High School
Shea Ralph grew up in Fayetteville, North Carolina, where she attended Terry Sanford High School. She was named Athlete of the Year by the North Carolina High School Athletic Association. The Terry Sanford High School graduate is best known for her basketball prowess, but she also lettered in soccer, cross-country, and track. At the time of the award she held 17 state basketball records, including 39.1 points per game as a junior, a 71.6 percent shooting percentage from the floor as a junior, and 18 assists in one game. A scholar as well as an athlete, the National Honor Society member was a recipient of the 1995 Dial Award presented annually to the top male and female high-school athlete/scholar in the United States, earning a 4.2 grade point average on a scale of 4.0. Ralph was named a High School All-American by the WBCA. She participated in the WBCA High School All-America Game in 1996, scoring twelve points.
In 1996 she was named the USA Today National High School Player of the Year.
While in high school, Shea began a multi-year battle with anorexia nervosa. It began with an offhand comment by a teammate, telling her she looked a "little thick". She cut down her eating so significantly she dropped from 145 pounds to 108, a very low weight for a 6-foot-tall (1.8 m) person. Her AAU coach, John Ellington, was concerned about her eating habits. One day at a post-game dinner he placed a hundred dollar bill next to a plate of mozzarella sticks and told her the money was hers if she would just eat the mozzarella. She turned him down. So he had to up the stakes, and told her to gain weight or she was off the team. The prospect of not playing basketball persuaded her to eat. Despite barely eating, she still managed to score 3002 points in her high school career.
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Famous quotes containing the words high school, high and/or school:
“The way to go to the circus, however, is with someone who has seen perhaps one theatrical performance before in his life and that in the High School hall.... The scales of sophistication are struck from your eyes and you see in the circus a gathering of men and women who are able to do things as a matter of course which you couldn’t do if your life depended on it.”
—Robert Benchley (1889–1945)
“Whatever is felt upon the page without being specifically named there—that, one might say, is created. It is the inexplicable presence of the thing not named, of the overtone divined by the ear but not heard by it, the verbal mood, the emotional aura of the fact or the thing or the deed, that gives high quality to the novel or the drama, as well as to poetry itself.”
—Willa Cather (1873–1947)
“I’m tired of playing worn-out depressing ladies in frayed bathrobes. I’m going to get a new hairdo and look terrific and go back to school and even if nobody notices, I’m going to be the most self-fulfilled lady on the block.”
—Joanne Woodward (b. 1930)