I remember the first day that the photographer Ruth Fremson and I met the Lady Jaguars, a misfit basketball team of troubled teens in West Tennessee. It was winter, 13 years ago. The girls, ages 13 to 17, were tossed together because a juvenile-court judge sentenced them to a strict day school called Carroll Academy. They never came close to winning games.
I can still see their faces in the van, headed to another game. I remember 13-year-old Hannah, sitting in the front. Her only crime was coming from a home broken by poverty and drug addiction. She was eager for attention. She had so many questions. I remember her voice, honeyed with an accent.
So it was strange and sad to hear Hannah’s voice, for the first time in a decade, coming from inside the jail in early 2023. How did that girl become this woman, facing felony counts related to meth? What had the years done to her?
That day, standing outside the jail, Hannah on the phone from inside, was the moment I decided to find out what happened to all the Lady Jaguars.
Renewed curiosity led Ruth and me to Summer’s chaotic house, to Kiana’s quiet place in the woods, to Alleyah’s recovery residence in Florida, back to the jail to find Destiny. Over more than a year, we connected with all nine members of the 2012 team, most of them multiple times. In the end, seven of them agreed to share their lives with all of us.
Ruth and I often traveled apart, to capture more episodes of their lives, from birthday parties to jail cells, Narcotics Anonymous meetings to children’s beauty pageants. In cars rented in Nashville or Memphis, we crisscrossed five sprawling counties, from the Alabama state line north into Kentucky. Combined, for this latest story, we made more than 10 trips to see the former Lady Jaguars.
It’s a journalist’s greatest honor to tell other people’s stories. It’s more of an honor to do it again.
The original series of articles about the Lady Jaguars, published in 2012, was less about basketball and more about girls like Hannah — who they were, where they came from, how they ended up at Carroll Academy.
Even before those stories were published, I wondered what would become of the girls after we left. Editors and I discussed returning, routinely, to see what became of the girls as they moved into and through adulthood. It would be our own version of Britain’s “Up” documentary television series, which followed 14 children beginning in 1964, when they were 7. Their lives were chronicled every seven years — at age 14, 21, 28 and so on. The latest documentary caught up to them at age 63. It was a social experiment, not without controversy.
But the power of the series was not just in seeing people as they age. It was in seeing how the world in which they live has changed. Or not.
We did go back to Tennessee in 2013, to capture the girls a year later, for a follow-up series. But then the idea sat, mostly in my mind, for a decade. I kept loose tabs on the girls through social media, occasional text exchanges and reports from Carroll Academy staff who had heard things.
From a distance, I sensed troubles and triumphs, saw relationships come and go, celebrated children being born. Some of the girls disappeared for long stretches.
Now we know what happened, and where they went.
For years, though, I thought the Lady Jaguars deserved more than what we gave them, which was a deep lens into their lives at the most vulnerable time — as teens, in trouble, living precarious lives where nothing was certain. They were fragile, scared, defiant and somehow hopeful, if only because they were too young not to be.
Now they are beginning to reach 30. They deserve a chance to show us what they’ve become, how this world has treated them, what they still hope to be.
Life does not stand still. And it certainly did not for the Lady Jaguars. I hope readers will get to know these young women — some of them again — through the words and photos of our latest story. Maybe it’s a prism into an America that many of us rarely see. Or maybe it’s a mirror.
The Lady Jaguars did not create this world. They were just trying to live in it. They still are.
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