Jocelyn Love's father, Wally Love, is a native of Holly Grove and a stand-out Panther basketball player:
Arkansas Democrat-Gazette Feb. 23, 2007 Sports Section, pg. 23 Like it is: UALR’s Love story isn’t tragedy despite ending
By Wally Hall LITTLE ROCK — It isn’t politically correct on either count, but it is true.
She looks like a model and plays like a man.
That will be only half-true Saturday afternoon when Jocelyn Love takes the floor at the Stephens Center for the final college game of her career.
Love will be in uniform, but she won’t be playing for UALR.
On Jan. 9 against Arkansas State (Saturday’s opponent), the Trojans were trying to make a late run and Love missed a shot and went after it.
“I had never jumped so hard to get a rebound,” she said. “It was the highest I had ever jumped.”
She got the ball, came down on her left leg and let go of the ball hoping for a foul and field goal.
What she got was a careerending injury. She tore the anterior cruciate ligament and lateral meniscus.
After the season, she will have surgery, and the only action she will see today is the farewell to seniors, the national anthem and if ASU gets a technical foul.
“My mom [Jackie] and dad [Wally] said that was the only playing I could do,” she said. “Maybe [Arkansas State] Coach [Brian] Boyer will feel sorry for an east Arkansas girl and get one on purpose.”
Love laughed when she said that.
She’s like that, happy and serious at the same time.
She was part of Coach Joe Foley’s first recruiting class to UALR and has played an intricate role in turning the Trojans from pretender to contender.
Love is the school’s all-time leader in scoring (1,495), field goals made (509), three-point field goals made (212), free throws made (265), steals (173) and minutes played (3,505, an average of 35 per game).
She’s third in assists and seventh in rebounding.
All of this from a young lady who told her junior high coach at West Memphis no thanks to an invitation to try out, “I was going to be a cheerleader.”
Six years of gymnastics had prepared her for that, but it just took one year to hook her on basketball.
Her best friend decided to try out for basketball so Love went home and told her dad, “I need some gym shorts.”
Wally Love was an outstanding basketball player at the University of Central Arkansas. He was a 6-6 natural athlete who could play all five positions.
“He was shocked,” she said. “We had talked about basketball and I knew Dad played, but he never pushed his kids to play.”
Wally rushed his daughter to the gym that night and taught her how to make layups with her right and left hands. She made the team.
“I was the only one who could make one from the left,” she said.
That was a critical year for the seventh-grader: Her mom made her quit gymnastics.
“I made the first B of my life,” she said. And her last.
Love developed into a good post player and in her senior year led West Memphis to the state championship, where she was named the outstanding player, but schools were not knocking her door down with scholarship offers.
She said with a smile, “I couldn’t shoot anything but layups. I had a decent little baseline shot. I already knew that if I was going to play in college I had to be able to shoot, so I started staying after practice.”
Foley heard from a coaching friend about the athleticism and desire and offered the scholarship.
“Coach Foley is the reason I have any records,” she said. “That freshman season he was all about shooting drills. Comingoff a screen with one dribble or no dribble, we did it for what seemed like hours every day.”
She became the toughest guard to cover in the Sun Belt Conference.
“Give me a couple more like Jocelyn and we’ll play anyone in the country,” Foley said.
The injury did not slow down the academics of the 4.0 honor student who is doing her student teaching and will be a teacher, or if the surgery goes really well, “I might play overseas for a couple of years.”
She will make up her own mind and she’ll do the right thing.
“Jocelyn Love is the poster child for what is right in college athletics,” said Chris Peterson, UALR’s athletic director.
Saturday, she’ll be center stage at UALR for the final time
-- Edited by Danyelle McNeill Fletcher at 17:41, 2007-03-01
