“I have my good days and I have my bad days, but as long as I have more good days than bad I’m doing alright”
-Coach Joiner-
It’s a beautiful sunny day, not a cloud in the sky, and a tennis team is about to start practice. The women get their racquets and start warming up. Tennis balls start to fly back and forth across the net until the coach calls a halt to the warm-up. It is time to run some drills. The women line up as coach carries a basket of balls and her oxygen tank out on to the court to start the drill. She stands there, feeding balls to her team as her oxygen tank lies at her feet. This is a reality for Coach Brenda Joiner, the head coach of Henderson’s tennis team.
The doctors have diagnosed Joiner to have an interstitial lung disease which has progressed into pulmonary fibrosis. Pulmonary fibrosis is the scarring of lung tissue, making the lungs stiff, which, makes the lungs unable to transfer oxygen and carbon dioxide to the body probably.
Coach Joiner has been treated for asthma since she was young, but has just recently found out that she has never had asthma.
“They (doctors) believe now that the interstitial lung disease has just progressed my entire adult life until the end result of pulmonary fibrosis,” said Joiner.
When Joiner was 13 years old she was caught in a house fire. Her house had caught fire in the middle of the night, and she was knocked out by the smoke. Eventually, her Grandmother was able to pull her out of the house.
“They can never be 100 percent sure what caused the damage, but they think it was triggered by the fire,” said Joiner. “They think I possibly I could have suffered a thermal burn during the fire or possibly the toxins that I inhaled during the fire could have triggered the disease.”
The symptoms of interstitial lung disease or pulmonary fibrosis are hard to diagnose, and normally do not show up until the disease has progressed into an advanced stage. Joiner had noticed symptoms such as shortness of breath and fatigue years before she was diagnosed, but she would think they were coming from her growing older or her asthma.
“You could always find a reason not to pay attention to it,” said Joiner, “But about a year and a half ago the shortness of breath and the fatigue then set in to the point that I was getting short of breath taking a shower or getting clothes out of the dyer, just normal day to day things it was getting hard to do.”
It was then that she started asking her doctor what was going on, but the symptoms of shortness of breath and fatigue are so generic, and can be caused by so many things, it was tough for the doctors to find the cause. They would eventually send her to a pulmonary specialist to test her lungs.
“While performing a test called the six minute walking test, they realized at just walking that my oxygen saturation levels were dropping down to like 80, which is damage your organs level,” said Joiner.
In May 2009 she was put on oxygen 24 hours a day, because her doctors could not risk her walking around with her oxygen levels being that low, even though they still did not know what was wrong with her. In August the doctors would perform a lung biopsy and finally diagnosed Coach Joiner with intestinal lung disease and pulmonary fibrosis.
“The up side is that we know now what’s wrong with me,” said Joiner, “The down side is there is no real treatment for it.”
She has tried the one treatment out there, but the side-effects of the treatment and the lack of effectiveness in the treatment would eventually cause her to stop the treatment. Coach has been off treatments and is waiting for a new treatment to be approved. As for right now she is trying to adjust her life to work around the disease.
“The main change is a little loss of independence, I can’t burn the candle at both ends anymore,” said Joiner, “I can’t go do whatever I want to do whenever I want to do it. I have to plan ahead.”
She has to plan for her overnight trips to make sure she has enough oxygen. At home she hooks up to an oxygen machine. It now takes her longer to recover from long days working and coaching.
“I just have to make sure I don’t over do it,” said Joiner.
When it comes to practices, Joiner has gotten a longer cord to connect to her oxygen tank to allow her to set the tank beside her instead of carrying it on her back, so she can still be active during practice and not become too tired.
“It really hasn’t affected practices, because I am still able to be there and feed balls, and tell them what to do,” said Coach Joiner. “It hasn’t really been as big of a problem as I thought it might be.”
Becca Staton, senior chemistry major, has played for Joiner for four years now and hasn’t seen much change in her since her diagnoses. “Coach is still the same coach she was freshman year. She hasn’t lost her spunk or energy,” said Staton.
The all of the players on the team have responded well to Joiner’s condition.
“They are very protective of me now,” said Joiner, “They take care of the little things like taking my chair out to the court and loading the van up for me, without me even asking. They really have taken it upon themselves to take care of me.”
Staton and the rest of the team understand that Joiner sometimes can overwork herself during practices. “Sometimes we have to make her sit down because she wants to be out there and she gives it her all,” said Staton.
Why do players like Becca Staton and Meredith Massey, senior business finance major, want to play tennis for Coach Joiner?
“It’s really hard to find a coach like Coach Joiner,” said Staton. “She really cares for us so much. She is really like a mother.”
“I really wasn’t planning on playing tennis in college, but I randomly met people who went to school here and they said I should visit so I did,” said Massey. “And you could tell it would be like a second home and she would be like a second mother, so I decided to play tennis here.”
As for this season the Lady Reddies have won four conference matches and have lost to Delta State and Harding. The Lady Reddies have just beaten Southern Arkansas 8-1 on March 30. They are 3-3 in conference and have just clinched a position in the Gulf South Conference (GSC) tournament in Montgomery, Ala. when they beat Ouachita Baptist 6-3. The Lady Reddies played rival Arkansas Tech on April 10 losing 6-3.
John Ragni, Excess Service Liberian and former Head Coach of the now-defunct men’s tennis team at Henderson, has played and coached tennis for many years now, and still helps out during the Lady Reddie’s practices speaks highly of Coach Joiner and the program she has built here.
“Coach Joiner is real hands on and she knows her players really well and gets along well with her players,” said Ragni.
Ragni believes Joiner has a successful program because she maintains the program, she recruits type of players she wants, and she makes sure that they play to the best of their ability. “A lot of that is trying to create a harmonious situation and from what I’ve seen Coach Joiner seems to be doing a good job with that,” said Ragni.
Joiner became the head tennis coach at Henderson in 1993 and has coached here for 17 years.
“This is where I was raised, this is where I grew up, this is where I hope to stay as long as I am able to coach,” said Coach Joiner.
She was born in Arkadelphia and grew up in the small community of Trinity. Her love for tennis would start at the age of 12 when she was asked to play in a youth tennis tournament by Jerry Childers, because there weren’t enough players.
“I had always been big into athletics, I played softball, basketball, and volleyball pretty much every sport that was offered but I had never played tennis,” said Joiner.
Childers would teacher her how to the game worked, how to keep score, and worked with her a few times on how to play.
“I went ahead and enter the tournament and ended up winning it, so I was bitten by the bug from then on, and that summer I really started taking it seriously and really started playing,” said Coach Joiner.
She attended Gurdon High School, with no tennis team available for her to play for, but that did not stop Coach Joiner from playing. She and three other girls, who had started playing together, decided that they would try and start a high school team. The four girls went to the principle and superintendent of Gurdon and ask permission to start a high school team. They were granted permission, but they needed to find a faculty member to sponsor or chaperon the team. Joiner and the other girls found a teacher to sponsor them, and the team was formed Joiner’s tenth grade year.
“They (Gurdon) have had a team ever since then,” said Joiner. “And we even fielded a boy’s team that year too.”
Joiner graduated from Gurdon in 1976, and decided to go to Henderson, where she would play as a Lady Reddie on the tennis team. She graduated from Henderson in 1979 with her degree in business management.
Joiner was not the first or the last of her family to be a Reddie. Both of her parents went to Henderson. Her father was an all-conference baseball player. Her mother taught in the English department for Henderson for 35 years. Duke Wells, the man the hyper center is named after, is Coach Joiner’s Great Uncle. And both of her children went to Henderson, with her son Reid Joiner working as the Webmaster for Henderson now.
“I have bled Reddie blood since the day I was born,” said Joiner.
Coach Joiner is a true Reddie. She loves coaching tennis at Henderson, and always keeps a is positive outlook on her life.
“I have my good days, and I have my bad days,” said Joiner. “But as long as I have more good days than bad, I’m doing alright.
