Any attendee of an AFA basketball game will hear frequently from one of the team’s biggest fans.  Comments such as, “Guard the baseline!  That’s a travel, ref!  Move the ball, offense, swing it!” can be heard emanating from one particular fan.   Most might assume that the ‘mystery fan’ might be an over involved parent, or someone who has been around basketball for decades.

In fact, the ‘Mystery Fan’ is none other than senior Mary Ball.

“I’ve been around basketball my whole life,” Mary comments.  “My brother Stephen and my sisters Emilie and Anne all played.  I’ve tried other sports, but soccer isn’t fast enough, and in volleyball there is too much standing around.  Basketball has the perfect combination of speed and intelligence.  Playing the game (she played for two years on AFA’s girls varsity) has deepened my understanding, and now I feel like I know what good basketball looks like and how it should be played.  It makes it all the more fun to be around the game.”

This passion for “deeper understanding” is reflected in Mary’s first love: reading.  “Reading is not an escape, it’s an exploration,” she comments.  ”Characters represent different worlds, different ways of knowing.”  Science fiction and similar genres are a bit technical for Mary’s taste, and instead she prefers character driven works.  She confesses, “I have a weakness for the dark, mysterious types with a heart of gold, like Edmund in the “Chronicles of Narnia,” and Aragorn in “The Lord of the Rings.” Ultimately, “it’s not the physical world the author constructs, but the mental processes they force me into, that makes me really enjoy books.  There is a variety and beauty in the [minds of the characters] that stretch me in a good way.

Mary came to AFA as a junior and found that,  “I was welcomed right away.   My class immediately became a community.  They were easy and fun to be with.  The academics are rigorous, and the fact that I did not have to ‘fight’ socially made the academics that much easier to deal with.”  She also found that this sense of community extended to the faculty.  “I like the way I can talk with my teachers, and I did not expect this.  I email teachers and hear back from them.  The availability of the faculty has made it easier to pursue learning.”

Mary, a professed “humanities person,” has usually done well in school,  but soon realized that, “my math and science classes would present a different kind of challenge here.  My previous teachers [in the sciences] only made me worry about the answer.  Here they wanted to know what we were thinking and why we thought it.  They want the theory behind the answer, and they want us to think creatively about the ‘why.’  It has made me appreciate math and science a lot more.”

Like her sister Anne (class of 2005) Mary hopes to pursue a combination of language and political science in college.  “[Anne and I] have always leaned towards the same things in school.  When she spent a semester abroad in France I visited her and it all came alive for me.  French was a specialty for me before AFA, and I want to rekindle that.  I also want to learn a language that has a different alphabet, like Arabic or Chinese.”

As Mary prepares to leave, the last of six Ball siblings to graduate from AFA, she feels no sense of being ‘boxed in’ by her family.  As the youngest of six, with siblings that all graduated from AFA, Mary proclaims that “I like that I am the last to carry on the Ball tradition.”