|
|
|
Thursday, December 7, 2000
Stiles willing to wait awhile
By Mechelle Voepel
Special to ESPN.com
|
The heat's sort of broken, and the nights have a different feel to them. That autumn feeling, where it seems like you can sleep better than any other time of the year.
|  | | Jackie Stiles of SMS led the nation in scoring in 1999-2000 with a 27.8 average. |
It's September, when you've still got one hand holding on to the summer but your mind's already going ahead to what's coming in the winter.
Jackie Stiles can't wait for the basketball season to get here. And yet she also wishes it would never come.
Couldn't it just remain September, when it's all anticipation, when it's all ahead of her, when goodbye is still too far away to see?
"It's a little scary," said Stiles, back on campus at Southwest Missouri State after a five-day trip to Hawaii that culminated with her U.S. Select team getting clocked by the Olympians on Sept. 3.
"I'm looking forward to the season, but I know how quickly it will go by once it gets here. I'm so excited, but I almost don't want it to start."
Don't you know exactly how she feels? For everyone who follows women's hoops, it's that kind of fall. Go ahead and start stockpiling the Kleenex now for all the senior days we're going to get choked up over when we say so long to this incredible class of 2001.
And while the farewells will be heartfelt in so many places -- from Storrs to South Bend to Knoxville to Athens to Santa Barbara -- there won't be any place more sorry to see somebody go than Springfield, Mo., when Stiles leaves.
|
ALWAYS IN STILES
|
|
A look at some of the highlights of Jackie Stiles' career at Southwest Missouri State:
Led the nation in scoring last season as a junior, scoring 890 points in 32 games for a 27.8 average.
Scored 30 points against Auburn in the first round of last year's NCAA Tournament to extend her double-figure scoring streak to 57 games -- and 92 of 94 in her career. The last time Stiles failed to score at least 10 points in a game was on Dec. 5, 1998.
Poured in a school-record 56 points against Evansville in the Missouri Valley Conference semifinals, which marked the fourth-best scoring performance in NCAA Division I history. Stiles scored 39 in the second half and shot 18-for-22 from the field, 3-for-3 from behind the arc and 17-for-20 from the line.
Against Bradley on Jan. 29, 2000, broke Melody Howard's SMS career scoring record of 1,944 points.
As a sophomore, ranked second in scoring at 25.7 points per game.
Is the first player in Missouri Valley Conference history to score 1,000 points before her junior year, and the first sophomore in MVC history to be named the conference's player of the year. |
Someone far from the Midwest e-mailed me earlier in the spring, curious about Stiles. She scores all those points, sure, but is she really that good? Will she make it in the WNBA?
I'm no scout, and don't really know if Stiles can get an even quicker release, can create enough of her own shots, can withstand the physical rigors of pro ball.
I sure hope she does all that. Because even if I can't really tell you how good Jackie Stiles is, I can tell you how good it makes you feel to watch her play.
Now if you tuned in to see Sunday's game, you didn't really see Stiles. Or Sue Bird, or Marie Ferdinand or Shea Ralph or Deanna Jackson. None of the select team members were really themselves in that 97-31 clubbing. Most of them had played together earlier in the summer in the Jones Cup competition that the U.S. won for the zillionth time. All of them are going to be big shots this coming college season.
None of them could do jack against the Olympic team.
"Everybody was just in awe -- and it showed, too," Stiles said. "We were a better team than that. I mean, obviously, they were a big reason we played like that.
"But we were not that bad. We couldn't pass or catch or do anything. It probably would have benefited us if we could have scrimmaged against them before we played them, just so we wouldn't have been looking at them like, 'I can't believe we're actually on the same floor as them.' "
This is so cute, really. You know there have been lots of kids -- oh heck, scratch that -- lots of people of all ages who've seen Stiles at the mall or something and wanted to casually go up and say, "Jackie, you rock," and they just couldn't do it.
That's why it's so funny to hear Stiles talk about herself and UConn's Bird and Florida State's Brooke Wyckoff looking at each other and their fellow passenger on a hotel elevator in Hawaii, all silently screaming, "Oh my God! It's RUTHIE BOLTON-HOLIFIELD! Standing right next to us!"
It's amazing, really, they managed the 31 points they did.
Because, for one thing, the Olympic team is fantastic. Stiles gets hacked plenty in the Missouri Valley Conference, but that didn't exactly prepare her for that stone-cold stuff from Yolanda Griffith.
"They were huge -- the guards are huge and posts are even bigger," Stiles said. "And it's the maturity level. They're just so smart, and to go along with that, they have the incredible athleticism. And it was amazing their speed up and down the court."
And the select team was aware the Olympic team was fantastic. I'm all for being confident, but there's something great to
be said about being plugged in enough to be appropriately awestruck.
"I knew these were the best players in the world, but I couldn't concentrate on that. I thought, 'I shouldn't think of who they were, just play my style of basketball," Stiles said. "But a couple times I looked, and here's Sheryl Swoopes guarding me, and it's like, 'Whoa.'
"I've never been on the floor with such great talent. It shows you where you need to be. But it also gives you confidence. I played against the best team in the world. I'm not going to be intimidated by anything I see in college."
Of course, Stiles has never shown any sign of that anyway. No, the Valley isn't the SEC, but it is no cotton-candy league, either. There is some genuinely good hoops played in the Valley (just ask some of the Big 12 teams that have lost to the Valley in recent seasons).
One of those Big 12 teams, in fact, played Stiles' foil in what some would vote for as her signature game (so far). For those of you unfamiliar with "The Wonder at Waco," you'll absolutely swear we're making this up. But it all really happened.
Dec. 2, 1998, at Baylor, SMS coach Cheryl Burnett was trying to get a technical to fire up her team, but she hit the gas a little too hard and got herself two T's and a seat in the locker room for the last six minutes of the game.
So with 5:30 left, SMS was down by 14, Baylor was feeling pretty good, Burnett had to be thinking, "What on earth did I just do?" and Stiles was plotting the comeback.
"I knew there was no way we were losing that game," Stiles said. "I said to our team, 'We are winning this,' and from that point on, I felt like I could do anything with the basketball. I can't explain it."
Stiles ended up with 52 points that night, but it's even more ridiculous than that -- she won the game on a four-point play. Just your basic, 24-foot 3-pointer over two people who foul you and send you to the line with 2.6 seconds left so you can win the dang thing just like you said you would.
This was no twinkie team Stiles lit up. Yes, Baylor had flaked out by the end of that season -- a victim of both chemistry problems and a pretty unfair conference schedule -- but talent-wise, it was one of the better Big 12 teams that year. That was even more certainly the case in December.
You wondered all the rest of the season though, if the Bears ever really got over what Stiles did to them.
Now, others -- including Stiles herself -- would give the nod for her best game to last season's Valley tournament semifinals. In that one, she went 18-for-22 from the field on the way to 56 points in an 88-75 victory over Evansville.
That game meant so much to Stiles not because of her point total but because she thought it was a must-win for the NCAA Tournament. Had SMS lost in the semis, hopes for an at-large bid would have been tenuous.
"I knew how it important it was," Stiles said. "To not make the NCAA Tournament -- that would have just devastated me."
Truth was, Stiles had already been devastated enough the summer of 1999 when she got cut from a team for the first time in her life. She didn't make the World University Games squad after having been on USA Basketball teams the two previous summers.
But Teresa Edwards -- who's headed for her fifth Olympics and who was part of the committee that helped pick the WUG team -- saw how crushed Stiles was and had some encouraging words for her.
Edwards couldn't have known how much that meant. Couldn't have known that as a little girl, Stiles had a poster of Edwards -- she can't remember for sure, but she thinks she picked it up a camp -- and put it on the ceiling over her bed.
Before she went to sleep at night, Stiles looked up and saw what she wanted to be some day.
OK, now you're sure we're making this up, right? Just too corny, huh?
Except that's what's so neat about Jackie Stiles.
She really is from Claflin, Kan. (if you want to find it, point your finger right smack in the middle of the state map), where her high school class had 26 people.
She really did score more points -- 3,603 -- than any girl or boy in Kansas high school history, even Wichita's Lynette Woodard.
She really did take only the second airplane trip in her life when she made her first USA Basketball team after graduating from high school.
She really did score 56 points and then talk about all the great screens her teammates set for her.
She really did call her mom from Hawaii last week to check in, heard that it was 107 degrees in Kansas and was all the more grateful for the trip to the islands.
She really does thank basketball for all it has given her: The journeys to places so far away from tiny Claflin, an education, another town where she will never be forgotten, the feeling of such focus with the ball in her hands that she doesn't even hear 8,000 people screaming their heads off.
"I turn into a different person," she says of those times she just can't miss, even with five people guarding her. "I feel like everything is going to go in."
They feel that right along with her in Springfield -- hey, they just flat-out expect it by now -- and that won't be something easy to get used to when it's not there anymore.
But let's not start saying goodbye yet. It's still September. Stiles is catching up with classes, fretting about not working out enough, both anticipating and dreading the beginning of the season.
She has scored 2,331 points, and the Valley record of 2,636 set by Drake's Wanda Ford is almost sure to go down.
It's still September. Enjoy the wait.
Mechelle Voepel of the Kansas City Star is a regular contributor to ESPN.com. She can be reached via e-mail at mvoepel@kcstar.com.
|
|
ALSO SEE
U.S. women give coach Fortner a record victory
UConn's Ralph leads U.S. Jones Cup team to tournament title
|
|
