Excerpt from the Dayton Daily News
By Tom Archdeacon
The Cleveland State Vikings had to be thinking some of the same things Monday in the semifinals of the Horizon League women’s tournament at the Indiana Farmers Coliseum that that doctor in Chicago did all those years ago.
“When she was born, the doctor lifted her up in the air and said, ‘Mom! How much you think she weighs?’” Ara Portwood said of her daughter, Shamarre Hale. “He couldn’t get over it. He said, ‘Oh my goodness. This one is something!’”
Portwood laughed as she recalled the start of her daughter’s life: “She was something. She was a big, big baby, She weighed 10 pounds at birth.”
She said her great grandmother wanted to call the baby Snuggles.
“I was like, “Snuggles? No… no…that’s not it,’” Portwood said. “And then it came to me. The name just popped out: ‘Tank!’
“I said, ‘She’s Tank’ and the name stuck. She’s been Tank since she was two days old.”
