, who passed away in February, convinced Karleen to hop on a bus with her toddlers and move to the Bay Area to enroll in community college. He introduced his cousin to the late Stephen Greer, an academic advisor and track coach at Contra Costa who supported Karleen and played a fundamental role in her journey to USC.
As she was walking around campus to register, she heard the familiar squeak of sticky shoes and the rhythm of balls bouncing.
"Let's just go check it out," she told her cousin as they walked into the gym.
It was Contra Costa's women's basketball team, and with approval from head coach Paul DeBolt, Karleen subbed in the pick-up game and played and ran track there for the next two years. To this day, she thanks DeBolt for bringing her back to basketball.
Many of the coaches who recruited her out of high school were now calling her up to transfer to their university, but most began with one question: "Can you get a babysitter?" It was a sly way of asking if she could come without the kids.
"No, we're a package deal," Karleen would reply.
USC was the outlier. Stanley brought Karleen to campus for a visit and had it all figured out for her, from an apartment on 27th and Hoover to the girls' enrollment at USC Magnet School right across the street.
"I knew before I left to get on the airplane [to go home] that USC was where I was going, because she showed me it was more about my children," Karleen said.
As Karleen packed up six little brown boxes to move herself, Keisha and Ayesha to Los Angeles for the 1993-94 season, ESPN was on her TV in the background and broke the news that Stanley was terminated. She was already walking out of her second-story, low-income apartment and didn't know what else to do. Their few belongings bounced and slid with each turn in the back of a 16-foot U-Haul truck (because the company was out of smaller trucks) as they drove down and left their life of living on welfare behind.
Former USC legend Cheryl Miller soon took over as head coach, and she embraced Ayesha and Keisha just as Stanley had.
Karleen's college career as a mother consisted of late nights and early mornings, usually only sleeping about four hours. Ayesha would head to school around 7 a.m. for a before-school program while Karleen began her day in class.
"I'd walk them over, or when I finally got a car we'd ride over," Karleen said. And by car, she meant her Diamondhead bicycle she bought for $20, with Ayesha riding on the seat, Keisha on the front bar and Karleen standing up.
Teammates Erica Jackson and Shanika Porter walked Keisha to kindergarten later in the morning while Karleen was in class, and the girls' friend who was in middle school at USC Magnet would walk them to North Gym every afternoon where practice was already in full swing. Miller and other coaches gave Ayesha drills to do on the sideline while Keisha, who sometimes joined in, would usually sit with her hands folded and quietly watch.
"They were the team's children," Leslie said.
When the whistle blew for a water break, they jumped up to give everyone high fives and smiles as the players huffed and puffed. They knew the routine of practice, and the routine of being a student-athlete.
"They understood the lifestyle we had," Karleen said. "They understood that this was Mommy's job. They had to be around me every step of the way, so they matured quickly. They understood what discipline, commitment and hard work was."
"And most of all, sacrificing."
At five and six years old, they knew to ask before going to the market if they only had enough for groceries, or if they could each get something. Sometimes they could, and sometimes they couldn't, but it was never a fight.
Karleen used to always tell them, "We do what we have to do now, so we can do what we want to do later."
And when Karleen went to visit her daughters' college apartment, she found those words written on a Post-It note attached to Ayesha's mirror. The lessons they learned from their mother at USC still stick with the girls today.
What Ayesha and Keisha remember most from those two years is the people and the love those people gave them.
"Everyone rallied around us. It felt like extended family," Ayesha said.
The school nurse would call Barbara Williams, the women's basketball administrative assistant until passing away in 1999, if the girls were ill. Williams delivered chicken soup in the middle of the day to soothe a stomach ache, or walked them home to rest. Soon they started faking it just to see Williams.
Tim Tessalone, Linda Reid and Nancy Mazmanian expected the girls everyday in the Sports Information office at Heritage Hall. Tessalone, the current head Sports Information Director, and Reid, the women's basketball SID at the time, laughed as the girls pretended to answer the phone and send faxes. Tessalone's candy drawer was usually missing one or two Snickers by the time they left.
"They loved my children as if they were their own. I'm not kidding," Karleen said.
"You can't not love them. They were too great," Reid said of Ayesha and Keisha, who later became the flower girls at her wedding. "They charmed everybody, for sure."
Jamie Yanchar, a strength and conditioning coach at the time, would happily watch "the rugrats" while Karleen ran to turn in an essay.
USC linebacker and legend Willie McGinest doubled as the Tooth Fairy and gave Keisha $7 when she lost a tooth.
A song leader would throw Ayesha on his shoulders to do the Fight Song at home games.
"It showed them people love you, that there are good people in the world, and you go be one of those good people," Karleen said of the support from the USC community. "I really believe that's what shot them to the moon."
Her daughters would sometimes have to accompany her to her Tuesday night class, sitting in a classroom until 9 p.m., and sometimes the library until 11 p.m. Karleen hated to do it, but it was what had to be done.
"The biggest challenge was being able to do my work, play basketball at a high level, and not just balance that with motherhood, but give more to motherhood," Karleen said. "I was not going to allow my kids to miss out on their mom as much as I could."
And it all proved worth it when Karleen walked across the stage to receive her diploma in 1995, with one daughter on each side of her, both waving and smiling at the audience, proud that "Mommy" did it.
