In basketball, a player sets a screen to help a teammate evade a defender. The screen-setter achieves this by blocking a defender’s path so that the teammate has room to make a shot or pass to an open teammate. A screen assists the offense by stretching the floor, enabling ball movement, and yielding higher-percentage shot opportunities. Setting an effective screen results from practice and well-developed team chemistry and communication. Screens are not listed in a game’s box score, but maybe they should be. At its core—not the screen-setters rock-hard abdominal core, mind you, which is required to plant a sturdy, wide base and hold it, statue-like—a screen facilitates a team’s offense.

A screen takes effort and the willingness to prioritize team over self. It also requires a glimpse at the bigger picture as well as humility—because the screen-setter is making way for a teammate to shine. A hard screen can be the overlooked, but underscoring context of a highlight reel-worthy shot. Applied to other concepts, a hard screen is a firm and deliberate effort to open a path.

the HARD SCREEN clears rubble through which knowledge and meaning can pass. Without meaning, understanding lacks and the team—collective, community, society, country, or humanity generally—suffer. The rubble includes misinformation, disinformation, artificial intelligence, and the speed of information dissemination. “If you don’t correct the record, the stories that people tell can start to seem like the truth,” Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Connie Walker said in her podcast Stolen.

Correcting the record—especially by adding missing context—is our mission.

Tamryn Spruill founded the HARD SCREEN in 2019 and is its chief editor. Spruill is an award-winning independent journalist and the author of The W: A History of the WNBA (Abrams Press, 2026).

Formerly the editor in chief of Swish Appeal, Spruill has written for The Athletic, Harper’s BAZAAR, The New York Times, The Red Bulletin, SLAM, and elsewhere.

She has a Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing from Goddard College and a Bachelor of Arts in Spanish and Journalism from the University of South Carolina. As an adjunct professor, Spruill is passionate about teaching media history/studies, world literature, and creative writing.

She thrives in nature, feels most grounded when making music and art, and lives in Massachusetts with her wife, stepson, and two cats.