ISAIAH LAMB
SPORTS ILLUSTRATED
COVER ATHLETE
SPORTS ILLUSTRATED
COVER ATHLETE
DULANEY HIGH SCHOOL
ALL-MET ELITE
DULANEY HS.
BALTIMORE MD.
COURTESY
OF
SPORTS ILLUSTRATED
OF
SPORTS ILLUSTRATED
Sudsville 24-Hour Coin Laundry sits on the main drag of Reisterstown, Md., right off I-795 in the northern suburbs of Baltimore. The low-slung building, framed by fast-food joints, gas stations and strip malls, is filled wall-to-wall with washers, driers, change dispensers, vending machines and overhead TV monitors tuned to the local news.
For Isaiah Lamb, Sudsville wasn’t just a place to bring his dirty clothes. Thanks to the benevolence of its workers, who turned a blind eye, the laundry provided Isaiah’s bathroom, rec room and study hall for much of last spring and summer. Night after night, the high school junior and his parents, Donald and Valerie, drove their black 2002 Hyundai Elantra into the back parking lot at Sudsville, hoping none of their friends or Isaiah’s classmates saw them. They washed their bodies and brushed their teeth at the bathroom sinks. Dinner might be a snack from a vending machine. As Valerie and Donald watched TV or read, Isaiah did his homework, using a folding table as a desk and sometimes a laundry cart as a chair. When he finished, the family piled back into the Elantra. Valerie took the passenger seat, Donald settled behind the wheel, and Isaiah pretzeled his 6’ 5” frame into the backseat. Then they tried to sleep.
“Many nights I would cry looking at him, because he was so crunched up in the back,” Valerie says of Isaiah. “I would say, ‘You all right?’ He would say, ‘I’m all right, Ma.’ ”
“My mother told me not to wear my feelings on my sleeve,” Isaiah says. “I always smiled and joked, but [my teammates] never knew what I was going through.”
Money had always been scarce for the Lambs, but early in 2014 they plunged into financial free fall. Donald suffered a heart attack while working as a maintenance man at a Baltimore nursing home. He recovered after months of convalescence but didn’t get his job back. Beset by the stress of Donald’s illness and unemployment, Valerie caught walking pneumonia, which forced her to take time off from work as an EMT. The Lambs incurred more medical bills without the income to cover them. Then came a sequence all too familiar to many Americans, particularly during the recent recession: overdue notices, denied or unattainable credit, eviction, homelessness.
The same long and lithe physique that made sleeping in the backseat so uncomfortable helped Isaiah succeed in football, baseball and basketball. He dunked for the first time in seventh grade, and by his freshman year at Dulaney High in Timonium, Md., he was starting for the varsity. Sports were a source of escape and joy. “I just went out and had fun,” says Isaiah. “It took my mind off of what was going on.”
Isaiah’s living situation exacted a price on his game, however. He missed tournaments and AAU events because the Lambs couldn’t afford the entrance fees or were on the move. How do you sign up for leagues when you don’t have a permanent address? How do you arrive at practice on time when you have to take three public buses and a subway to get to school, as Isaiah did? How do you add muscle or stay in shape when dinner often consists of a 99-cent cheeseburger or a snack from a vending machine? How do you fit into a team when you’re hiding a secret?
“[Teammates] would say, ‘Hey, let’s go to your house,’ ” Isaiah recalls. “I’d make up excuses: ‘Aw, my mom’s sleeping.’ What I couldn’t tell them was that I didn’t have a home.”
In suburban Baltimore, the Lambs’ fortunes have improved in recent months, if incrementally. Valerie is back working at the hospital. Donald found part-time employment as a maintenance man at a gym in Towson, Md., before being laid off last month. He is trying to launch a housekeeping business. After saving enough money for rent and a security deposit, the family recently took a month-to-month lease on a small ground-floor apartment in Cockeysville, a middle-class suburb.
Finances remain tight. The apartment has no furniture except for a small television and two chairs. Isaiah’s clothes are neatly arrayed on the floor of his bedroom. He sleeps on an air mattress. “I can’t even really remember the last time I slept on a mattress outside of being in a hotel,” he says matter-of-factly. “I never had my own bed.”
Things are looking up for the Lambs. After saving enough money for rent and a security deposit, Valerie, Donald and—finally able to stretch out—Isaiah found an apartment in a suburb of Baltimore. The move means that Isaiah has his own bed for the first time and an easy walk to school. His focus now, he says, is on college.
The move has been “wonderful,” he says. The apartment is within walking distance of Dulaney High, sparing Isaiah his old hour-and-a-half commute on public transportation. The apartment’s bathroom saves him from having to shower in the locker room before school. Free of the worries that came from living at a coin laundry, Isaiah, a senior, has flourished on the basketball team. A silky and nimble guard, he can bring the ball upcourt but also nail jumpers and break down his man off the dribble.
Isaiah doesn’t talk much with his teammates about his living arrangements. “My mother told me not to wear my feelings on my sleeve,” he says. “I always smiled and joked, but [my teammates] never knew what I went home to, what I was going through.” Still, his home situation is something of an open secret. “There’s a fine line,” says Lochte, the coach, speaking about helping underprivileged players. “You try to find a support system, help the kid find a ride, make sure there’s breakfast available. But you don’t want to make anyone uncomfortable or self-conscious. Honestly, it’s a touchy subject.”
Free of the worries that came with living at a coin laundry, Isaiah, a senior, has flourished on the basketball team. He also carries a B-plus average and made the school’s honor society.
Isaiah carries a B-plus average and made the school’s honor society. Affable, handsome, modest, he is popular in the extreme. With prodding, he admits that he attended three proms last spring. (If the girls had the guts to ask him, he reasoned, the least he could do was accept their offers.) It’s easy to forget that he is 17; he shows uncommon wisdom and maturity, hard-earned to be sure. While far less talented peers dream of the NBA, Isaiah is more concerned about graduating from college which, he says, “is much more of a sure thing.” When Lochte gushes that Isaiah is “a special human being” and “full of courage,” it doesn’t come off as a coach’s hyperbole.
Still, Valerie worries about what she calls “my son’s mental state. He’s so quiet but strong He says, ‘I’m O.K., Ma.’ But you often wonder, Is he really O.K.?” Isaiah, for his part, is almost philosophical about his childhood. When discussing the hardships, he quickly perhaps wishfully? switches to the past tense.
Part of what makes his parents proud also imbues them with fear: Their circumstances are at variance with the conventional perception of homelessness. There was no family dysfunction, no divorce. No substance abuse, no cataclysmic event. There were simply a series of unanticipated expenses, and absent a safety net (“no sponge,” says Donald) the Lambs were suddenly homeless. “Don’t think because you’re at a certain status in life, because you have certain material things, it can’t happen,” says Valerie. “It can happen in the blink of an eye.”
Now Valerie and Donald are trying to save as much of their paychecks as possible. Isaiah is pondering scholarship offers from Siena, Radford and UNC-Greensboro, among other D-I schools. Life is a lot better for the family than it was earlier this year. Isaiah thinks about what advice he might give to others facing homelessness.
“I guess you just need to remember, it’s temporary,” he says. “I’m not saying it’s easy, but you can overcome it. You can get past being homeless.”
He stretches out the last word, as if to make sure there’s no misunderstanding: It’s spelled with an m, not a p.
Dulaney High School (Baltimore)
2015 Rising Senior Guard Isaiah Lamb
Key Games:
December 19, 2014 Dulaney vs Towson at Goucher College 7:00pm
December 26, 2014 Dulaney vs Oakland Mills at Oakland Mills 7:00pm
January 2, 2015 Dulaney vs Mount Saint Joseph at Mount Saint Joseph 6:00pm
January 23, 2015 Dulaney vs Patterson Mill at Morgan State 4:00pm
January 24, 2015 Dulaney vs Thomas Stone at Morgan State 3:00pm
January 28, 2015 Dulaney vs New Town at Dulaney 5:30pm
February 18, 2015 Dulanery vs Milford Mill at Milford Mill 5:30pm
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