David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits, and the Art of Battling Giants

counterpart. When some teams play the press, the defender plays behind the offensive player she’s guarding in order to impede her once she catches the ball. The Redwood City girls, by contrast, played a more aggressive, high-risk strategy. They positioned themselves in front of their opponents to prevent them from catching the inbounds pass in the first place. And they didn’t have anyone guard the player throwing the ball in. Why bother? Ranadivé used that extra player as a floater who could serve as a second defender against the other team’s best player.
    “Think about football,” Ranadivé said. “The quarterback can run with the ball. He has the whole field to throw to, and it’s still damned difficult to complete a pass.” Basketball was harder. A smaller court. A five-second deadline. A heavier, bigger ball. As often as not, the teams Redwood City was playing against simply couldn’t make the inbounds pass within the five-second limit. Or else the inbounding player, panicked by the thought that her five seconds were about to be up, would throw the ball away. Or her pass would be intercepted by one of the Redwood City players. Ranadivé’s girls were maniacal.
    The second deadline in basketball requires a team to advance the ball across midcourt into its opponent’s end within ten seconds, and if Redwood City’s opponents met the first deadline and were able to make the inbounds pass in time, the girls would turn their attention to the second deadline. They would descend on the girl who caught the inbounds pass and “trap” her. Anjali was the designated trapper. She’d sprint over and double-team the dribbler, stretching her long arms high and wide. Maybe she’d steal the ball. Maybe the other player would throw it away in a panic—or get bottled up and stalled, so that the ref would end up blowing the whistle.
    “When we first started out, no one knew how to play defense or anything,” Anjali said. “So my dad said the whole game long, ‘Your job is to guard someone and make sure they never get the ball on inbounds plays.’ It’s the best feeling in the world to steal the ball from someone. We would press and steal, and do that over and over again. It made people so nervous. There were teams that were a lot better than us, that had been playing a long time, and we would beat them.”
    The Redwood City players would jump ahead 4–0, 6–0, 8–0, 12–0. One time they led 25–0. Because they typically got the ball underneath their opponent’s basket, they rarely had to attempt the low-percentage, long-range shots that require skill and practice. They shot layups. In one of the few games that Redwood City lost that year, only four of the team’s players showed up. They pressed anyway. Why not? They lost by only 3 points.
    “What that defense did for us is that we could hide our weaknesses,” Rometra Craig said. “We could hide the fact that we didn’t have good outside shooters. We could hide the fact that we didn’t have the tallest lineup. Because as long as we played hard on defense, we were getting steals and getting easy layups. I was honest with the girls. I told them, ‘We’re not the best basketball team out there.’ But they understood their roles.” A twelve-year-old girl would go to war for Rometra. “They were awesome,” she said.
    Lawrence attacked the Turks where they were weak—along the farthest, most deserted outposts of the railroad—and not where they were strong. Redwood City attacked the inbounds pass, the point in a game where a great team is as vulnerable as a weak one. David refused to engage Goliath in close quarters, where he would surely lose. He stood well back, using the full valley as his battlefield. The girls of Redwood City used the same tactic. They defended all ninety-four feet of the basketball court. The full-court press is legs, not arms. It supplants ability with effort. It is basketball for those who, like Lawrence’s Bedouin, are “quite unused to formal warfare, whose assets [are] movement, endurance, individual intelligence…courage.”
    “It’s an exhausting strategy,” Roger Craig said. He and Ranadivé were in a conference room at Ranadivé’s software company, reminiscing about their dream season. Ranadivé was at the whiteboard, diagramming the intricacies of the Redwood City press. Craig was sitting at the table.
    “My girls had to be more fit than the others,” Ranadivé said.
    “He used to make them run!”