the prorector classes: Thode, once top and Show-bound, now the bats prorector
Thode had been a pupil of Coach G. Schtitt back at Schtitt’s infamous old crop-and-epaulette Harry Hopman program in Winter Park FL and then for a couple years at the new E.T.A. as a top and Show-bound if kind of rabidly political and not too tightly wrapped female junior.
Context
The purgatorial-figure thread given a full biography: Mary Esther Thode was once "a top and Show-bound... female junior," a player of Schtitt's, before the pro tours blacklisted her and she came "practically with a bandanna-tied stick over her shoulder" back to Schtitt, who kept her on. Her trajectory — promising body → washed out → prorector teaching insane elective seminars — is the same arc as the male prorectors, the academy reabsorbing its own unrealized talents. The Show-bound junior becomes the bats teacher; the developmental carrot, uneaten, leaves a life to be filled with something else.