Courter’s Rapid Turn-Bowne pitcher, once a troubled teen, set to graduate after winning city title

Last year, Margaret Courter would’ve come undone. As she pitched for John Bowne in the PSAL Class B softball city championship Saturday afternoon at the College of Staten Island, Lane’s fans behind home plate mercilessly heckled her.
But the blond girl on the mound - who retired 20 of the first 21 batters she faced at one point and pitched through an error-filled seventh inning, silencing her detractors and pitching the Wildcats (19-2) to a city title, 7-5 - wasn’t the same person she was a year ago.
At that time, she was a troubled team with no direction in her life. Courter never met her father and her mother was deemed an unfit parent. As a result, she lived with her grandmother and then her uncle, who she characterized as an alcoholic and rarely spent much time at home.
She frequently smoked marijuana - “I was a pot-head,” she said. She hung out with the dregs of her Flushing neighborhood and barely went to class; when she was in school, she often slept through lesson plans.
“She was in trouble so often,” Bowne’s softball coach, Bruce Bitterman, said. “Every day, I’d walk in the door and someone would say you better do something, she’s going to be out of here [soon].”
Softball may have contributed the most to her drastic turnaround. As a sophomore, she failed off the team, suffering the indignity of watching Bowne be pounded, 14-0, by Newtown in the city championship. Last year, a blowup with the coach caused her to lose focus in a quarterfinal loss to Beach Channel putting her spot on the team in jeopardy. “I didn’t think she would ever play for me again,” said Bitterman, who also coached Courter on the basketball team.
At the time, Courter was beginning to turn away from her troubled ways. She got a job at a local Wendy’s and buckled down at school. She is now set to graduate on time, racking up an 80-point average in the last marking period. Taking night classes at Bowne and Flushing high schools, Courter plans to attend Kingsborough Community College in Brooklyn next fall where she will play basketball and softball.
“I just feel like I matured, I figured things out,” she said. “I saw myself going nowhere. I just wanted to make a change. I was always smart, I wasn’t stupid. I now know what I want to do with my life: go to school for six years, become a gym teacher, maybe even a coach. Do for other kids what my coach did for me. He never let go.”
She repaid that faith against Lane. “I did the opposite of what I usually do,” she said, cradling her three-year-old baby niece Corrine Hackett in her arms. “It’s the championship game, what are you going to do. I had to keep my composure.”
“I’m the coach that gives everybody 20 chances,” Bitterman said. “They say I’m too soft. But she rewarded me on Saturday. I thought she was going to cave into that pressure, but she grew up. I’m so proud of her.”
The attitude change really began when she moved in her with her aunt, Margaret Hackett a year and a half ago.
“We’ve had a lot of talks of when she lets things get to her,” Hackett said. “I told her . . . the best thing you can do is play your game and beat them [the hecklers] and she did just that. I’m so proud of her because she could’ve lost her head there.”
Not the new Margaret Courter.