Staying There

by Betty Bean

Semeka Randall fires up a 15-foot jumper and whoops for joy. It's money, and she dances as it rips the net.

"Woooo-ooo!! I'm hot!"

Tamika Catchings powers through traffic and slams to the hole, finishing a leaping lay-up with an easy finger roll.

Chamique Holdsclaw flies. Literally flies, hovering like some backboard angel, hitting the ground only after she plucks off a rebound and slips it through the rim.

There is a fable about Larry Bird walking into the locker room before a three-point shooting contest, surveying the room and asking: "Who's going to come in second?" This year, nobody thinks it will be the Tennessee Lady Volunteers, who are riding the crest of a 45-game winning streak, and preparing to take it higher. Never have the experts been so unanimous about who's number one. But Coach Pat Summitt is not Larry Bird. She works at keeping this team wary, because she knows that staying there will be harder than getting there.

She gathers them into a circle in the middle of the floor, almost out of earshot of the handful of hardcore fans who have come to watch practice. She tells the sweat-stained players they're going to have to work a little harder.

"You don't have any friends out there," she says of the world beyond the friendly orange confines of Knoxville. "I promise you that. I know what the talk is and they're out there taking names and getting ready to kick your butts..." The Lady Vols nod.

The Three Meeks are back, practicing like they played during their historic 39-0, Three-Peat NCAA Championship season, only better. Randall has improved her shot. Catchings, on the receiving end of a world of hurt under the basket last year, has gotten stronger. And Holdsclaw, Summitt says, is the most improved player on the team.

The Meeks are consensus preseason All-Americans, and all three have been nominated for the Naismith Award, college basketball's highest individual honor. Holdsclaw is the prohibitive favorite.

But the Meeks aren't the only ones to be counted on. Steady senior point guard Kellie Jolly returns with the memory of her second straight All Final Four Team honor still fresh in her mind. Junior stand-out Kyra Elzy, who went down last February with an ACL tear, is practicing again, and her classmate, Niya Butts, whose playing time last year was severely limited by painful shin splints, is greatly improved. Butts is said to be the quickest Lady Vol of all. Sophomore point guard Ace Clement won the three-point shooting contest at Midnight Madness and has been shooting the lights out in practice. She worked out all summer, as did post player Teresa Geter, who led the SEC in blocked shots as a freshman last year.

Junior center LaShonda Stephens has been lost to arthritic knees, but the Lady Vols have strengthened up the middle with two freshmen—6'4" center Shalon Pillow, who also excelled at track in high school, and 6'5" Michelle Snow, who, undaunted by her failure to dunk at Midnight Madness, is laying plans to get it done during a game.

The team's Achilles' heel, if it has one, is depth. The early departure over the summer of reserve seniors Misty Greene and Brynae Laxton has left the bench looking sparse, and additional injuries in the back court could require walk-ons Sarah Edwards and Amanda Canon to be called into action.

Summitt's stellar coaching staff returns intact, despite Mickie DeMoss, Al Brown, and Holly Warlick all being romanced by a variety of college and professional teams. DeMoss, the recruiting coordinator, was recently named the nation's top assistant by the Womens' Basketball Journal.

Last season opened with New York sportswriter talk that Chamique Holdsclaw would be leaving the Lady Vols at year's end to go professional. This year's New York sportswriter talk is that Summitt herself will follow Holdsclaw into the ranks of the pros.

Don't hold your breath, Summitt says.

"I'm not leaving this sophomore class. And I will be here for much longer than that because I love the college game."

Is it safe to say, then, that there are things about coaching professionally that give Summitt pause?

"You hear horror stories," she says. "Players who'd rather pay fines than practice—obviously it's a job for them (professional players).

Our kids have a great love for the game. And this is the best game for Pat Summitt."

Lots of teams win games. The 1998 Tennessee women have changed the way people look at women's basketball. A recent story from the Denver Post illustrates the point:

"Oct. 27 - BOULDER - It's all gone now, a pile of junk stashed somewhere in a corner of Ceal Barry's memory bank.

"The old double-post offense.
"Junk.
"The half-court game.
"Junk.
"The heavy legs.
"Junk, too.

"All very productive junk in its day, but no longer useful now that the University of Tennessee has raised the level of women's college basketball to a place just under the rim and set a pace that will probably take almost every other team in the country at least three years to catch up to."

It's not like Pat Summitt's teams weren't already the gold standard. She had won five pre-1998 national championships, and won them most every which way—won as underdogs, won as overdogs; won ugly and won gloriously. Won close and won big. Tennessee, during Summitt's 24-year tenure, has steadily cranked out All-Americans, Olympians, professional players, coaches, and Final Four appearances, all while playing the toughest schedule in the country.

But last year beat all. Last year brought such history-making success that this team, if all goes as most expect, is on track to break Louisiana Tech's record 54-game winning streak by beating UCLA at home Dec. 21. Getting there won't be easy, though. They must extend the streak on the road, in places like Purdue and

LaTech, which also owns the longest home winning streak and will be spoiling for revenge from the 93-75 beating it took last March in the NCAA finals. And once it's done, there are tough road games to UConn and Old Dominion, both of whom will be waiting to ambush the Lady Vols.

The professional leagues—both the ABL and the WNBA—are eagerly anticipating Holdsclaw's graduation, and some say the fate of the faltering ABL, generally considered the "player's league," rests upon her decision. Most everyone who has an informed opinion says she will command an unprecedented sum of money when she becomes a professional, and that the WNBA's New York Liberty will do whatever must be done, including trading away current stars, to get her back to her hometown. One basketball publication, a magazine called Slam, had her picture on the cover posing in a New York Knicks uniform, and suggested that she might as well go to play in the NBA, bypassing the women's leagues altogether.

Such breathtaking success has not come without a price. Summitt's new book, Raise the Roof, reveals that Kyra Elzy was tormented last season by a stalker. Ace Clement has a sort of cyber-stalker who, against her wishes, maintains an obsessive web page dedicated to her. Holdsclaw's celebrity status has made it difficult for her to make a simple shopping trip to the mall. Semeka Randall has been targeted for individualized abuse via the Internet. Tamika Catchings was the victim of so many on-court cheap shots that her father, former NBA player Harvey Catchings, has said it was all he could to keep from coming out of his chair during the brutal Mid-East Finals game against North Carolina.

The team as a whole is paying a price, as well. The Lady Vols have become the New York Yankees of the women's game. Not only the team to copy, but the team everyone loves to hate, the team to beat. Any misstep, any weakness, any ill-considered utterance, and even injury reports, become a source of comfort to the opposition.

As recruiting season swung into high gear this fall, the word in basketball circles was that the world as we knew it was coming to an end. That top recruits were looking to Alabama, to Georgia, to Florida, to Wisconsin and Minnesota—anywhere but Tennessee. That cracks were showing in the mighty Rocky Top, and that Pat Summitt and the Lady Volunteers were living on borrowed time.

Mike Flynn, who publishes the widely-consulted Blue Star Index, a basketball recruiting newsletter, says staying on top much longer is impossible.

"There's only one way to go when you're on top," he says. "There's only one way to go—down. It's a matter of time. If this is such a lofty team, it's very difficult to maintain that pace. It's three bars on a slot machine—you can't get it all the time... "

Flynn said college recruiting has gotten more difficult since the advent of the women's professional leagues "...because there's a lot more discussion among players to tailor their game for the pro level. It's very interesting, if you're one of the top four high school players in the country, do you go to Tennessee and wait your turn, or do you go someplace else and be the big fish? That's the discussion point out there. For a handful of the top players, this is the consideration. The kids wanna play. They don't want to sit..."

So, does Lady Vol recruiting coordinator Mickie DeMoss sound worried about the recruiting guru's theory?

"That's so ludicrous," DeMoss says. "Where are you going to get more publicity, on a team that never gets on TV, or on a team that has back-to-back-to-back championships and is on national and regional TV 15, 16 times a year? Will it mean more to be on this team, or a team nobody ever reads about and nobody ever sees?

"Look at the North Carolina men's team—they've had more guys to go to the pros than any other program, and do people say that kind of crap about them?"

Summitt says she takes a very direct approach with recruits who have been told they wouldn't be able to play if they came to Tennessee.

"I tell them, 'So they're telling you you're not good enough to come here and play with these players. Do they think you're good enough to go somewhere else and beat us? You don't have to come here and play with these players. You can go somewhere else and play against them. But if you want to win championships, wherever you go, you're going to have to be on a team with the talent to compete against these players.

"'You have a choice. Which do you prefer?'"

As the early recruiting season grinds toward its November climax, Tennessee has secured commitments from the nation's two top-rated forwards, Alabama stars Tasheika Morris and Gwen Jackson, both named to the Street and Smith's All-America first team. They will join Indiana point guard April McDivitt, who is on the Street and Smith's second team and committed in July. Iowan Nina Smith, arguably the nation's top recruit, has whittled her list down to Tennessee and two others.

Meanwhile, DeMoss dismisses boasts that arch-rival UConn's current five-All-American freshman class will outperform Tennessee's four 1998 freshmen All-Americans.

"If they go undefeated and win a national championship, we'll have something to talk about. How can you be better than 39-0 and a national title?"


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