The spring 2004 evaluation had not gone well. Allison Jaskowiak worked out for an hour for USC's new coach, and barely made a basket. Mark Trakh walked away shaking his head. He called the sophomore from Missouri into his office.
Trakh told Jaskowiak that he would honor her scholarship, and that if she wanted to transfer he wouldn't stand in her way. He told her she would never play at USC, but "we won't try to run you off."
She was angry and sad, and sat there soaking it in. She never said it was unfair. She stood up, teary-eyed, and said "OK." She hugged him and walked out.
He didn't hear from her for two weeks.
"I wish I had known what she had gone through before I called the kid in," Trakh said. "I'm so happy she proved me wrong."
As a recent arrival from the St. Louis suburbs, Jaskowiak had no friends at USC, no support system. She sprained an ankle her freshman year, and her basketball career under then-coach Chris Gobrecht was going nowhere.
"Basketball was the one thing I knew, and I wasn't even playing," recalled Jaskowiak, whose grandfather Charlie "Chuck" Share was the first player selected in the 1950 NBA draft.
She went to a greeting card shop on Oct. 10, 2003, after practice to buy some chocolate. She returned to the dorm suite she shared with seven roommates and ate the candy. All of it.
"I shouldn't have eaten this much candy," she remembered thinking to herself. "If I just do this once, it won't hurt me."
After running track in high school to get from 165 to 155 pounds, she was in the best shape of her life. Still, she went to the bathroom and forced herself to throw up. The purging had begun.
"After I did it once, any time I would eat more than I should, it became an easy option," Jaskowiak said. "I could satisfy my hunger and not have the calorie intake."
She developed bulimia, an eating disorder often caused by stress, depression or low self-esteem.
"I'd say one in three college female athletes are actively in what I call 'disordered eating,' either they're starving themselves to be a certain weight, or they're bingeing and purging, and it's starting in high school," said Gregory Jantz, a certified eating disorder specialist in Seattle. "Eating disorders are on the rise. We had a lot of attention to it in the 1980s, and we're in another phase, and it's including even younger females."
In Jaskowiak's case, she induced vomiting. Almost 5 feet 11 inches tall, she lost nearly 20 pounds in 2 1/2 months.
