Driving down the court, Leah McCoy fakes left, steps right, shoots, and scores—a job?
A second-year student at Georgetown University Law Center, McCoy has emerged as a leader in a basketball league that offers female lawyers and law students an athletic outlet along with career networking opportunities.
Although the Get in the Game Lady Lawyers League started as a group of friends playing basketball in Georgetown’s law school gym, it quickly grew to include students at other Washington-area law schools as well as practicing lawyers from some of the nation’s most prestigious firms.
“There are so many basketball leagues for lawyers, but they’re all co-ed or just for men,” McCoy says. “The idea with our league was to have more opportunities for women. Plus, it’s helpful for those of us who are still students to have so many chances to play with attorneys in the D.C. area.”
Now, the group is focusing on expanding its footprint and mission. Members like McCoy are pushing the league into increased public service efforts, hoping that its players can use their athletic and academic experiences to serve as role models for young girls. The group has already taken part in a Girls Inc. summer program with members of the WNBA’s Washington Mystics. It also is building a relationship with the Washington-area Boys & Girls Clubs in which league players mentor local girls in grades 6 through 12.
“When you take something that you love doing, like playing basketball, and combine it with helping the community, it makes it that much more rewarding,” McCoy says.
At the same time, the league is beginning to sprout sister clubs across the country as women lawyers learn about it and current students graduate and move away from Washington. Get in the Game has already established leagues in Southern California and in the San Francisco Bay Area. McCoy says she hopes to start a version of the league in her native Texas when she returns to her home state after law school.
Surprisingly, McCoy never expected basketball to become such a defining portion of her law school experience. She stumbled across the league’s nucleus—then playing as a Georgetown club—when she went to the law school’s gym to practice for an alumni basketball team she had just joined.
“Before that, I hadn’t touched a basketball since eighth grade. I was pretty bad at first, but I’ve really improved,” she says. “Being a stressed-out law student, it’s good to have something to take you away from your school books.”
League founder Lindsay Amstutz says McCoy is a great example of what can happen when someone without much prior basketball experience dedicates themselves to improving.
“Leah was a little bit timid in the beginning, but over the last few months, she’s just really found her game,” says Amstutz, a 2006 Georgetown graduate who is now practicing with O’Melveny & Myers in Century City, Calif.
But Amstutz’s praise for McCoy goes beyond her abilities on the court. She says that thanks to McCoy’s enthusiasm and dedication, the league has been able to grow far beyond its early days in Georgetown’s law school gym.
“There’s a core group of gals, including Leah, who have taken the league and run with it and made it such a success in D.C.,” she says.
In particular, McCoy has helped organize the league’s annual all-star tournament, in which participants are assigned to new teams with the hope that different players will meet each other.
For McCoy, part of the reason she has become so dedicated to the league is that there’s no experience quite like team sports to build relationships within a legal community.
“When you’re up against someone and you take a cheap shot at them, they may tease you a little bit about it at an interview, but the league gives you such better networking opportunities than being a suit at a cocktail reception,” McCoy says. “It’s amazing the connections you make when you meet people playing basketball and then you meet them in other areas of your professional life.”
Craig Linder, a third-year student at the University of Pennsylvania Law School, is Student Lawyer's student editor.
Do you know a distinguished law student (continuing for 2006-07) who would make an interesting subject for Spotlight? Please e-mail suggestions along with your name, address, and daytime/evening phone numbers to studentlawyer@abanet.org (subject line: Spotlight).
