For Mystics' Vaughn, Graduation Day Is Better Late
East Baltimore Product Beats the Odds at VCU And Gets Her Diploma

By Katie Carrera
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, August 6, 2008

Ever since she started playing in middle school, Krystal Vaughn eagerly awaited the day when she would graduate from college as the leader of a Division I basketball team. But on May 17, when the rest of her class walked across a stage at Virginia Commonwealth University, Vaughn wasn't there.

She was in Indiana for the Washington Mystics' 2008 opener against the Fever.

Knowing how much the graduation meant to their third-round (34th overall) 2008 draft pick -- she was the first in her family to graduate from college -- the team put together a surprise ceremony for Vaughn. Staff members secretly invited her family and her high school and college coaches to the Mystics' home opener a week later against Houston. When she saw about 40 people staring at her as VCU Coach Beth Cunningham handed her the diploma she had waited so long to get, the usually reserved Vaughn couldn't help but cry.

"Missing graduation hurt," she said recently, sitting in the Mystics' locker room at Verizon Center.

"Not many people thought I would graduate from college," said Vaughn, 21. "Not many people thought I would make it out of high school, flat out. So many people gave up on me, and talked bad, saying, 'Oh, she'll never make it out of here.' And I did."

Vaughn was born and reared in East Baltimore, a crime-ridden, low-income area troubled enough that Johns Hopkins Hospital warns its new doctors and patients to take precautions getting to and from the facility. According to the 2000 census, the median annual household income in the neighborhood where Vaughn lived with her mother was $26,801, more than $15,000 below the national median.

Before she was 10 years old, Vaughn had learned how to duck and run away from drive-by shootings that ripped through young people's conversations as they gathered on street corners. When she was 12, Vaughn saw a man shoot and kill a convenience store clerk. When her family moved from the Freedomway projects off Federal Street to North Montford Avenue, neighbors regularly broke into their house. Older kids chased and picked fights with Vaughn, her older sister Marian and younger brother Lloyd as they walked home from school.

Vaughn grew angry. Following the rules didn't seem to make a difference in her neighborhood, so she didn't do her homework, refused to pay attention in class and stayed out with friends at night rather than go home. "You run into all of that as a little kid and you don't know what to do, or how to handle it mentally," Vaughn said. "And for a while I didn't have any guidance."

Vaughn said her mother, Pamela Nicholas, always managed to put food on the table -- before alcoholism made her distant and damaged her liver and kidneys. Now Nicholas, 47, undergoes dialysis three times a week. Krystal barely knows her father, Leonard Vaughn, who lives in St. Petersburg, Fla., and spoke to her for the first time when she was a sophomore at VCU.

When it became clear that Nicholas couldn't take care of her 11-year-old daughter, Vaughn's aunt and godmother, Pauline Hargrove, who lived about a mile away, took her in. Hargrove's house was also in East Baltimore and surrounded by violence, but "Miss Paulie" provided the steady discipline Vaughn needed.

"She needed that shove," said Hargrove, 65, who has no children of her own. "Everybody needs that somebody behind you pushing you in the right direction."

In seventh grade, Vaughn still had trouble in school but she began playing recreation league basketball in the Lake Clifton-Eastern High School gym, and it was the one place where she felt comfortable enough to let her guard down. At the gym, it didn't matter that she wore the same pair of jeans to school for two weeks straight or that she brought her laundry to the locker room because the washing machine at home didn't work.

Determined to make Vaughn take school seriously, Hargrove sought help from Delora Walker, the girls' basketball coach at Lake Clifton-Eastern. If Vaughn didn't come home at night, if her grades slipped or if she simply couldn't be found, Hargrove called Walker, who would kick Krystal out of the next practice and slam the gym door in her face.

Vaughn wanted to be like the college and professional women's basketball players she saw on television growing up, but if she wasn't on the court there was no way that would happen. Basketball "was my only ticket to being happy," Vaughn said. "I'd do just about anything to keep playing and they used it to teach me to not to be a product of Baltimore City. They taught me how to look people in the eye when I talked to them, how to control my anger and how to become a young lady."

Said Hargrove: "Krystal has always had her own mind and wanted to do what she wanted to do. But when you laid something out on the line for her -- like that she had to do her homework to play basketball -- she understood and she listened."

In her senior year, Vaughn averaged 24 points and 13 rebounds per game and caught the eye of Cunningham, VCU's newly appointed coach, who was looking for a younger player she could develop and offered Vaughn a scholarship. "There was this sincerity about her that made me realize she really knew how important this opportunity was and could be to the rest of her life," Cunningham said.

VCU and Richmond were nothing like the life Vaughn knew in East Baltimore. People spoke properly, they were respectful of one another and they offered her unconditional friendship. Unsure of how to act, Vaughn devoted most of her freshman year to studying game plays and completing class assignments in her room.

Despite her initial discomfort, Vaughn told Cunningham that she couldn't go home often, and when she did go home she couldn't stay long. Although she worried about her young half sisters, Jessica, now 15, and Jennifer Jones, now 12, Vaughn knew that the best way she could help them was by focusing on school and completing her degree in sports management. She worked and saved money for the times that she did visit to buy her half sisters new clothes, school supplies and groceries.

Since becoming the first Ram in program history to be drafted by a WNBA team and making the Mystics roster in May, Vaughn hasn't seen much playing time. She's averages about five minutes per game while transitioning from power forward to small forward. But she has largely recovered from a nagging hamstring strain she suffered in training camp and interim head coach Jessie Kenlaw likes the energy she exhibits on the court.

Vaughn has started to visit her old neighborhood more since moving to Washington, including a trip home recently during the WNBA's month-long Olympic break. She still doesn't stay too long, but she spends time with her ailing mother, goes to Saturday evening Mass at St. Francis Xavier Catholic Church with Hargrove and, before taking the family out to dinner, she checks to make sure that Jessica and Jennifer are keeping up with their schoolwork.

"They don't want to disappoint me," Vaughn said. "That's important. All the kids in East Baltimore need guidance, they need someone to see the potential that my aunt and Coach Walker saw in me.

"It took a while but I finally understood that the bad stuff, the violence around me, wasn't my fault. . . . And I will go back to see my family until I can get them out of there. Especially the little ones, they're who can't provide for themselves. I don't want them to suffer the way I did."