FINDING LIFE LESSONS IN SPORTS\Meyers Drysdale was shaped by what she learned as an athlete.

Byline: Jaena Thompson Orange County Register

A casual observer might think a teen-age Ann Meyers, the winner of varsity letters in seven sports at Connelly and Sonora High Schools in California, would have been too busy to bear the burdens, anxieties and angst confronting an adolescent girl.

But even as she set sports standards and broke down barriers for women athletes, she was torn by insecurity, fearful that people only liked her because she was Dave Meyers' sister.

She chose basketball and went to UCLA because her brother did; and she turned that familiar, familial security into a national championship and Olympic silver medal.

She played professionally, again like her brother, and set up a broadcasting career by seizing a $50,000, no-cut contract with the Indiana Pacers. She didn't make the team, so she joined the team's broadcasting crew. Since then she has worked for ABC, CBS and NBC, and can be seen on ESPN's and Prime Sports' college basketball broadcasts.

The widow of baseball Hall of Famer Don Drysdale, Meyers Drysdale was offered a job as the color analyst on the Chicago Bulls' radio broadcasts before the NBA season began. She turned it down because of "three other considerations" - her children, Don Jr., Darren and Drew.

Now 40, a classic age for reassessing one's life, Meyers Drysdale, a speaker at a California Interscholastic Federation symposium on sports marketing on Wednesday and at Women and Girls in Sports Day activities Thursday in Los Angeles, says she is still growing.

"I got teased a lot," she said of her childhood. "I was a tomboy. I didn't fit in with the girls. I always had short hair. Long hair didn't go in sports for me. The boys didn't really accept me. Yet the guys liked me because I was a ballplayer. I was caught in the middle.

"I came home a lot from school crying. I wanted to run away from home. There's always a reason to feel sorry for yourself. It's hard growing up for a girl - or a boy."

She didn't learn until much later that her parents had been required to go before the school board to secure permission for her to play against boys in elementary school sports. She accepted the level of competition on girls' teams in junior high because that's all there was.

"I was exposed to young women playing sports," she said, citing her older sister Patty's participation in softball on Buena Park Gold Sox teams that included players who established themselves as greats. "Though the only people I saw on TV were men. When I would make up games by myself, I would be John Havlicek or someone like that."

Her sports-oriented family of 13 - she was born the sixth of 11 siblings - provided Meyers Drysdale as much security as she could handle.

"You never knew what peer pressure was," she said. "I can't speak highly enough of my family. They were all in sports. I didn't have a clique. My family was my clique."

But there were times, she said, when so many siblings provided unwanted competition, a challenge to attract parental attention. Still, it was nothing like the challenges children face today.

"Today," she said, "you hope your daughter or son isn't kidnapped from the school grounds or that a stranger doesn't rape them or that someone doesn't drive by with a gun or that there aren't weapons in school," she said. "The whole emphasis in society has changed. It's just as hard to grow up today. Drugs weren't around. You didn't have to try to prove you're a man or a woman.

"I think coaches fundamentally have to deal with so many more things today. The whole family structure is different than when I grew up. There are second families, mothers with careers or two-income households that make it difficult with kids not getting support, with parents not there. Girls getting pregnant or boys into drugs or boys getting girls pregnant. . . . There's so much more out there than the pick and roll. Hopefully, sports is teaching sportsmanship, but maybe even that has gone by the wayside."

Living with her children in the Huntington Beach area to be close to her family, Meyers Drysdale now plays the single-working-mother game. She has to pass sometimes on further pioneering, yet there are no regrets and no what-ifs.

"I think sports helped me," she said. "You don't win every game. There are a lot of defeats in sports. It teaches you to maybe be a little stronger in life after sports. Sports teaches competitiveness and how to stand up for yourself.

"Really, athletics is a small part of your life. If you're fortunate enough to play into your 20s, that's good. Hopefully, you'll live to 70 or 80, so what do you think of the next 50 or 60 years? When you turn 30 and you're done playing, yeah, there's money, but you have to have something in your life. You have to have that edge. You have to have a challenge to get up each morning and want to keep going."