The electric drone of industrial-size floodlights fills the open spaces of an empty Kohl Center. Overhead, a mammoth four-sided scoreboard hangs, its thousands of light bulbs switched off for the night. Of the arena’s 17,142 seats, all but two are vacant. The Kohl Center is naked, and Jessie Stomski chooses this environment to reveal her story.
This tale of redemption starts off innocent enough. The protagonist, a future Big Ten Freshman of the Year in basketball, hasn’t even played her first game of organized hoops. Instead, this five-year-old Minnesota girl has her sights set on the NFL. She wants to play quarterback.
“Before I could grip the pigskin, my father and I tossed it back and forth across the living room for hours,” Stomski wrote a week ago in “Captain’s Log,” a column she pens for the UW Athletic Department website. “It was not long before I could throw a spiral, and Dad and I rejoiced.”
Soon, though, Mr. and Mrs. Stomski divorced. They maintained a cordial relationship — and still do — but the family separated. After the split Jessie lived with mom, while her dad moved out of the house.
“I became much more independent,” Stomski said. “My mom was working, and my brother lived with my dad. I was basically an only child, and I had to do a lot of things for myself.”
Despite the physical distance separating the family, the four did anything but isolate themselves from each other. Mom and dad kept their friendship alive and didn’t close lines of communication, lessons that still influence their daughter.
Stomski says she saw her dad “all the time” growing up. And when the Super Bowl aspirations finally dissolved, both Dad and Mom stood behind Jessie’s burgeoning dreams of the World Series, Wimbledon and the local T-ball championship.
“My dad would usually come over on Christmas Eve and spend a lot of time with us,” Stomski said. “Obviously my mother and father would get into other relationships, but they always made time, especially at holidays, for us four to be together.”
The fairy tale ends there, however. As Stomski moved through adolescence, she developed a rebellious streak. The tomboy with a penchant for picking fights matured into a teenager who strafed most of the authority figures that crossed her path. She referred to her parents as Enemy No. 1 and Enemy No. 2. She ditched high school regularly during the off-season, when the skips couldn’t affect her playing time. She got tattoos.
“When I left home to come [to college], it was pretty rocky,” Stomski said about her relationship with her parents in high school. “They may have even been glad to see me go.”
As Stomski fought her rebellion, she was quickly becoming Minnesota’s top high school player. As a 16-year-old she poured in 25 points a game in AAU competition, playing with current teammate Tamara Moore. In 1998, during her senior year, she averaged more than 28 points and 12 rebounds per game. She earned first-team all-state honors, and the St. Paul Pioneer Press named her to its All-Metro team. Brian Peterson, her high school coach, called her “the best-skilled player in Minnesota” and more dominant than Moore, who was named Ms. Basketball in 1998.
Under it all, however, Stomski hid an increasing affection for alcohol. Rumors of the Tartan parties had circulated — some had wafted all the way through the Minneapolis Star Tribune newsroom, according to one reporter — but so far Stomski’s taste for alcohol hadn’t become official business.
That changed in January of ’98. An unnamed source tipped off the Tartan athletic department about a party at the house of one of Stomski’s friends. Tartan athletes were scattered throughout the house when the friend’s parents burst into the party. Stomski knew she was busted.
“The individual coaches of the teams sat every team down and said, ‘We know who was there, so confess'” Stomski said. “They tried to get everyone to confess that they were there. I was the only one out of every sport that admitted it.”
With Stomski’s admission on the record, the Minnesota State High School League suspended her for two weeks. The Tartans lost three of their four games while she served her suspension. When Stomski rejoined the lineup, they didn’t lose again.
A month after MSHSL lifted the suspension, the roof caved in on Stomski’s drinking habit. After dropping a friend off at home Feb. 28, Stomski headed back to her own house after another party. She could still feel the buzz.
She didn’t make it home. Police in Maplewood, a suburb about a mile away from Oakdale, pulled her over on suspicion of drunk driving. The Breathalyzer she blew into returned a blood-alcohol reading of .15, exceeding the legal limit of .10. Not that it mattered; Minnesota adheres to a zero-tolerance alcohol policy for youths, which meant Stomski had broken the law with her first sip of the night.
But she didn’t just serve a suspension this time. With less than a month left in her senior season, her high school career was over. Tartan lost its next game, the regional final against Stillwater. As for Stomski, she couldn’t handle seeing her teammates play without her. She stayed home.
Two weeks later, though, the story had spun out of Stomski’s control. The Star Tribune, Pioneer Press, and Wisconsin State Journal all ran stories covering her DWI. Stomski heard people opinionating about her on talk radio.
Closer to home, Stomski’s mother complained to the Oakdale-Lake Elmo Review about its coverage of the incident. In the middle of this media maelstrom, an 18-year-old stood in front of dozens of people who wanted answers.
“I became the poster child for drinking teenagers,” she said. “Which I don’t think I was. I was a little rebellious, but I also was the kind of person that coached second- and third-grade little girls for four years.”
Finally Stomski summoned the courage to explain herself to the people she cared about most: her team. First she wrote an apology and distributed a copy to everyone involved with the team that year. Then, during her senior speech at Tartan’s end-of-the-year banquet, Stomski broke down. In front of everyone, she wept. The others couldn’t hold back.
“There wasn’t anyone that wasn’t crying in there,” Stomski said. “It was just very emotional. They were disappointed in me, but they also supported me and what I had to do in order to make changes in my life.”
At her parents’ behest, Stomski checked into a rehabilitation clinic. There, the self-described “high school jock” walked alongside junkies and addicts with serious mental problems.
Stomski says she didn’t feel like she belonged there, but she admits that for the first time in her life she realized that her partying connected somehow with her basketball career. She realized she couldn’t have it both ways. She’d have to choose one or the other.
She chose basketball. In the fall of ’98 Stomski entered UW as one-fourth of one of America’s top classes of recruits. As a freshman she set the UW freshman scoring record with 459 points and tied the freshman rebounding mark with 214. In February of that season she scored 34 points against Ohio State, which still stands as her career high. Those statistics helped Stomski earn the Big Ten Freshman of the Year award.
During her sophomore year, Stomski’s numbers dropped off slightly, as did her intensity. That season she shot the lowest percentage of her college career, scored fewer points and committed more turnovers than ever before. But the next year she recorded career highs in points and rebounds per game and career lows in turnovers and fouls.
This season she already received preseason co-Player of the Year honors in the Big Ten. She’s the conference’s No. 3 scorer, and she has done it while opponents have double-teamed her on virtually all of her touches.
“She’s tripled her performance in the last four years,” said Kyle Black, a fellow senior. “She’s the best player I’ve had the opportunity to play with.”
Stomski has also developed a knack for academics. Liberated from the constricting required classes of high school, Stomski chose to follow her lifelong love of writing and pursued a journalism major. Her newly acquired dedication to school has led Stomski to raise her high-school 2.7 GPA to a 3.2 in college.
But the most impressive accomplishment of Stomski’s college career has come off the court, in the way she has dealt with the turmoil of early ’98. She says she’s never driven drunk since her DWI. She admits that she still goes out and she still drinks, but she does it with the memory of the past in the back of her mind.
“I’ll never be able to forget that’s how I ended my high school career, when we could have won a state championship,” Stomski said. “That’s something that’ll never go away. Four years down the road, right now, that’s on my mind, and I think about making sure my college career doesn’t end that way.”
More important than a glorious finish for Stomski, however, is ensuring that others understand the moral of her life’s story.
“I think that there’s a lot of kids out there that see us as these perfect role models and think that when they make mistakes in their lives, that means they can never achieve what we’ve achieved,” Stomski said. “That’s not true.”
