It was a hazy afternoon in June 2007 when Merissa Barber-Smith’s mother sat her four children down in the living room of their house on the South Side of Chicago.“Kids,” she told them, “we’re...

The Achilles' heel of the women’s basketball team over the past couple years has been the fact they’ve made a habit of digging themselves into early holes that they can’t crawl out of.For the first...