Sallard strives to keep her promise

On the court, life is easy.

It’s all about bounce passes, screens and jump shots – the free… On the court, life is easy.

It’s all about bounce passes, screens and jump shots – the free throws, rebounds and fast breaks.

The sound of the ball bouncing off the hardwood slows everything down.

In practice, the girl dribbling looks comfortable. She looks relaxed. She looks at ease.

Around these things – around basketball – she’s calm.

But there’s more to Sophronia Sallard than meets the eye.

A sophomore on Pitt’s women’s basketball team, Sallard lost her best friend and mother, Deborah Sallard, to cancer on the morning of Oct. 8, 2007. Deborah was 50 years old.

Sallard, who transferred to Pitt last year from University of Kansas, first suspected her mother was ill this past summer.

“Her eyes looked a little yellow,” Sallard said. “I thought maybe she’d just been stressed.”

A single mother of seven, stress was inevitable in their home. And already diagnosed with diabetes, Deborah’s health had been an issue for some time.

Still, Deborah promised her oldest daughter she was fine. She told Sallard to go back to school and play basketball. She said not to worry.

So Sallard came back to Pitt and tried to forget about it. About a month into the school year, her phone rang. It was her little brother. Their mother was in the hospital.

Sallard headed to her home in Syracuse, N.Y., right away.

When she arrived, it was obvious that something was seriously wrong.

“Her complexion was a lot darker. It looked like she lost tons of weight,” Sallard said. “I didn’t want to come back [to Pitt], [but] she made everything seem like it was going to be OK.”

Following her mother’s orders, Sallard came back to school.

Still feeling the effects of a serious concussion she suffered in August, she’d been through a tough few months. And despite her attention to basketball season, which was about to start, her mind was laced with fear.

Once again, her phone rang.

Her mother’s condition was worsening, and she had been diagnosed with cancer.

Sallard made the trip home once more. This time, Pitt coach Agnus Berenato was by her side.

“That was pretty big of Coach,” Sallard said. “I didn’t have to be by myself.”

Berenato had met Deborah once before. After Sallard suffered a concussion, Berenato flew to Syracuse to meet with Deborah to talk about Sallard’s condition and to get to know her.

“She had so much wisdom,” Berenato said. “She was incredible.”

But when Berenato made her way to Syracuse for the second time, the mood was a bit different.

Sallard had the nurses set up a bed in the hospital next to where her mother stayed. Once it was there, she refused to leave. And even with everything that had happened in the past months, nothing she’d ever experienced on or off the basketball court could prepare her for what happened next.

“I saw her take her last breath,” Sallard said. “The craziest thing is that I didn’t want to miss it.

“I was still hoping and praying that maybe she could beat [the cancer].”

Before her mother died, Sallard made a promise to stay in school and earn her college diploma. She swore she’d become the first person in her family to graduate from college.

To make that promise come true, Sallard was forced to move on – or at least try to. As hard as it was, she had to keep her head up and work through the pain. In between the eruptions of emotion come classes and practice.

For Sallard, basketball was the only escape.

“I was out of my mind,” Sallard said. “I knew I was just going to break.”

Berenato, who has dealt with the loss of parents first-hand, said the idea of moving on is difficult to grasp.

“The players and the students, everybody else moves on,” Berenato said. “But you have to go to class and practice every day. You have to carry it with you.

“You sit there thinking, ‘Doesn’t anyone know what just happened to me?'”

So as a coach and a friend, Berenato has done her best to help Sallard get through this time.

For Thanksgiving, she invited her and three of her younger siblings to her house for dinner.

“I think that really helped her,” she said. “She’s doing so well. I’m just so proud.”

Not only does Sallard plan on keeping the promise of earning her degree, but she also wants to attend law school. And whatever she does, whether it’s on or off the court, she’ll never forget what happened at 8:25 that October morning – that morning her entire life changed.

“I’m playing for her, hands down,” she said. “Everything is for her.”

And that’s how Sallard will live the rest of her life – for her mother. That’s how she’ll wake up every day and go to sleep every night. The girl on the basketball court driving through the lane is really a woman with incredible strength. She’s a woman with a dream – carrying a promise she made on the fifth floor of a Syracuse hospital nearly five months ago, a promise she swears she’ll keep.