The Times has a great profile about a group of girls in rural Tennessee, all former high school basketball players. What happens to the girls after high school?

“Our job here is to keep them out of custody and give them the education,” said the Carroll Academy director Randy Hatch, who grew up in Huntingdon. “Then we turn them loose into the world. No different than Huntingdon High School, where the locals go. We’re putting them out into the world. What’s for them to do? What is out there?”

All three girls applied multiple times to the various fast-food restaurants in their towns. Each pondered more education at one of the region’s technical schools. But the lack of jobs, and the cost of cars and gas to navigate the stretched-out landscape, made even the first steps into the real world daunting, if not unmanageable.

So they waited, frozen in time and place.

“For someone who’s 18, you’ve got one of two choices, that I see,” Hatch said. “You’re either going to go to college, if you can get in, or you’re going to join the military. If you can find a job, it’s going to be by the hour. You’re not going to find something that’s going to help you raise a family. Those jobs are just not here.”