More to life
Cabot senior discovers happiness in third world
While winning a state basketball championship was special to Melissa Wolff, spending a week helping the underprivileged on foreign soil proved to be an even more gratifying experience for the Cabot senior.
“It was a blast, a lifechanging event,” said Wolff, who joined 16 others from her church on a trip to South Africia in late March. “We went to the third world part. We went to several hospitals and got to play with the kids and love on them. ... We went to the schools and taught them life skills. We went to some of the AIDS hospitals. We went to the beach and played with some kids there.”
Wolff and the other members of the Mount Carmel Baptist Church in Cabot also got to spend time on a safari and she even got to pet a cheetah.
March was a very memorable month for Wolff, who had just a few weeks earlier had earned MVP honors in leading the Lady Panthers to their first state basketball championship.
Wolff has been selected as the Arkansas DemocratGazette Miss Basketball for 2012.
“Her best years are still in front of her,” Cabot Coach Carla Crowder said. “She’s only going to get better and better.”
A year ago, Wolff could not imagine herself as among the state’s best players. But her work ethic and solid play during the summer of 2011 caught the attention of the University of Arkansas women’s coaching staff. Wolff signed a national letter of intent with the Razorbacks in November.
“The thing about Melissa is that a lot of people didn’t realize how quick she was,” Crowder said. “I told her last year that she needed to play summer ball with a team that was really quick where [college] coaches could see that she could guard those quick players.”
Her solid play continued during her senior season. She averaged 17.0 points a game for a team that finished 27-5 overall and 13-1 in the 7A/6a-central.
“She was consistent and I think the other kids fed off of that,” Cabot assistant coach Charles Ruple said. “We didn’t have to worry about what kind of game she was going to have. ... I don’t think she had a ‘bad’ game. She took very few bad shots. They might not have all gone in, but they were at the right place and the right time.”
Crowder said Wolff was steady in her emotions as well as her performance.
“She never changes her expression,” Crowder said. “She just goes out there and plays. She keeps everybody focused. She is our team’s favorite player and it’s pretty unusual that your best player is liked by everyone.”
Wolff credited the team’s success to excellent chemistry.
“Nobody was selfish,” Wolff said. “We were all willing to work hard and we all knew our roles and what we were good at and we didn’t try to do stuff we weren’t good at. We worked hard and pushed each other.”
Crowder and Ruple both said Wolff was, at times, too unselfish.
“She’s was unselfish to a point where it almost hurt,” Ruple said. “You’ve got to say something to her about it, otherwise she was going to pass it.”
But when it came to important games, Wolff did not disappoint. In a 51- 41 victory over Fort Smith Northside in the Class 7A state championship game, Wolff scored 22 points and grabbed 15 rebounds.
“She stepped up when we needed her to,” Crowder said. “She always did.”
Basketball, however, is not all-consuming to Wolff and her recent trip to Africa only made that fact obvious to her.
“Going on the mission trip was more fun and lifechanging,” Wolff said. “Don’t get me wrong, the state championship was great, but I had never been on an experience like the one in Africa. ... I would love to go on another one to anywhere, but going back to Africa would be nice, too.”