For Honor Roll Alumna Batastini, Old World is Her Oyster

She has lived in a cabin on a mountainside in Norway.
The president of her Italian team used to sit in the stands and scream invectives at her and the other players.
In Sweden, her team used to go outside and walk around in the cold for 10 minutes before games.
Last season, in Switzerland, she was routinely referred to in the newspaper as L’Americaine. She even once had her picture in the paper over a caption that said, “a pose un lapin,” which translates into “pose a rabbit,” a Swiss expression for screwing up.

Christina Batastini has traveled far since she was named the Journal’s Honor Roll Girl in 1996.
She has played professional basketball in Germany, Latvia, Lithuania, Denmark, Turkey, the Netherlands, and Austria, in addition to Norway, Italy, Sweden, Switzerland.

Have jump shot, will travel.
And travel she has.

So far from her days at Classical High School when she was All- State in cross country, All-State in track, maybe the most nationally recognized Rhode Island high school women’s basketball player ever, good enough to get a scholarship to Stanford. An amazing high school career that just the other day got her named to the New England Basketball Hall of Fame. Oh yeah, she also had something like a 3.99 grade-point average in high school.

Batastini wasn’t just a star at Classical. She was a constellation. It’s the kind of resume that can be a passport to the inner workings of corporate America, and when she got out of Stanford in 2000 she went to a work for a start-up company in Silicon Valley, because that’s what so many Stanford graduates do. The plan then was to work, and go back to Stanford for a fifth year and pick up another degree. Then she got a call from a professional team in Bergamo, Italy. They offered her a two-week tryout. She didn’t hesitate.
So long to the corporate life.

Goodbye to what Stanford graduates are expected to do. Christina Batastini had decided to follow her heart. “I felt I had had an unfinished career,” she says. “I didn’t want basketball to end like that.”

For her, basketball always had been more than just a game. Maybe that was because her father has been coaching CYO basketball around here for half a century now, so she came to the game early, in many ways had her childhood defined by it. Most adolescent girls measure out their lives by trips to the mall, by new clothes and hairstyles. Batastini had measured hers in workouts and AAU tournaments, in innumerable games and big basketball dreams.

But at Stanford, one of the top women’s programs in the country, she never had the kind of success she wanted to have, the kind of career she used to dream about. Yes, she played on a team that went to the Final Four. Yes, she traveled around the country, in the heart of women’s college basketball, one of the few Rhode Island women ever to do that. But when it was over, it felt like a movie that hadn’t had the right ending.

So there she was in the winter of 2001 in a new country, trying out for a new team, unable to understand the language. “I was always sitting there with a constant buzz around me,” Batastini says. She also got her first introduction to professional basketball overseas. How the American is always blamed when things go wrong. How if you score 25 points one night, and only 15 the next, they want to send you home. And how basketball overseas often operates in its own reality. Like the time the team president got into a fight at a team meeting. Or the times he would sit in the stands and yell at the players.

At the end of the year her team folded. She came back to Providence and essentially operated as her own agent. She would go on the Internet every day, look for European teams to play for. This led to a tournament in Amsterdam, a showcase for European scouts. Which led to a team in Norway, which played in the Baltic League, her entrance to Eastern Europe. Later that year she jumped to a team in Sweden for a better deal. Last season she played for a team in Switzerland.

That’s the quickie resume, but it doesn’t begin to tell about the daily struggles, whether it’s negotiating with teams to get more money, or always having to go into a new situation, always having to prove yourself over and over again. The ongoing drama of being on your own, playing professional basketball in Europe, L’Americaine posing a rabbit.
Like the time she was playing in Sweden and she and a teammate went out one night to a club, only to miss the last bus home. So there she was at three in the morning, she and her teammate from the Czech Republic, walking three miles back to their apartment in the cold Swedish night.

“Was there ever a time in those three miles when you asked yourself, ‘What am I doing here?’ “she was asked. “I’ve never had any doubts about what I’m doing,” Batastini says. “I’ve loved the experience. The opportunity to visit different countries, learn different cultures. The only negative is being away from my family, and there are some little things about American culture you miss, but I’ve learned that life in Europe can be different from how we see it here.”

She now speaks both French and Italian. She has carved out a basketball career for herself in Europe, in ways she never could have envisioned just four years ago. She now feels good about her basketball, in a way she didn’t when she left Stanford. She knows now that when she finally walks away from playing it will be with the sense that it ended the right way having success, having fun, basketball the way it had been as a kid, back when it had been the epicenter of her life.

In a couple of weeks she’s going back to Switzerland, this time to play for a team she’s also going to coach. It’s an incredible opportunity, a player-coach at 25, the first step on what she hopes will one day be a coaching career back here.

Maybe more importantly, she knows how far she’s traveled since that July morning seven years ago when she was named the Journal’s Honor Roll Girl, so far from that day she decided to walk away from her job in the Silicon Valley and go off to play in Europe, the day she decided to follow her heart.

And what’s the biggest thing she’s learned in the last seven years, ones that have taken her all over the world?
“I know now that I can succeed in any situation,” Christina Batastini says.
Let someone else pose a rabbit.

BILL REYNOLDS. The Providence Journal. Providence, R.I.: Jul 20, 2003