Like mother, like daughter

On Saturday afternoon last weekend, everybody at the Daniel E. Rumph Playground in East Germantown stopped to watch a brief, impromptu one-on-one battle. This mini-game featured a lot of incidental contact, no fouls called, and some mild trash talk.

"I know how to play one-on-one," the older player said after making a full-contact layup.

The opponent was a skilled 15-year-old, not backing down.

What about the next shot?

"Jump shot," the teenager said.

"Back up," an older man on the sideline yelled.

A typical-enough summertime hoops game, except for this: The players were mother and daughter. The 46-year-old mother was not backing down, either. She wanted to win - anybody could see that - but really, she had another goal in mind: impart everything she knew about hoops to her daughter.

"Give her everything in me," the mother said later.

The first couple of years, the daughter just tagged along, sitting on the single bleacher row at the recreation center. By all accounts, she usually looked bored.

"I wasn't that into it," Betnijah Laney said.

Her mom had some of the best girls' basketball players in the city working out in that gym. Every Saturday morning during the school year, Yolanda Laney led hours of drills. She had gone to this gym herself while a teenager living in the West Queen Lane projects in Germantown. She had always been a force as a player: an all-American forward at University City High; an all-American at Cheyney, when she played in two Final Fours against the likes of Tennessee; briefly a pro in Europe before she got her law degree from Temple.

Even as a lawyer working for the solicitor's office in Atlantic City, Yolanda couldn't leave the game behind. She began the Saturday morning drills in 2001, commuting from her home in Delaware. Dozens of top area players have picked up tips from her.

The best of them may turn out to be her daughter.

"I was around it too much for me not to play," Betnijah said.

Now she's the force. Going into her junior year at Smyrna High in Delaware, Betnijah already has scored more than 1,000 career points. Not quite 6 feet tall, she scored 52 points in a game last season, breaking Elena Delle Donne's state record by a point. Betnijah averaged 29.6 points a game in 2008-09 and made USA Basketball's under-16-year-old national team that will play in Mexico this summer, and she sat behind Connecticut's bench on Senior Night last season.

She's a bluest-chipper. The Huskies and Rutgers and everybody else are recruiting her.

But Betnijah's first passion was dance. She used to go to Brenda Lee's Dance Studio on Stenton Avenue. "Ballet, tap, jazz. I think that helped with her footwork," her mother said.

Betnijah wanted to be a cheerleader. Mom said that was fine. Her younger brother, Shakaris, now 13, was into basketball. Betnijah could cheer for him. She still tagged along to the workouts, and about five years ago she told her mother, "I want to play."

She was in dress clothes. Her mother told her to change. A dress code is taped to a wall at the rec center: 1. ATHLETIC SHORTS ONLY. 2. BASKETBALL SHOES OR SNEAKERS ONLY. If that wasn't clear enough, there were more rules. No boots or street shoes. No cutoff shorts. Not even sweatpants or warm-ups while playing. The gym is for serious, sweat-inducing hoops.

The city's best have come through here. Formerly Mallery Playground, it's Rumph in honor of the Western Kentucky point guard who collapsed during a 2005 game at the gym and died of cardiomyopathy, an inflammation of the heart.

Yolanda started her workouts because she believed there were dozens of places in the city where boys could play but few opportunities for girls. Recreation center director Leroy Berry, who had been drafted by the Cleveland Cavaliers in 1980, asked what she had in mind. Saturday mornings, just that one morning, for the girls, she said.

"She was developing the girls. Word got around," Berry said. "I always remember she was just really intense. We'd tease her: 'You ever smile?' We started calling her Sgt. Carter, like, 'Move it! Move it! Move it!' When she does her workouts, I don't see any kids playing around."

The workouts are mostly during the school year, but the Laneys were at the rec center last weekend practicing with the Philly Triple Threat, a 16-and-under AAU team of top talents from Southeastern Pennsylvania, South Jersey, and Delaware. Yolanda is one of the coaches. Betnijah is a forward.

She often plays on the wing, but around the basket she shows quick, powerful moves. She cuts easily without the ball, and with it she has guardlike control. One key part of her game: It's difficult to tell which hand is stronger. She shows a lefty hook - her natural hand, her mother confirms - but continually scores with her right hand down on the block and regularly shoots jumpers with her right hand.

At the rec center, the only time Betnijah looked her age was when her brother tried to get in a photograph. She shot him a perfect 15-year-old older sister look and tried to box him out of the picture.

On the court, it's not just her skills that catch the eye.

"I would say her strength is maybe just that - she's a relentless rebounder. She's not intimidated by contact," said Carol Callan, the USA Basketball women's national team director from the Olympic team on down.

Another obvious Laney asset, Callan said, is her ability to play inside and out.

"For the international game, we like versatility in our players," Callan said.

Yolanda had her daughter and the other girls play against boys in age-group leagues, just as she did when she was young. Coming back to Philadelphia from Delaware also had its purpose: more talented competition and more serious basketball. (Yolanda moved to Delaware after her brother suggested it, to be nearer to him after her mom died, as she worked full time as a single mom.)

Yolanda, a part-time assistant coach at Temple while in law school, was a little old to take advantage of the WNBA, although when the league got up and running, she often scored at will against some of its new stars in summer competitions, said her brother, Terrance Brown.

"I think she was before her time," he said. "She put on a show by herself. A lot of people didn't know how to play her because she had a post game, but she also had a very good jump shot that was really beyond everybody else out there."

Because Mom learned a lot of basketball nuances from coach C. Vivian Stringer at Cheyney, Yolanda said, other schools have assumed Betnijah is headed for Stringer's Rutgers team.

"I learned the craft for teaching as well as coaching from her," Yolanda said. "We've had our fights over the years and when I was a player, but I always loved her."

"At first, UConn wasn't recruiting me," Betnijah said. "They weren't going to because they thought I was going to Rutgers."

To let schools know this isn't a done deal, the Laneys are having Betnijah's godmother field recruiting calls. Except her godmother played for Stringer at Cheyney, too.

Yolanda tells everybody it will be Betnijah's decision and tells Betnijah she'll know when to make that decision. Yolanda had planned to go to Kansas, she said, but dreamed one night about playing at Cheyney and decided to follow her dream, canceling a visit to the Midwest.

This is the first year USA Basketball has a girls' team at this age group, preparing for a new under-17 world championship next summer. The coaches who cut a pool of 38 players to 12 never saw the Betnijah who preferred dance at Miss Lee's studio to hoops at the rec center.

"Once she said she loved basketball, she never backed down," Yolanda said.

Officially Betnijah, who will turn 16 in October, has yet to beat her mother one on one.

"I beat her one time, but she quit, so she won't let me officially say that I won," Betnijah said.

"She didn't beat me," Yolanda said. "She was leading. I scored and tied the game. But because of my age and everything, I had to sit down. I just had to sit down. I needed oxygen. Neither of us went down. I told her I would rather sit down than fall out."

At the rec center last weekend, Mom had the ball, daughter defending. Yolanda accepted the challenge to hit a jump shot. She backed up to 22 feet, took a couple of dribbles, and shot a 19-footer, her daughter all over her.

After the basketball barely grazed the rim as it fell in, and the whole place erupted, Yolanda walked over to the bleacher and sat down.

"I asked her what she wanted," Yolanda said of taking the jumper.

Her daughter came over smiling and slapped Yolanda's palm and started to sit on her lap but then walked away to get a drink.

"I would say she still has the skills after all these years," Betnijah said later.

"She's still not where I've been, but she's going to get there,' Yolanda said, believing that as soon as Betnijah perfects her jump shot with either hand, the torch will be passed for good. Her daughter will have everything in her, and she will be unstoppable.