No regrets or looking back for ex-coach Roller

Something tells me that Tracy Roller is going to be OK.

Near the end of our two-hour phone conversation earlier this week in which she described in detail the personal hell that she has been living in over the last five years, it was Roller who actually was encouraging me.

This is a woman who tortured herself incessantly by trying to live up to unrealistic expectations, a woman who pressured herself relentlessly until she made herself physically sick, who contemplated suicide multiple times and who ultimately resigned from her dream job as a Division I women's college basketball coach just so that she could hang on to what little bit of sanity she had left.

And here she was being my cheerleader.

A former AAU basketball teammate of mine from way back during our high school days in Indiana, Roller listened sympathetically as I told her about the struggles in the newspaper industry today that are cutting many journalists deeply and personally.

"If you believe in yourself, you can keep your head high and look with hope to the future," Roller said. "Things are going to get better, especially if you're a good person and you work hard and you try hard. I really believe that."

I kind of felt like I was listening to a pregame speech in the Ball State locker room.

That's where Roller spent some of her best days. And her worst.

I had wanted to do a column about Roller about a month ago when the Ball State women, making their very first appearance in the NCAA Tournament, knocked off mighty Tennessee.

It was the first time in the history of the entire women's tournament, dating back to 1982, that Tennessee not only got dismissed in the first round, but didn't advance to at least the Sweet Sixteen.

It was a monumental victory for little Ball State. Roller was so proud of the players, each one of whom she worked so hard to recruit.

But instead of celebrating with them on the bench, Roller watched on TV, from her living room.

Roller had resigned as head coach about a year earlier when she was diagnosed with manic depression.

It's a disease that ebbs and flows in her life and hit a spike the week after the Tennessee game, which is when we were going to talk. One of Roller's close personal friends died unexpectedly. Roller was clearly distressed, so I went to Plan B and wrote about something else.

Then, I got busy covering the latter rounds of the tournament and the WNBA draft after that.

So, here we are, well removed from the NCAA Tournament, but I'm still wanting to write about Roller, who coached at Ball State for seven years, was the winningest women's basketball coach in school history and was once the highest-paid coach on campus with a $182,000 annual contract.

Her story is that compelling. In fact, it makes you wonder how many other Tracy Rollers are out there - in sports, and elsewhere.

"To everyone else, I had the appearance of the perfect life," said Roller, 39. "It seemed like I was confident, in control, having fun, getting paid well to do something I absolutely loved.

"But in reality, when I went home at night, I wasn't that person at all."

The trouble started in Roller's third or fourth season at Ball State. After winning right out of the gate her first few years, the losses that season started piling up.

"It was our first losing season, maybe first .500 season. All I know is that we had lost like 15 games and I just couldn't handle it," Roller said. "Sometimes my assistants would say things like, 'Remember when we beat so-and-so, how great that was?' And I couldn't remember a single thing about those games. But I could tell you the final score and everything about every single one of our losses. I never forgot anything about the losses. They hit me hard."

And harder and harder and harder.

The stress on Roller was building by the second.

"It got to the point where I had breakdowns, I couldn't sleep for days, I was drinking and overdoing everything," Roller said. "Like, I would work out two times a day just because I didn't think the first time was good enough. I stayed the night at my office for days at a time watching film, trying to come up with different ways to do things because I thought whatever we were doing before wasn't good enough. From that one losing season on, nothing was ever good enough."

That was Roller's exhausting, haunting reality for the next five years. Each and every day she made herself chase a level of perfection that simply doesn't exist. She put on a happy face, but the mounting disappointment and angst was consuming her on the inside.

"I would blame myself for every missed free throw, every missed layup, thinking that if I had done something differently we would have made them," Roller said. "If I was out at the store, I felt I needed to talk to everyone, talk about Ball State women's basketball, because if I didn't, that would be the one person who would be offended and we would lose them as a fan.

"At one point, when we were playing bad, I remember thinking that if I just killed myself that my players would play better because they would have something to play for. It was crazy. I had just lost all perspective. On everything."

Roller reached the breaking point one day in December 2007 after her team played badly and lost to Indiana State on the road.

She looked so upset on her way to her hotel room that her colleagues made sure to check on her. Roller, as it turned out, was suicidal.

"My parents happened to be at that game, they came over and they took me to a stress center in Indianapolis," Roller said. "I thought, 'Great, I'll be at the stress center for three days, I'll get better and I'll get right back at it.

"Well, three days turned into two months."

At first, the team and the public was told that Roller was battling mononucleosis. By March, she still was out of commission. The team hadn't seen her even once since she left her hotel room that day in December.

"The mono thing was becoming less believable, and rumors, like that I was pregnant, or in drug rehab, were starting to swirl. I knew I had to come forward, especially for the team. They deserved to know."

So Roller told the team about her troubles, and knowing that they were far from being resolved, she resigned her position, walked away from her big contract and put her ultra-fun house with a pool, hot tub and sand volleyball pit on the market.

She hasn't looked back since. Not even when Ball State won that game over Tennessee. Without her.

"I just knew I couldn't be that person anymore. I was so burned out. It was the best thing for me to step away," said Roller, now in sales in Indianapolis. "But I knew it was also the best thing for the team. I've always been a team-first person and it was important for me to put the team first. I wasn't the person meant to get them to a place where they could beat a Tennessee. They needed someone to take them to that next level, but I knew it couldn't be me.

"I miss the kids, but I don't regret that decision at all."

It's a decision Roller will likely stay with. Even though basketball and coaching is all she's ever known, she says she'll probably never go back.

"I guess you can never say never, but I would say it's unlikely," Roller said. "I'm much more at peace now and that's liberating. I mean, I could not wait to move to Indy and be nobody. I know people can't understand that because so many people would love to have what I had. So many people want to be somebody and in a small way, I was somebody.

"All I can say is that I never allowed myself to enjoy it. I would be dead by now if I kept trying to live that life. Being somebody was killing me. I still have my bad days, but now I have a lot of good days, too."

pbabcock@dailyherald.com