Court-Ordered Basketball, and No Fans HUNTINGDON, Tenn. - The Carroll Academy girls basketball team had just lost by 59 points to Dresden High School, the top team in the conference. Still, Tonya Lutz, Carroll Academy's coach, lauded her team's effort. Randy Hatch, Carroll Academy's day-to-day director and founder of the basketball program, reached into a pocket and slipped $20 to one of the girls, as he usually does after games. Together, amid giggles, the nine girls on the team bounced to the snack stand in a single-file line. Patrick Steele, the school's straight-faced security director, followed them. Over the years, Steele has overheard taunts, even racial slurs, directed at Carroll Academy students, boys and girls, from opposing fans. He escorts the players wherever they go - from the bus to the gym, to the locker rooms and bathrooms, and back to the bus. The girls returned to the empty bleachers on the visitors" side of the gym, munching on candy and popcorn. They settled in to watch the boys teams play, the second half of the usual girls-boys doubleheader. It might be their favorite time of the day. The pressures of their lives melt away amid gossip and sugar. But first it was Dresden's Senior Night. One by one, every Dresden senior winter-season athlete was introduced to an admiring crowd. Each carried a bouquet of flowers across the court, handed it to beaming parents and received hugs and kisses. The Carroll Academy girls watched. Destiny broke the mood by pretending to cry. "Miss Tonya, can we have parents" night, too?" she asked with a mocking tone. A couple of girls giggled. "We could do a Senior Night," Hatch whispered. I could get the sheriff to go round up all their parents. Poverty, Drugs, Crime, Hope That morning, sunlight peeked over the trees and mist loitered over the low spots of winter's dormant cotton fields. The fleet of 10 white Ford vans, driven by Carroll Academy teachers and staff members, pulled out of the parking lot. They splintered across the countryside, through five counties of rural West Tennessee. This swath of empty landscape is sprinkled with decaying towns. Some carry incongruent names borrowed from Europe - Paris, Milan, Dresden. Huntingdon, the Carroll County seat, is centered by a stately courthouse in the middle of a picturesque square. Most of the manufacturing jobs that attracted past generations have dried up. The H.I.S. factory that made Chic jeans and other apparel in nearby Bruceton, employing 2,000 or more for decades, closed more than 10 years ago. Hatch's parents worked at a long-gone shirt factory - his mother as a seamstress, his father as a sewing-machine mechanic. Now, double-digit unemployment feels normal. Tennessee's population grew more than 10 percent in the past decade, but it is stagnant in this area. Median household incomes linger in the $30,000 range. About 15 percent of adults have a college degree. Drug use is rampant, across generations. Tennessee had more methamphetamine-lab seizures in 2010 than any other state, according to the Tennessee Methamphetamine Task Force. Carroll County, with 18 seizures in a population of about 28,000, had about twice as many per capita as the rest of the state. Prescription-drug abuse is particularly acute in Tennessee. The state perennially has among the highest number of prescriptions per capita in the country. It has the sixth-highest percentage of youth, ages 12 to 17, abusing prescription pain medications, according to the Tennessee Department of Health. It was across this quiet, complex setting that the Carroll Academy vans meandered. They picked up students, some an hour away, and returned past the scrubby trailers along two-lane roads and the tidy brick homes along High Street, to the school's truck-dock entrance. The school is a single-story wing of a former hospital. The sign outside reads: "Carroll Academy. Home of the Jaguars. A State-Licensed Facility for Grades 6-12 Operated by the Carroll County Juvenile Court.