Mansfield girls basketball coach attacking cancer treatment with ‘relentless optimism’

MANSFIELD — Mansfield girls basketball coach Brooke Brittain was working out on her rowing machine at home when the title of one of the books stacked next to her caught her eye. She had read Jim Brennan’s The Art of Becoming Oneself before, but when she read it this time, the chapter about being “relentlessly optimistic” took on new meaning. That’s because in June, Brittain had been diagnosed with Stage III melanoma, an advanced form of skin cancer. Brittain was moved to reach out to Brennan, who like her had been a military police officer in a global conflict, and had also served as the sports psychologist for the Villanova men’s basketball team when it won the national championship in 2016. They forged a friendship, bonding over their military service and basketball ties. When Brittain was diagnosed with melanoma, doctors challenged her to be cautiously optimistic. Brennan changed her mind-set. “He feels like a long-lost friend. We felt so connected,” Brittain said. “He and I have often discussed what it looks like to live and lead with relentless optimism — on the court and in life’s toughest battles.” Brennan, who served in Vietnam and is retired after working as a professor at Lehigh, has never met Brittain in person. But during their phone calls, he respected how the 42-year-old coach never acted like a victim or asked “why me,” even when there were rough days. “After meeting with her, I thought she embodied the concept of relentless optimism,” Brennan said. “She was a living example of what I was trying to capture in words.” Brittain said she’s not scared of a disease that has a five-year survival rate of 63%, according to the Melanoma Research Alliance. That fearless demeanor is derived from 20 years in the Army, including two tours of duty in Iraq and another that sent her to seven countries in the Middle East. As part of the first invasion into Iraq after 9/11, Brittain watched bombs drop and at times listened to gunfire throughout the night. “Surreal would be the way I would describe it,” she said. “Sometimes I feel like I lived three different lives. You are at school high-fiving kids, and I literally sat watching a war from yards away and was involved in an invasion. But it shaped a lot of who I am and how I look at things.” “What we agreed on is the idea of post-traumatic growth, understanding combat and post-traumatic stress,” he said. “I’m one who thinks it’s not helpful to portray post-traumatic stress as something permanent. Brooke felt the same way. If you grow through it, then you have the ability to go help others.” Brittain, who didn’t need chemotherapy but is receiving immunotherapy, said she hopes to be in remission by this summer. She has struggled with fatigue and brain fog but with assistance from her staff, she has never had to stop coaching. “The melanoma itself was not the shock. That it was in my lymph nodes was the shock,” she said. “I was very, very blessed and fortunate that they found it before it had spread very far.” Mansfield is 14-17 and 3-8 in District 3-6A, a far cry from the school’s girls basketball dynasty that won four consecutive state titles in the UIL’s top classification from 1999 to 2002. But what matters most, Brittain said, is how her players have rallied around her and embraced the mantra of relentless optimism, including helping lead a districtwide Special Olympics basketball camp at Mansfield and taking the initiative to clean the cafeteria the day after a close loss. “Everything we do on and off the court, that is our motto,” junior small forward Hayley Mathiesen said. “We do everything for her and for that reason. It has been hard seeing her struggle, but it is really inspiring for all of us. If she can go through something hard and still be there for all of us, the least we can do is be there for her.” Added senior point guard Kameron Chambers: “Every day we just try to remind her that she’s being strong and she is doing her job and showing up for us while battling cancer.” Brittain was playing basketball at Sterling College in Kansas when she joined the military in 2001, right before 9/11. She was a military police officer during her first tour in Iraq and a battle staff operations sergeant during her second in 2009, helping companies train the Iraqi police force. “I chose military police because I wanted to be pretty active and I didn’t want to stay home and sit behind a desk,” Brittain said. “[The war] altered the course of all of our lives for the military at that time. That was why I joined, was to be there when our nation called.” When she returned home, Brittain finished her college basketball career at UT-Dallas and was hired as the head coach at Arlington Martin, where she spent 11 years until Mansfield hired her in May 2021. She continued her military career in the Army reserves before retiring in 2022. Brittain isn’t sure how much longer she wants to coach, but she is working on her doctorate and wants to do consulting work to help coaches who have endured trauma. It goes back to her days in combat, seeing soldiers die and squad leaders guide those who had to return to the mission, and it hit home in 2015 when Arlington Martin football player Carl Wilson was shot and killed. Students cried in her arms in the hallway then, and Brittain has felt the pain of other coaches who have lost athletes at their school. “I talked to a friend two days ago that had a player commit suicide, and another friend had a player that had an asthma attack that led to heart failure, and he died,” Brittain said. “There are coaches navigating very real trauma every single day and then going and trying to inspire and lead young people through it and trying to win basketball games. We can’t let that adversity derail every kid.” It’s why Brittain will work to help more coaches be relentlessly optimistic. Find more high school sports coverage from The Dallas Morning News here. Sign up for our FREE HS newsletter.