Everything's Working Out For Gulf Girls

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TRINITY - At first glance, the home of Gulf freshman point guard Nicole Adams looks like your average house in a manicured subdivision.

Open the garage door, and every spare inch of concrete on the floor and the surrounding walls are adorned with a contraption or apparatus to help Adams become an even better basketball player than she can imagine herself to be.

"Our garage is pretty tricked-out," she said.

Adams has made an immediate impact at Gulf, averaging about 18 points a game, second to senior Jordan Schulman, who averages 19 and also trains regularly in the Adams garage.

Both believe their training has had a lot to do with their strong seasons.

"My parents both played basketball, and they love to work out, too," Adams said. "But they wanted to do anything they can to help me with basketball, so I'm very thankful for that."

Her father Tom leads the tour, and considering how long it takes to explain what everything is and how it works, you would think you were touring a major athletic facility, not a two-car garage in the suburbs.

But aside from the $2,000 Vertimax machine, a wooden platform with cords for resistance that is designed to increase the user's vertical jump, and the life-size boxing dummy, everything in the garage is relatively small and has its own spot, whether it is hanging on the wall or rests on the ground.

There are some things you might expect: a rack of basketballs, some medicine balls, weighted jump ropes, adjustable hand-weight blocks.

And there are some extras: plyometrics boxes, a balance board that moves in five different directions and strengthens the core muscles, a calf exerciser, an agility ladder for drills, the rubber floor, hurdles and about 20 instructional DVDs that range from Steve Nash basketball drills to jump-rope drills.

All of it has taken the Adams family about a year to accumulate, with Nicole's mother, Bernadette, being handed all the bills every few weeks by Tom.

"It started with a little bit, and then I said, 'Why go to the gym and why go to personal trainers?'" Adams said. "If you put your time in and study it and break it down, it's so much more convenient. We do it all here, and I just find that she gets 100 percent attention from the person who's working her out, and that would be me and my wife."

The equipment has cost them about $5,000, but it's a small sacrifice if it means Nicole will earn a basketball scholarship from their efforts.

"Some kids have advantages," Tom Adams said. "Some kids have older sisters or brothers and they learn to play from them, but she's a single child and this is now our full-time hobby, training her. It's what we do.

"If it's her dream, it's our dream."

He added that if she wasn't putting in the effort it wouldn't be worth it, but the girls are there six days a week training, and Adams is in the International Baccalaureate program at Gulf and has a 4.5 grade-point average.

In addition to the financial cost, the Adams family has reallocated their time to help Nicole realize her dreams.

An AAU coach on the side, Tom Adams spends three to four hours a day six days a week on the Internet trying to find more equipment or build new workouts.

But it's not just for his daughter.

Some of the players he has coached in AAU have been over to train with him, as have most of the Buccaneers' girls basketball team.

They came mostly during the intense heat of summer. The Adams family plans to put air conditioning into the garage soon. They also plan to add some security to the motion detector lights and the Maltese.

The results have been tangible for Adams and her teammates, especially Schulman.

Schulman has come a long way from her freshman season, but Gulf coach Mike Quarto said her development was apparent during the summer.

"She came in as a freshman when we had a lot of older kids and was pretty one-dimensional, but her ball-handling has improved, her leadership has improved tremendously - she's the one that everyone is looking to now, and she's taken on the challenge," Quarto said.

Nicole Adams' vertical jump has increased five inches to 21 inches in six months using the Vertimax machine, and she is hoping to increase it another five inches.

The girls' dribbling and ball-handling have become a strength largely because of the more than 200 drills she and Schulman do, including many while blindfolded.

All this effort translates to the court too, where the Buccaneers have lost only two games.

"We've done a lot better than what I could have ever imagined for such a young team," Schulman said.

"I was expecting that I was going to have to step up a lot more and do more than just shoot and dribble. I was expecting a learning process and correcting everything and a lot of fundamentals, but I guess from working together the whole summer as a team, we really have a sense of what everyone is capable of."