Rookie in the Empty Gym

The gym is not romantic. The gym is hot, and the hot is an unventilated hot, and the scoreboard hasn’t worked since the first Obama administration. Twelve hundred jumpers a day, five days a week, for most of high school.

“I grew up knowing a rim from the sound the ball makes coming off it. I did not need to look.”

— Aiyana Brooks

The sound of the rim

There is a theory, popular among coaches of a certain temperament, that great shooters are built in small rooms. The reasoning is mechanical: fewer distractions, fewer corrections, fewer opinions. A jumper is a conversation between the shooter and the rim, and the fewer voices in that conversation, the cleaner the answer. Whether or not the theory is true is beside the point. It was true for Brooks.

The gym on Meeting Street was built in 1957 for a congregation that no longer exists. In 2011 the city sold the building to a nonprofit, which sold it to a second nonprofit, which sold it in 2014 for one dollar to Teague, who had, by then, been running free basketball clinics for Charleston middle-school girls out of a borrowed church annex. She renamed it nothing. She never changed the sign.

The gym at 118 Meeting Street, 6:12 a.m.

Photograph — Tariq Gibson

The first time Brooks came through its doors she was eleven and very quiet. She had been brought, against her inclination, by an older cousin who thought the gym might help with a shyness that her family had started to worry about. Teague gave her a ball, pointed at a line painted in blue tape on the hardwood, and said: Fifteen. See what happens. Brooks made fourteen.

“She did not flinch when she missed. That is the first thing I remember. The ball came back and she shot again.”

— Dolores Teague

Twelve hundred, give or take

The number — twelve hundred jumpers a day — is approximate, but only barely. Brooks kept a wall calendar in the laundry room and marked every session with a small tick under the date. Teague counted. Teague, in fact, counted everything. By the time Brooks graduated high school she had taken, by the notebook accounting, 1,147,000 shots inside that gym. She made around sixty-one percent of them. For comparison, the WNBA career leader in field-goal percentage made fifty-eight.

What the numbers obscure is that the work was boring. It had to be. Brooks shot from the same seven spots, in the same sequence, at the same time of morning, for the same reason: so that, when the spotlight eventually arrived, the act of shooting would be the least interesting thing in the room. The shot should be the given. Everything else is the story.

Warm-up, Charleston. January, 2026.

Photograph — Tariq Gibson

She is twenty-one now and the gym has been renamed for her — a fact that embarrasses her and delights her simultaneously, in roughly equal measures. In January the city held a ribbon-cutting. Brooks wore the sweatshirt she had worn to practice at fifteen. She asked that the ribbon be cut by Teague, who refused, and then agreed, and then cried, and then denied having cried, and then cut the ribbon.