Beyond the Arc with Kate Harman feature: Inspired by her father, Picardo continues to go with her gut
By: Kate Harman
Bianca Picardo can still feel her dad’s eyes watching her play basketball. Not in the way a father typically observes his kids play a sport, as he wasn’t cheering from the bleachers or from inside a gymnasium. No, Mark watched from a bed set up in the family den.
Then, Picardo was in elementary school and outside playing in the driveway with her older brother, AJ. Back when he was still able to play with them, Mark had painted lines to make the driveway look like a court - they are some of Picardo’s best memories of the man. But later on, he would watch from inside, as he would rather view his kids practice the game he loved than turn his focus to the television.
There wasn’t a screen on the window at their Fairway Drive house in Skippack Township and so if you lifted it, air would come through the house. The open window meant Mark could hear his kids from the driveway and that they could hear him, too.
Usually they didn’t need to hear him to know what he wanted. Picardo called this her “intuition.”
Mark was battling leukemia, a fight he would lose when his daughter was in just the first grade, but from the bed that hospice set up, he would direct his kids with his eyes. Every so often, Bianca or AJ would catch a glimpse of Mark and could tell what he wanted them to work on with a single look.
“Loved,” Bianca said of her dad’s relationship to the game. “He loved it, really loved it. He never played it – just coached. But when he was watching us through the window in the den we would just look up and see that look on his face. He loved watching us play.”
After Mark passed, Bianca and AJ found themselves still turning their gaze to the window from the driveway. They were waiting for the look - it was habit.
From that point on, basketball became something else to the now 21-year old.
“Basketball saved us,” Picardo said. “It made us always feel home.
“We knew this is what we were meant to do,” she continued. “Whether we were upset, sad, whatever, we’d be outside and playing basketball – it felt comfortable for us. There was just something about it – it was so much fun. It felt like what we should be doing.”
Quickly, her father’s passion became her own, as Picardo immersed herself into the game.
“I’ve been around a lot of young ladies and men from that age,” her trainer and still close friend, Chuck Moore said. “She is one of the most, biggest, go getters I’ve seen. She has tremendous drive. She’s always been out to get and works hard to get.
“She might call me, one spring or summer, still, I don’t know,” Moore added. “I’ll be in the gym on the weekends, and she’ll call me out of the blue and say that she’s coming, that she’ll meet me there. That’s the type of person she is. She’s a strong minded young lady.”
The passion helped her score 1000-points for Souderton, as the team garnered success it hadn’t seen before, and earned her a Division I scholarship to play basketball at New Jersey Institute for Technology.
The first time she met the coach of the Highlanders he reminded her of her dad.
It was in his mannerisms and the way he talked, Picardo said.
Her gut – her intuition – was telling her that’s where she should go.
So, she did.
But a high school injury resurfaced at the college level, as she rolled her ankle her first year in a NJIT uniform. Instead of sitting out and rehabbing, she worked out too much, ran too much, and played in games she shouldn’t have.
“We were playing teams like Clemson,” Picardo said. “I wasn’t going to sit out. You see teams like that on the schedule and you’re just in. Of course, you want to play – that’s the dream.”
Months later she had surgery to fix nerve damage in her leg, with her coaches and athletic trainers certain she’d be back to 100-percent health.
Picardo wasn’t.
Again, her intuition was screaming at her.
Picardo knew she’d have to hang up her sneakers and transfer to a school with an academic program closer aligned to her interests.
“My family has been the most supportive,” Picardo said. “How do you call your mom and say your basketball career is over and you want to go to film school. That’s just doesn’t even sound right — especially coming from me. But she supported me, uplifted me, she always has. She makes me believe I can do anything.”
Picardo ended up at New York University and in 2017, graduated with a Bachelor’s degree in Film and Television from the prestigious Tisch School of the Arts with a minor in producing.
Film was a passion that first developed in Rich Curtis’ RedAlert class at Souderton – a course where students develop their own multimedia projects and serve as directors or producers. The opportunity to take the course was offered to students each semester, as early on the class consisted of basic editing before advancing to more production-based skills. Picardo took RedAlert for two years and soon she began to feel about film, the same way she felt about basketball – especially after the success of her senior project – a Lip Dub video that eventually went viral and raised $22,000 for the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia.
Back then her gut was telling her that film or media could be her future.
She felt that feeling again at NYU.
“It was hard because basketball was a connection I had with my dad,” Picardo said. “It was hard for me to close that chapter. I felt disappointed, upset.
“I can still be around the game,” she added. “But I connect with game in a different way. I don’t have to play to feel him.”
The chapter wasn’t closed entirely, however.
Last summer, rehabilitated and reenergized, Picardo was set to play again – this time for Chestnut Hill. The plan was to get her Masters in Instructional Tech and compete for Griffins. She went to workouts, got gear, and was all set to be back on a basketball court.
Then, one night on a whim, she checked her program’s website.
“Page not found.”
She refreshed the browser.
“Page not found.”
Her program had been discontinued, and so, again, Picardo would have to listen to her what her intuition was telling her and change course.
She lives in Philadelphia now, near Jefferson University and is working on the development of her own app – Beach Eatz. It came to her over the summer when she was with her mother – and mentor – Sara, on the beach in Cape May. Picardo wanted a hot dog but the line to get one was long, long enough that she started to wonder what it would be like it someone delivered one to her chair on the sand.
She’s attacked the project much like the way she attacked the basket or a film project, head on and at full speed.
Most of all?
She’s followed her intuition.
@Ka_Harman
KateRHarman@gmail.com
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