The Season Ends, and the Scoreboard Doesn't Tell the Story HUNTINGDON, Tenn. - It was a last chance. The score was close. And Tonya Lutz was not going to let the opportunity slip. "We can win this ballgame, but y'all have to help me out!" she shouted to her players during a first-half timeout of their district playoff basketball game. It was a play-in game, of sorts, between ninth-seeded Carroll Academy and eighth-seeded Bruceton High, which several of her players attended before the juvenile-court system sent them to Carroll Academy. Lutz hollered instructions about rebounding and defense. "Do you understand that?" she said. Sweaty, pie-eyed faces nodded back at her. This is the end of the trail if y'all don't do that. This is in your court. Y'all have to want it. Y'all understand? The girls piled their hands in the middle of the huddle. "O.K.," Lutz said. One, two, three - hustle! Destiny, the senior point guard, made a 3-pointer. She hit another. Carroll Academy trailed by only 3, its smallest second-quarter margin of the season. Murmurs rippled through the crowd at the neutral court in Clarksburg. Bruceton stretched the lead to double digits. Destiny's 3-pointer with one second left made the halftime score 24-16. The couple of dozen Carroll Academy fans in attendance stood and gave the girls their biggest ovation of the season as they disappeared into the locker room. Carroll Academy girls have never won a game in the district tournament, ever! Lutz shouted, talking faster than usual. The girls looked on, their hands raised and palms out, Lutz's mandated reminder during timeouts and halftimes to always keep their hands up on defense. "Come on, girls," cried Summer, a 17-year-old senior with a baby at home, a recently failed drug test in her file and a history of delinquency on her juvenile record. Theirs may be a losing team, unappreciated and unloved. But for one coach and nine girls, on a day when they would be together for the last time, there was reason for optimism. Champion Point Guard, Losing Coach Lutz is a 36-year-old mother of two, with a twangy voice that can pierce the din of a classroom or the roar of a basketball crowd. She is a regular at the biggest church in town, and an occasional judge at beauty pageants, where her daughter used to compete. She desperately wants to be viewed seriously as a coach. "Any good coach, I would challenge to come and do a year or two and see if they can turn a program around," she said. Because I thought the same thing. Lutz grew up a few miles away, in Gleason, where she was the point guard on a state championship team nearly 20 years ago. She played basketball at Bethel University in nearby McKenzie and earned a sociology degree. She spent several years doing counseling, then was home for two years after she and her husband had their first child. When Randy Hatch, the Carroll Academy administrator, hired her to replace him as the girls coach in 2004, she never looked at the team's record. Even though she had no head-coaching experience, she assumed she could overcome the disadvantages - the ever-changing roster, the inexperienced players, the lack of parental support. "If someone were to look at my record, they'd probably think I can't coach at all," Lutz said. On the first day of practice in October, Lutz asked her players some basic questions. Where is the free-throw line? What is traveling? How many players are on the court at a time? Most of the girls replied with blank stares. "Until Christmas, I was teaching them offense versus defense," Lutz said. We have a crash course in peewee basketball - dribbling, passing, shooting, defense. She knows that her record with a team that always loses may preclude her from coaching elsewhere someday. It gnaws at her. But she musters enthusiasm for the job - doggedly challenging referees, for example, or diving for loose balls in practice to set an example. "I'm going to coach like we're going to win a state championship," Lutz said. They deserve that. Players see her as a stable, trustworthy role model, unlike anyone they know. She is fiery, sassy and confident. She gives them pointers on everything from manners to hairstyles. Typically, she starts games with a pep talk about fundamentals and effort, employs a diatribe at halftime and makes the postgame speech a life lesson about perseverance. "A lot of people who are in the stands are people who don't see what we're winning at," Lutz said. And she started to cry. Fans at Last, and a Chance to Win