“It showed that there was still hate in the country,” Davis said. “It changed the way I started to see things.”

Later that day came another significant moment for Davis, this one affirming and uplifting. She and her teammates met Representative John Lewis of Georgia, a towering activist in the civil rights movement who helped lead the marches from Selma to Montgomery, Ala., in 1965 to promote black voter registration and the Freedom Rides that challenged segregation of public buses.

For months before the trip, the teenage athletes studied the country’s black history, from slavery through the civil rights era. They had seen the movie “Selma” and videos of Lewis and other demonstrators being clubbed by Alabama state troopers at the foot of the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma on March 7, 1965, in what became known as Bloody Sunday.

When Davis met him in person, she said Lewis’s stature left her breathless.

“You see him in these movies and videos, and he doesn’t seem like a human being after everything he’s gone through,” Davis said.

Lewis told the players a well-known story about forgiveness and reconciliation. In 2009, he received a visit on Capitol Hill from a former supporter of the Ku Klux Klan. Decades earlier, the man and others had attacked and bloodied Lewis when he tried to enter a waiting room for whites at a bus station in Rock Hill, S.C.

“Mr. Lewis, I’m one of the people that beat you,” Elwin Wilson, the former Klan supporter, then in his 70s, and who died in 2013, told the congressman. “I want to apologize. Will you forgive me?”