Love is in the air

Pauline Love is more than happy about the way life has turned out.

A brash, fun-loving girl with a wiry frame and a smile that can light up a room, she’s learned to deal with everything life has thrown her way, but not without some adversity.

The 6-foot-1/2 inch forward has been named pre-season All-Conference USA, and has her eyes trained on several school records for rebounding. More importantly, she is on pace to graduate on time with an undergraduate degree in coaching.

Graduating may not seem like much to the average college student, but considering what Love’s been through to get here, it’s nothing short of remarkable.

Love grew up in Luxora, Ark., a small town about an hour north of Memphis near the banks of the Mississippi River in the Arkansas delta.

“Luxora has about 1,800 people,” Love said. “And I’m related to about 1,798 of them.”

Nobody in her family had ever spent more than a month in college, but when she was named Arkansas’ 2005 Prep Player of the Year, she became determined to be the first.

Problem was, her grades weren’t where they needed to be and it didn’t look like she had a shot to qualify academically. In Luxora, most high school students aren’t being prepared for college so much as they are pushed to simply earn a diploma.

“There’s always hurdles when recruiting from a small town.” Southern Miss coach Joye Lee-McNelis explained. “They don’t usually have many great players that have that opportunity to play at this level, and they are usually short handed and don’t have people who have knowledge of NCAA rules. It makes it a little more difficult. She consumed a lot of our time just to get her here.”

Love played her first game with Lee-McNelis in attendance as a sophomore, and got her official scholarship offer the following year.

Lee-McNelis recruited Love to Memphis before leaving to become the head coach at Southern Miss. When she moved, so did Love’s commitment.

“She said she could tell there was something about me that was special,” Love said. “And she made me believe it. She said she would take care of me, and she made me believe it.”

She decided to take a chance, and enrolled at a school located seven hours from her hometown and everything she knew.

“She said ‘I don’t know where Southern Miss is, but I’m coming with you.’” McNelis recalled.

Unfortunately, once she got to Hattiesburg her grades caught up with her.

She was considered a “Non-qualifier” by the NCAA clearing house, meaning not only could she not play in games, she wasn’t even allowed to practice with the team.

“It was one of the biggest mistakes of my life, not putting more into my high school education,” she said. “I knew what I was capable of with a basketball, and my grades didn’t seem that important.”

The result was the hardest semester of her college career.

“I was depressed,” Love said. “I couldn’t play ball, I couldn’t practice with the team. All I could do was go to class, and I didn’t think that was going very well either.”

Homesick and frustrated with the way college was going, she would basically run away.

Once she went to the Mississippi coast to stay with the family of a friend, other times she would head for Memphis to be closer to home. Lee-McNelis and her staff would spend hours and sometimes days trying to get her on the phone and convince her to come back.

One day when all the coaches were on a particularly long recruiting visit, Love went to the station and caught a bus back to Luxora. She stayed there for a week and a half while Lee-McNelis, her assistants and Love’s teammates rang her phone off the hook trying to find out where she was.

“I don’t know what I was doing.” Love remembered. “I was running away, but when I got to Luxora I realized I couldn’t just go back there and spend the rest of my life sitting there, it wasn’t for me.”

Re-energized, she returned to Hattiesburg ready to be a part of the team.

Unfortunately for her it wasn’t going to be that easy.

Lee-McNelis suggested she spend a year at Jones Junior College in Ellisville, Miss., about 30 minutes north of Hattiesburg. There, she could get her grades up and play at the same time, something Southern Miss couldn’t offer at the moment.

“It turned out to be a great experience for me,” Love said. “I really connected with coach (Sandra) Sumrall, she was the spitting image of coach McNelis and she too was willing to take care of me.”

“She grew up so much under coach Sumrall,” Lee-McNelis said. “She gave her the tough love it took to get through to her, and we never had another problem with her going to class or doing homework.”

After a year at Jones, she came back to Southern Miss and thrived on the court.

Love has become just the third player in Southern Miss history to score over 1,000 points over two seasons, and says the goal for her senior year is to get over 10 points and 10 rebounds in every single game.

She has also cleaned her act up in the classroom, and now mentors the younger players on the impact of the decisions they make.

“It seems like every semester has been tougher and tougher,” she said. “But I’ve got the support group in place with my teammates, coaches and friends to get through it now.”

Love has also worked hard enough to keep her grades up, and is staring a May graduation square in the face.

So what comes next?

“Everyone keeps asking, and honestly I don’t know,” Love said. “I’d love to play at the next level, but I could see myself coaching. Really it’s whatever the Lord has in store for me.”