Jenkins’ journey gives Bobcats perspective ahead of Cancer Awareness games

Texas State was down a couple of guards during Tuesday’s practice due to injury, so assistant coach Jericka Jenkins was asked to step in during the team’s final five-on-five segment of the day inside Strahan Arena.

Jenkins had her braided hair pulled back in a long ponytail that fell to her waist. She tucked it inside her maroon practice jersey and ran the point guard spot for her team, never coming off the floor.

There was a time in her life she couldn’t do any of those things. 

“When she talks about persevering and fighting through, I think it hits (the players) right in the face,” head coach Zenarae Antoine said. “Not in a negative way. But it’s an impact that puts them back into line with perspective.”

In March 2005, Jenkins was a 14-year-old freshman at Lancaster High School. She ran the mile and two-mile races on the track team to stay in shape during the basketball team’s offseason. One Sunday morning after a track meet, Jenkins woke up with a marble-sized lump poking out of her skin near her right collarbone. It didn’t hurt at all but it definitely stood out.

Jenkins went to the school’s athletic trainers the next day, who told her it was a swollen lymph node and that it should go down in a few weeks. The bump didn’t get any smaller, though, so the trainers told Jenkins to see a doctor.

She was told the same thing — to wait a little longer and see if it goes down. It still didn’t, though, so the doctors took X-rays and noticed Jenkins had some cloudiness in her lungs. They scheduled a biopsy two weeks later to have the lymph node removed. Another swelled up near the first one during the time in between.

On April 15, two days after the surgery and six weeks since the original swollen lymph node first appeared, Jenkins was diagnosed with Stage IV Hodgkin lymphoma. It’s described by the American Cancer Society as a disease that “starts in white blood cells called lymphocytes” and affects the body’s immune system. Less than 9,000 cases of Hodgkin lymphoma are diagnosed every year according to Cancer Treatment Centers of America, making it “the least common of the four major types of blood cancer.” Stage IV is the most severe type of the disease as it means the cancer has spread into other parts of the body — in Jenkins’ case, her lungs.

Jenkins didn’t know it was Stage IV at the time. She thinks maybe her parents knew, but she didn’t find out herself until a few years ago. It was still shocking to hear, though.

“It was hard to believe. I think I was a bit ignorant at 14,” Jenkins said. “I didn’t really know anybody that had cancer, so I didn’t know, really, what it looked like. The only thing I knew was it was either babies or more elderly people who got cancer. So I was a little bit confused. And it was tough to believe at first.

But then, I mean, I cried that night just thinking about, honestly, my hair. I was like, ‘My hair’s gonna fall out!’ But I did cry that first night, and that was the only time I truly cried about it.”

Jenkins had a second surgery to have a portacath inserted — a catheter implanted under the skin to allow easier access for IV medications. She began her first round of chemotherapy treatment at the end of April. She went through another round every three weeks five more times after that, typically staying at the Children’s Medical Center of Dallas Monday through Wednesday before going home for the weekend.

She said she didn’t really feel any side effects through the first round, but was so weak that she could barely walk to the bathroom by the end of the second. Jenkins’ doctors put her on steroids so that she could gain weight, but she barely ate. Her dad would mash up potatoes for her, just to have something heavy on the stomach, but she struggled to keep it down. Her doctors gave her medication to help with her nausea, but it just made her drowsy. 

Jenkins hated losing her hair. She worried she looked like a boy with a bald head and almost always kept it covered up with a bandana or a skullcap.

“Sometimes I would put some weave in the back of the bandana, so I had like hair in the back. But most of the time, I didn’t wear any extra hair or anything. But I just thought I looked like a boy. And I used to get mistaken for a boy, too,” Jenkins said. “I just was never comfortable with my head. I don’t even know why I say that. I wish I was. Now, in hindsight, I wish I was. I wish I had more pictures. I only have one picture of my head bald. Just one.”

She knew she looked different and she knew she felt different. Her biggest fear was that she’d be treated differently.

Her family and friends put her concerns to rest. They came to visit her in the hospital. Her friends all signed a T-shirt that they gifted to her. They made her feel like she was still Jericka to them.

In July, Jenkins attended a summer camp called Camp Esperanza that’s sponsored by the Children’s Medical Center for former and current cancer patients between ages 6 and 15. Jenkins was nervous about meeting other cancer patients and initially didn’t want to go to the camp. She was convinced otherwise and was glad she changed her mind. She made new friends that helped her feel normal while going through something that wasn’t.

“I met some people who were amputees and a young lady who’s still in a wheelchair that was going through it,” Jenkins said. “And I could relate to every single one because we had all been through chemo on some level.”

Jenkins smiles while attending Camp Esperanza in Dallas during the summer after her freshman year of high school in July 2005. Photo submitted by Jericka Jenkins

Basketball helped with that, too. Even while going through her cancer treatments, Jenkins stayed in the gym and played with her club team. She was a hooper at her core and she refused to let that part of her identity be taken away from her. It was extremely challenging, though.

“I was just really, really fatigued. Because the chemotherapy, you know, it attacks all your fast-moving blood cells,” Jenkins said. “So I would have to tell the refs like, ‘Hey, if I need a sub and it’s not a dead ball, then I need a sub.’ So maybe if I knew I needed to sub and we scored or the other team scored, I would just tell them ‘Hey,’ and then they would blow their whistle and give me a quick sub. And then I’d go out and catch my breath and get some water and then go back in. But it was tough to play through it. I was just so tired all the time. But I love basketball and basketball was fun and I was pretty good.”

Jenkins turned 15 in July and started feeling better during the last few rounds of her chemotherapy treatments. She went through three weeks of radiation treatments as her sophomore year began but she didn’t feel any side effects with those. She was able to go straight from radiation at 8 a.m. to her basketball practice at Lancaster without any issues.

At the end of the three weeks, Jenkins was declared cancer-free. Her hair grew back — she said she stopped covering up her head after it got to be around an inch long. She played another season of basketball and started breathing a little easier.

Two years later, Jenkins’ doctors put her into remission. Jenkins went on to play at Hampton, the only NCAA Division I school that offered her a scholarship. She started all four seasons for the Lady Pirates and was named to the All-Mid-Eastern Athletic Conference First Team in each of her last two years. During the 2010-11 season in her junior year, Jenkins ranked second in the nation averaging 7.2 assists per game and was selected as an Associated Press All-America Honorable Mention, becoming the first player in program history to be recognized by the AP.

Jenkins graduated in May 2012 with a bachelor’s degree in criminology/criminal justice. She spent the next year playing overseas, then returned home to Lancaster to try to find a job that put her degree to use. She was hired at Nordstrom’s in the meantime and was soon promoted to an assistant department manager position.

She knew she wanted to do something different, but she couldn’t seem to get hired anywhere else.

“I just knew that wasn’t my plan in life, I didn’t want to sell clothes for a living,” Jenkins said. “And so I decided to get into coaching. So I pretty much stepped down from a management position. And then God just worked — maybe two months later on, I got a call about a junior college position that was available.”

Jenkins spent the 2017-18 season as an assistant coach at Ranger College. She’d always wanted to get her master’s degree but didn’t want to take out a student loan to do so. Instead, she applied to become a graduate assistant at Texas State.

“We interview our graduate assistants here the same way we’d interview any other assistant coach. And the one thing I learned about (Jenkins) was that she was a hard worker,” Antoine said. “I talked to her high school coach, I talked to her college coach, I talked to some folks back at her university where she played as a student-athlete. Every step of the way, they had nothing but positive things to say. But the one consistent was that she was a really hard worker. And I thought that was really important, especially coming in as a graduate assistant, you know, there’s so much that you have to do, and so much you have to learn.”

Jenkins spent the 2018-19 and 2019-20 seasons as a GA. Antoine hired her as a full-time assistant in June 2020 and she’s been in the same role since, helping develop the Bobcats’ guards and assisting with scouting and preparation.

As the youngest full-time member on the maroon and gold staff, Jenkins is someone many of the players confide in. She’ll share her story when they ask about it, which provides them a different frame of mind.

“I think just her energy that she brings, I think a lot of that comes from what she went through. And knowing like how fragile life is, I think she, every day, comes in positive, every day, comes in energetic,” sophomore guard Sierra Dickson said. “And so that brings to the team a level of just appreciation and energy that we probably wouldn’t have if she wasn’t here. So I think what she went through definitely changed a lot about her. And so, she’s very energetic and always enthusiastic about life. And so, I think that pushes us as a team to be a little bit more like that, too.”

Texas State (11-11, 6-4 Sun Belt) will don hot pink uniforms in a pair of games this weekend as part of its annual Cancer Awareness tradition, hosting Louisiana (13-5, 5-3) on Thursday at 7 p.m. and Louisiana-Monroe (4-19, 0-9) on Saturday at 2 p.m. inside Strahan Arena.

Jenkins said she sometimes doesn’t know how to feel. Sometimes going through her bout with cancer doesn’t seem like such a big deal, as if it was just part of her growing up. But other times she’ll sit and think about how big of an effect it had on her life and how grateful she is to have survived it.

Cancer Awareness Week helps remind her to do the latter.