Blue Star Basketball

Amid the flurry of sorting through college preseason information, it’s easy to employ the casual, snappy lingo that comes with assessing key players and coaches for each team. These thumbnail previews read, and are written, as if these individuals are all mechanical pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, neatly tied together with a couple of brief pronouncements summing up a team’s prospects:

“The days of (School X) being an easy win in conference play have probably come to an end.”

“The level of patience at (School Y) beyond this season may well depend on the strides made in the short term.”

These are actual sentences I’ve written in recent weeks, as I paused only briefly to double-check spellings, statistics and whether or not what I wrote made sense.

The whirlwind of getting these profiles written and published is like this every time this year, and pondering the intangibles — those often wildly and unexpected human dynamics — doesn’t always enter the equation. Even coaches who spent hours with their players every day have to bank on the unpredictable.

But four programs couldn’t have imagined the truly frightening events in recent months that have involved three of the promising players in the game and touched the best team in the land.

North Carolina forward Jessica Breland, placed on the watch lists of all the national player of the year awards, was diagnosed with Hodgkin’s lymphoma in May and began immediate chemotherapy. Tennessee sophomore Amber Gray underwent life-saving surgery in the summer, after a blood vessel broke in her brain, which was triggered during a routine operation to repair a damaged rotator cuff.

More recently, incoming University of California standout Tierra Rogers collapsed during and after a preseason workout. She was rushed to a hospital where doctors detected a heart condition that can be fatal to young athletes, and her career ended before she ever played a college game.

And just last week, the NCAA champions from UConn were dealing with the campus murder of football player Jasper Howard, who occasionally played pickup games with some of the Huskies. All-American Tina Charles had gotten to know Howard well, on the court and in the classroom.

How does one try to delicately weave these developments into a tight preview capsule? Will it seem rushed, even crass, given the need to rate the quality of returning and incoming players and judge those who have moved on? Finding the right touch, and right words, can be elusive.

Breland is in school in Chapel Hill, but her status for the basketball season has not been determined until her chemotherapy was complete. Gray is back in Knoxville taking a few classes and she will not play this season. Whether she plays again is uncertain. Rogers is done playing the game, but has been voted a team captain and will stay on scholarship. Charles and her teammates will carry heavy hearts into the season as they remember their fallen friend.

Despite the great talent and coaching at all four schools, their programs have been indelibly altered in ways they cannot imagine right now. There’s no proper way to write a preview that gives off even a hint of how they might respond.

Since coming back from the Final Four in St. Louis, I’ve been thinking about how readily some people regarded the whole event – and the college season as well – as an anticlimactic bummer.

The utter lack of suspense associated with Connecticut’s dominance has been quite obvious, and it’s the topic that frankly bored media types, even me, to a degree. It’s nothing against Geno and his fantastic players and their unbeaten season. We all offered this as a disclaimer.

A month later, I’ll go further and suggest this: It’s really about everybody else. And why none of the teams that could have given the Huskies something of a run in March (and April) even got to take the court against them.

This has less to do with the continued dominance of UConn (and Tennessee) than it does with the stunting of some elite programs that seemingly have everything they need to join the top of the heap. Either they haven’t managed to do it, or they have not demonstrated true staying power.

If you look at the recruiting landscape over the last decade, you honestly can’t say that the wealth isn’t being spread around rather generously. There’s no recruiting stimulus needed in this sport, despite the riches that keep rolling into Storrs and Knoxville. Kids are going to play at places where they can get playing time, develop their game with the pros in mind and maybe even start a new tradition.

More resources, better facilities and higher expectations are being handed to BCS-level women’s programs than ever before. Yet in that same decade, UConn and Tennessee have won seven national championships.

Even as powerhouse programs have been built, maintained or revived at places like Maryland, Baylor, North Carolina, Duke, Rutgers, Notre Dame, Oklahoma, Stanford, LSU and Ohio State, they all remain firmly in a tier below The Big Two.

Instead of complaining only about how the sport is the domain of two programs, wouldn’t it be better to ask this: Why are they still in a league of their own?

This isn’t the same scenario as the early 1990s, when very few women’s programs had the institutional backing that exists now. There’s also an incredible amount of media and TV coverage and a professional league that didn’t exist then. As well as a grassroots game that is developing superbly athletic, talented and polished players for the college game in greater quantities than before.

And yet as this season rolled along and UConn’s inevitability became apparent, TV analysts and writers tried to explain that this was a “down” year in the women’s game. But aside from Tennessee’s struggles, should this have been the case?

Not many people expected the Lady Vols to be Final Four-worthy this season. That there’s a crisis of confidence now, and that Pat Summitt called a “Come to Jesus” meeting after their first-round NCAA loss, was a real shocker.

But is it any more surprising than what has transpired at Maryland since the Terrapins won the NCAA title in 2006? That group, which is now gone following the departures of Kristi Toliver and Marissa Coleman, never got back to the Final Four. Never.

How does a team with those players, plus Shay Doron, Crystal Langhorne and Laura Harper, not get back to the Final Four? And please don’t throw the “parity” word at me. That concept is still a mirage.

After Toliver’s colossal three-pointer in overtime against Duke in Boston, I was sold on the idea that Maryland had all the essentials to crack The Big Two. Brenda Frese demonstrated she was as good a recruiter and program-builder as anyone in the country.

So is Sherri Coale, and when she reeled in Courtney Paris and then a terrific supporting cast to go with her, I was convinced Oklahoma could get to the promised land.

The Sooners finally did reach the Final Four – in Paris’ last season – but like Maryland got ensnared in the Louisville buzzsaw.

I’m still flabbergasted by this, no discredit to Jeff Walz and his team.

I fully expect Maryland and Oklahoma to remain elite programs, but they have missed golden chances to become something more than that.

I’m flabbergasted that North Carolina and Duke have had plenty of opportunities to become juggernauts beyond the ACC, and haven’t closed the deal (the Tar Heels’ NCAA title was in 1994). Ditto for Rutgers, which may become best known for how it weathered the Don Imus flap.

I’m still flabbergasted that in this 10-year period under review here, LSU went to five Final Fours in a row, and never won a game. And that Duke has gone to four Final Fours without winning a title.

If you look at how widely this fall’s incoming talent is being dispersed, you’ve got to believe that this two-note tango can’t play on forever. While UConn and Tennessee aren’t going anywhere, there’s plenty of room at the top, if any of the following questions, among others, can be answered in the affirmative:

– Can Baylor, which had the best recruiting class of anyone, get back to where it was in winning the 2005 NCAA title? And stay there?

– Can Cal, which also has a great class following the most successful stretch in program history, do more than give Stanford a challenge in the Pac 10?

– Can UNC, with another outstanding group arriving in Chapel Hill, do better than pile up amazing talent that underachieves in March?

– Can Notre Dame, which welcomes Skylar Diggins, return to the heights that her idol and role model, Niele Ivey, scaled in leading the Irish to the 2001 national title?

– Can Ohio State, with Jantel Lavender, Samantha Prahalis and now Tayler Hill, get Jim Foster back to the Final Four for the first time since 1993?

If the answer is “yes” — and not just for a year or two but for the long haul — then perhaps we can put to rest the question that’s constantly asked but that isn’t the right question to ask.

It’s not about how UConn and Tennessee roll, but how – and even if – any others can really roll with them.

. . . is being placed in the context of its precarious economic situation as it begins its 13th season.

Will 13 prove to be unlucky for the WNBA?

Perhaps, but news that once might have been viewed as evidence of the league expanding its business footprint in a mainly positive vein is now seen as a possible sign of impending doom.

On Monday the Sports Business Journal reported that the WNBA is looking to sell ad space on team uniforms.

Added to the heap of other developments in the league — such as Los Angeles Sparks coach Michael Cooper being contacted by USC about its vacant women’s head coaching position — this continues an unsettling pattern of events.

Getting some new corporate sponsorships on board — in the form of ads on uniforms — would add some money to WNBA coffers. And although this wouldn’t solve all of what ails the league, it would send something of an upbeat signal.

Will increased attendance this season really make that much of a difference? Certainly David Stern would take note of a such a development. But this matter isn’t as simple as getting more fannies in seats.

The fate of the WNBA ultimately rests with what will happen with its benefactors, the NBA. The impending economic future of that league isn’t all that rosy.

Niche leagues like Major League Soccer appear poised to weather the economic storm better because of scaled-down business models. The WNBA is a niche sport with a reasonably-priced business model, with estimated operating costs per franchise per season of around $2 million.

But it’s also tied to the NBA, whose business model, like that of the NFL and Major League Baseball, is under severe strain. The NBA will borrow nearly $200 million to assist nearly half of its teams in paying for operating expenses. The future of the Indiana Pacers and Sacramento Kings — which also run WNBA franchises — is among the concerns for the NBA.

But the larger concern comes two years from now, in 2011, when NBA’s labor agreement comes up for renewal. Super agent David Falk is already predicting doom. Beyond his interest in the financial prospects for player contracts, he believes that that the very business model of the NBA simply cannot sustain itself.

If that’s the case, then the WNBA could very well be seen by enough owners as a subsidized luxury that has had a nice run, but is no longer affordable.

That would be a short-sighted plea, of course, but it’s one that surfaced several years ago during some contentious WNBA labor talks that had the league skating on thinner ice than has been publicly acknowledged.

Stern was able then to convince enough NBA owners to stick with the WNBA, and the league expanded its ownership model to allow non-NBA management of teams. It’s been a positive step for the WNBA, one that until now has been seen as ensuring some longer-term prosperity.

I’m not sure whom I envy the least in the emotional saga of replacing Kay Yow at N.C. State:

– New head coach Kellie Harper, the gritty former Tennessee point guard Pat Summitt called the “toughest girl” ever to have played for her?

– Wolfpack athletics director Lee Fowler, who wanted to hire someone with proven head coaching experience but had to contend with Yow’s wishes that her longtime assistant, Stephanie Glance — who didn’t meet that standard — succeed her?

– Glance, who did an admirable job several times in recent years leading the program as Yow’s health deterioriated and who clearly wanted the job in her own right?

– The N.C. State players, who’ve been absolutely gutted this season in losing their beloved coach and wondering what will come next?

There’s plenty of disenchantment from those who believe Fowler should have honored Yow’s request, first expressed two years ago. Did she hang on and hold out for that to happen? We may never know.

Trying to move beyond this gut-wrenching backstage drama was going to be dicey with a program on a steady decline since N.C. State’s only Final Four appearance in 1998. (Ironically, that was the same Final Four, in Kansas City, where Harper led the Lady Vols to a perfect 39-0 season and a national title.)

Fowler, who said virtually nothing during the hiring process, tried to address the delicate nature of his task after a Thursday news conference to introduce Harper in Raleigh — on Kay Yow Court at Reynolds Coliseum. He said he made it clear to Yow and Glance two years ago that he would prefer a head coach.

According to Fowler, Glance interviewed to become the head coach at Charlotte around that same time, but that school wanted a clause put in her contract preventing her from leaving directly for N.C. State. (Glance has refrained from commenting at all on the entire episode, and issued only a written statement in response to the final outcome.)

So Glance appeared to have been stuck, trying to get the head coaching experience that Fowler required but unable to use it for the purpose she had in mind.

This only complicated the inevitable events at N.C. State.

So did a women’s basketball community that didn’t make a concerted rush to apply for the job, out of respect for Yow’s backing of Glance. Fowler said a 14-member search committee forwarded to him the names of 20 candidates, and he interviewed six of them. He said he was quite impressed with Harper, the Western Carolina coach for the last five years, during a three-hour interview, and a glowing recommendation from Summitt didn’t hurt either.

He also addressed the issue that figures to rankle Yow and Glance supporters for years:

“I’d love for David Horning [N.C. State's longtime senior associate AD] to replace me when I leave here but I’m not sure you’ll get that because I ask for that…it’s always a feeling. Kellie would probably like to name her replacement at Western, but the people that are there and trying to move the program ahead…I think you’ve got to do what’s best for the program. I think Kellie is the best fit, and the best to move ahead with the program.”

“We really tried to keep it on who would be the best coach to move us forward.”

Was Harper, who turns 32 in May, the best of what might have been a limited pool of candidates? Only her results on the court in coming years will tell. She signed a five-year deal with the same $247,000 base salary as Yow and N.C. State men’s head coach Sidney Lowe. That’s a sum that’s in the middle of the pack among ACC head coaches.

It’s been 30 years since N.C. State has had to make a coaching change, and obviously the game is so much different now. Fowler’s point about wanting a head coach is understandable, but two ACC programs that have climbed out of mediocrity and surpassed N.C. State in recent years — Florida State and Georgia Tech — are doing so with Sue Semrau and MaChelle Joseph, respectively, both of whom had never been head coaches before. Neither had Sylvia Crawley, the former North Carolina standout and assistant who just finished her first season at Boston College.

As for current ACC coaches with previous head coaching stints, neither Cristy McKinney at Clemson, Katie Meier at Miami nor Beth Dunkenberger at Virginia Tech (Harper’s predecessor at Western Carolina) have been able to lift those programs out of the bottom of the league.

But the greater question about Harper is recruiting. Can she make the jump to competing for, and signing, players in one of the most athletic and talented conferences in the country? Harper is likely to add her husband, Jon Harper, her assistant at Western Carolina, to her staff at N.C. State. How she fills out that staff — which had been populated with former Yow players — will be the key.

Former Wolfpack point guard Debbie Antonelli, who’s now a leading women’s TV analyst for Fox Sports Net and ESPN, is among those incensed with what came down, and how. On her “Shootaround with Beth and Debbie” podcast released Monday on the WBCA Web site, Antonelli said she was the only basketball person named to the search committee, and she let it be known that she felt Glance wasn’t given a fair chance to compete for the job.

A few snippets from what Antonelli said would be her only public comments on the matter:

“I’m not happy. I’m very disappointed in my university. . . . Stephanie was in my opinion the right fit right now for what those kids needed.

“This is no reflection on what Kellie Jolly [Harper's maiden name] is capable of doing.

“Two weeks, three weeks, a month from now, I’m not going to hold that against Kellie. . . . But honestly, I don’t think Joanne McCallie, Brenda Frese, Sylvia Hatchell, Debbie Ryan are shaking in their boots this morning. I don’t think they’re thinking, ‘Wow, that’s a scary hire.’ “

The Wolfpack’s lone senior last season on a 13-17 team was leading scorer Shayla Fields, and there is some decent returning talent to help get the new coaching regime started. Harper’s second gargantuan challenge is to help comfort and lift up a group of players who handled themselves well in playing through the devastation of Yow’s death. Glance did an amazing job keeping them together while tending to Yow in her dying days. She was the essence of grace and dignity and loyalty, and those are rare qualities in the present college sports landscape.

As a player, Harper was someone I enjoyed watching as much as anyone. While Chamique Holdsclaw rightly earned the headlines as the Lady Vols won NCAA titles in 1996, 1997 and 1998, Harper, was heart and soul of those teams. She was never flashy, didn’t always look to score, but personified leadership, confidence and the absolute will to win. In other words, she was Summitt on the floor more than most players who ever played for Summitt. And that’s saying something.

Harper will need all of those qualities and more in Raleigh. None of what transpired before her arrival was easy, and neither will what’s to come as she tries to follow a legend.

Chris Mennig has posted previously on the Division I legislative meeting at the Women’s Basketball Coaches Association convention last week in St. Louis, even injecting some smiley faces into his post. Nice touch.

I caught some of the “action” from the back of a packed ballroom of coaches who weren’t finding much to smile about. This was a grinding, day-long event (broken up by luncheons and other events) and expertly handled by legislative chair Muffet McGraw, who’s got some serious parliamentarian chops to stand up for hours as she did, and plod through a mind-numbing lineup of proposed changes.

My aim in sitting in on the discussion was to make sense of the proposals I had been reading over in advance. There was quite a bit of brisk debate on a number of topics, especially the Pandora’s box of allowing for structured workouts and practices for players attending summer school.

Minnesota associate head coach Barb Smith sparked some applause when she went to microphone and poured out a sentiment plenty of her colleagues share:

“These kids have absolutely no life, and neither do we. It’s just too much. We all need some down time. Let the kids be kids. Let’s have some fun in basketball.”

There were a number of summer-related proposals, including one by the Big Ten to allow four hours of skill instruction and up to four players in the gym in the summer, as is done now in the spring. In fact, this was one of five summer-related proposals coming from across the conference spectrum. The Big East and Mountain West have put forth another limited summer skill session period; the WAC wants all returning players in summer school to be available, including freshmen; the Northeast Conference wants limited summer time just with freshmen; and the Atlantic Sun wants to allow for individual instruction for summer school attendees but didn’t offer specific limits on hours.

As I was taking all this in, I wondered if there isn’t a better way to streamline these matters and try to unify the concerns that coaches and their respective conferences have. This is one organization, one division, right? Surely coaches across the Division I spectrum can relate to Smith’s exasperation about the relentless grind of the recruiting trail they live on year-round.

Then I realized that was a terribly naïve notion. This is like herding cats; there are so many competing agendas, depending on the size and influence of a coach’s conference and the recruiting advantages and disadvantages that come with it. These proposals are meant to increase advantages particular to the conference suggesting them, usually at the behest of the coaches.

I pulled out just one topic to illustrate what I found to be a withering process. And this is just the first in a long series of steps toward actual legislative action that would bring any of these proposals into force. The Division I coaches forwarded seven of the 12 proposals they voted on to NCAA’s Women’s Basketball Issues Committee, which serves an advisory role to the NCAA Legislative Council that turns proposals into bylaws.

Please bear with me if I’m going over material that’s old hat. I found this process fascinating, if not a little bewildering, as I dig down deep into the very important minutae of how coaches handle the most important aspects of their jobs — how, how often and when they can recruit and develop players. As this reality sunk in, I had a greater appreciation for why nearly every seat in that ballroom was filled, why the coaches were incredibly attentive and why the emotions can run high, as Barb Smith showed.

To my non-coaching, journalistic mindset, this is a very new experience. But for coaches and those whose livelihoods depend on whether the proposals reach that magical 70 percent threshold to move on, this is absolutely vital.

My impressions were confirmed later by a coach at a mid-major program who is just glad that there’s a way for people like her to have their voices heard at the grassroots level. She and her staff are flooding the recruiting trails this weekend in search of some more players to sign in the spring, and they favor a more generous evaluation time this time of year. Her school was one of many that has switched conferences in recent years, and the talent upgrade her program in this new league has been substantial.

For coaches in the BCS leagues, the spring is essentially a babysitting period for those players they locked up in the fall. They scarf up the best of the best, those recruits listed at the top of scouting service rankings. The rest are left up to mid-major and small conference programs that routinely scavenge in the spring like the homeless roaming alleys in big cities, opening up one trash can lid after another for anything edible. So you can see the differing agendas at work in just one aspect of their jobs.

It was instructive for me to hear this perspective as I will be soaking up many more in the coming weeks and months. My education into the arcane world of legislation affecting coaches, and the game they labor in, has just begun.

That the WBCA had one of its top executives, chief operating officer Shannon Reynolds, and the NCAA had academic and membership affairs director Lynn Holtzman available to answer and explain attested to the importance of what goes on at this stage of the process. It’s probably the most important one of all.

Observing the slowly turning sausage grinder, even from a distance, isn’t terribly pleasant. But to understand these innerworkings of the coaching profession and the legislative decisions that affect it was absolutely indispensable.

ST. LOUIS — A very prominent person in women’s basketball — not a coach — asked me a question quite a few years ago that still astonishes me today:

“Do you like women’s basketball?”

It’s not unusual for journalists who write critical pieces about a sport, or a team, or an individual to have that accusation lodged against them. It comes with the territory, and the best policy is to treat such a question as a rhetorical one.

And I’ve grown used to people in women’s basketball expecting me to “promote” the sport with what I write. That’s understandable in a small sport battling for exposure and viability in a media landscape that’s always going to be skewed in favor of more popular fare.

But what unnerved me the most about that question is the insinuation that anything even remotely critical is meant to be personal, against the sport and the individuals who labor within it. Especially those who are the acknowledged pioneers and role models, the venerable figures who have awards named after them. There’s a royalty that must be paid unyielding fealty, and their intentions, methods, actions and words must never be questioned.

I met another writer a number of years ago (and who no longer covers the sport) who said upon our introduction that he had liked my work in Basketball Times: “I think I love you. But do you have any friends?”

I’ve never thought of myself as carrying the only barbed pen among the smallish media tribe that has covered the women’s game over the years. In fact, I camped out at a pleasant Irish pub last night with another such soul, watching the North Carolina-Michigan State game. We hadn’t seen one another for several years, and spent a lot of time catching up. Both of us have covered much more than women’s basketball, and it’s within that context that we compared one another’s impressions of how the game is covered now and what it can expect given the decline in the newspaper industry.

I left my newspaper job last fall, and my friend is looking at covering this Women’s Final Four as gravy, as a last hurrah. That ought to make anyone who’s invested in the women’s game very concerned. Including that person who questioned my “loyalty” to the sport.

The press contingent here in St. Louis is as small as I can recall, going back to my inital years covering this event in the early 1990s. The writers covering UConn have inflated that number by about a dozen or so. And only a handful of newspapers have people here — the New York Times, Washington Post, Boston Globe, New York Daily News.

Who’s not here? Just about everybody else who doesn’t have a local team playing this weekend. Los Angeles Times — absent. Chicago Tribune — no-show. My former paper in Atlanta, Chicago Sun-Times, Kansas City Star, Baltimore Sun, etc., etc.

At Tuesday’s WBCA Awards Luncheon, Mel Greenberg got off one of his classic nyuk-nyuk lines before giving out the trophy of the organization’s media honor bearing his name to retired Associated Press reporter Chuck Schoffner:

“The reason they asked me to give this presentation was to let people see what a newspaper writer looks like.”

My point here isn’t to lament the dearth of reporters as much as what the game is missing by not having them here. There aren’t that many writers who have followed the internal workings of the game, and there are even fewer still who will take a critical look at the game beyond the headlines.

Coaches and others who want us to write cheerleading prose might be relieved to know that. But they shouldn’t be. When Courtney Paris was asked not once, but twice, about paying back her scholarship in the moments after Oklahoma’s crushing loss to Louisville on Sunday, it might have been regarded as cruel and unfair.

I hated to see Paris’ gut-wrenching, painful reaction myself. I felt the same way when I watched Marissa Coleman weeping uncontrollably after Louisville beat the Terps to get to the Final Four. It’s hard to watch young players who give everything they have fall short like that. It’s hard not to admire their passion and dedication.

But to treat these players, coaches and others in women’s basketball with kid gloves is to regard the sport as little-girlish and not very grown up. My friend and I and other reporters there have covered men’s college and pro sports. We don’t have to confront this issue anywhere else. If it were Blake Griffin who had made such a guarantee, the press wouldn’t have backed away. Just because it was Courtney Paris and she’s intelligent and articulate and gracious and generous doesn’t mean she should be spared just because she was crying. She created quite a bit of public interest with her pledge. It’s a matter of covering the story to its conclusion.

And that doesn’t mean that those of us who ask such questions hate the sport. To finally answer the question posed to me many years ago, it’s “Yes.” I do like the sport. If I disliked the sport I wouldn’t have spent a couple hours at the Division I business meeting at the WBCA convention Monday, listening to proposed changes to the recruiting calendar, open gyms, regular season schedule and other arcane matters that don’t merit coverage in the mainstream media.

But judging from the packed ballroom of coaches, I understand how important these issues are to the future of the game. This is the lifeblood not only of the coaching profession, but of the sport.

If I disliked the sport, I wouldn’t have spent the time I have examining the long-term prospects of the ESPN contract to cover the NCAA Tournament, or talking to people like NCAA women’s vice president Sue Donohoe about bracketing, seeding and other related matters. I wouldn’t be boning up on what’s before the NCAA’s women’s basketball issues committee — a lot. I wouldn’t be keeping tabs on the dreary doings of the Sisterhood, which must be forlorn that two male coaches are meeting with a national championship on the line for only the second time.

I’m not trying to sound self-serving by saying all this. I want to be here ferreting out these details, piecing together a better sense of where the sport is and where it’s headed. Not in the service of turning in a scandalous exposé, but to get a deeper understanding of what’s happening in the game and report on it.

And that is all.

ST. LOUIS – Saturday’s WBCA High School All-American game was billed as the renewal of the Kelsey Bone vs. Brittney Griner rivalry, their last before heading off to college. But as she did earlier this week at the McDonald’s game in Miami, Skylar Diggins was the player who made the greatest impression.

At least to this set of eyes that isn’t regularly focused on the grassroots game. A number of years ago I made occasional visits to the summer Nike and WBCA camps, when they were in Indianapolis and Chattanooga, respectively, as well as some Blue Star and U.S. Junior National events and the Georgia AAU tourneys near my home. It was a great way to see players who would soon star on the college stage and glean insights from coaches on recruiting.

On Saturday I felt like I was stepping back in time as I walked into a small and raucous gym at Washington University that was filled with fans and coaches. Like the summer circuit, big-name coaches were conspicuously seated on the front row opposite the benches: South Carolina’s Dawn Staley, who just got a verbal commitment from Bone this week and Sharon Versyp of Purdue, who had a signee in the game, Sam Ostarello of Fort Pierre, S.D.

So did Tennessee’s Pat Summitt, who was watching Taber Spani of Lee’s Summit, Mo., a shooting guard, and who was surrounded by young autograph seekers at halftime.

Diggins, who’s headed to Notre Dame, was the white team MVP with 24 points, 5 assists and 5 steals and Baylor-bound Griner (20 points, 9 rebounds and 8 blocked shots) earned the same honors for the blue team, which held on for a 79-77 win.

The battle between the two big Texas posts was rather heated at times, as Griner absolutely shut down Bone. Several times Bone went up in the paint for a shot, only to have it blocked. On another trip down the floor, Bone tried going around Griner, but was called for traveling.

Diggins kept the white team close in the final minutes with some rather courageous drives into the line, tossing up high shots off the glass over Griner that went in.

“There was no other option — get it up, or get it blocked,” Diggins said.

Bone and Griner hauled down between them most of the national player of the year awards, but Diggins to me showed tremendous maturity and poise both on the floor and later after the game, when I talked to her about her play and her future with the Fighting Irish. She might be able to contribute sooner at the college level than the other two because of that, but that might very well be a fleeting impression on my part.

“This is what the caliber of college ball is going to be like,” Diggins said. “You’ve really got to focus on the little things, and try to do them well, because they really come out in games like this.”

Diggins, who hails from Washington High in South Bend, said she enjoyed the recruiting process, but found it very difficult to tell her other finalists (Penn State and Stanford) that she was staying in her hometown to play for Notre Dame.

“It’s like dumping a boyfriend,” she said. “It was hard at first, but after I made the decision I haven’t had any regrets. I’m going to be playing in the best league in the country and playing close to family and friends.”

Griner got close enough to the basket a few times as she flirted with the idea of getting a dunk, but couldn’t get the couple of steps needed pull it off.

That’s about the only thing the crowd didn’t get to see.

• A few other impressions:

Griner is a pleasant, articulate young woman to talk to, and seems comfortable in that imposing 6-foot-8 body of hers that’s impossible to ignore. She puts her weight at around 205 pounds, and says the Baylor coaches want her to gain more more muscle, if not necessarily more pounds. She’s also acutely aware of the attention that’s going to increase as she heads for college.

“I don’t let it get to my head,” she said. “My teammates here, they get a kick out of it.”

• Bone said the final discussions with her mother over her college choice went on for a week before she picked South Carolina. Her mother preferred Texas A & M, but Bone said she wanted to chart a different course.

“I’ve always talked about being different and creating a different path for myself,” said Bone, who was elated that Staley was there to watch her, front and center. “That was really important. I just know the SEC is going to be phenomenal. There is no off-night.”

• In the few years since I’ve really watched the elite prep and AAU players go after one another, I’m simply astounded not only at the athleticism, but the polish of these players as they head for the college game.

When I watched Candace Parker, Alexis Hornbuckle, Tasha Humphrey and Sylvia Fowles tear up the Nike camp as sophomores, I thought that was pretty special. Indeed, that might be one of the best high school classes ever, and they proved it in colleges and are doing the same thing at the professional level.

But what I’m seeing now is a tremendous combination of skill, athletic ability and seasoning across the board, with so many colleges tapping into a talent pool of players who play ball year-round.

Later today I’m taking a flight to St. Louis for the Women’s Final Four, which for quite a number of years has been the biggest event in women’s team sports.

It’s also an event that I haven’t attended in the last five years for professional reasons. After my sportswriting career at my paper came to an end with the 2004 Women’s Final Four, I became a Web editor and producer until I took a buyout last fall.

After 25 years in newspapers, I was taken aback by the time and opportunity to set the course for my new career. It has been fun but a little daunting, too. After having stories and deadlines dictated to me by editors for so many years, calling my own shots didn’t come naturally.

But the newspaper world I first joined in the early 1980s has virtually vanished, and in such a short period of time the bottom simply dropped out of the business model. In the time I spent doing Web work, the nature of the profession transformed so dramatically that we may not know for many years what it’s going to look like.

What I’m most curious to see when I get to the Final Four is how the sport of women’s basketball has changed in my time away. I’ve done a little freelancing here and there for the last five years but haven’t been deeply involved like I will be in the coming days.

Certainly the atmosphere will be different given the economy. I would expect some schools might not send coaches, or not everyone on their staff, or will cut the duration of those trips. Already the WNBA has decided to stay close to its New York headquarters and will not be having its draft in the Final Four city, as has been done in recent years. There’s some concern about the long-term viability of the league after the demise of the Houston Comets, a reduction in roster sizes and financial problems for the NBA, which is borrowing $175 million to help nearly half its teams pay operational expenses.

And also gone, apparently for good, are some of the parties at the Final Four, at least those open to large numbers of coaches, media and other people in town for basketball. The WNBA used to have a party and there was a party thrown by the NCAA host committee on Saturday nights, with big-screen TVs showing the men’s Final Four and plenty of food and drink at open bars. (Say “cash bar” to a journalist and you’re speaking a foreign tongue.) The luncheons and dinners and a continental breakfast or two are still going strong.

So now that I’ve brought my dancing shoes back to the Final Four, where are the parties? I say that in jest, partly because I don’t dance, having a pair of left feet. The early 20th century anarchist Emma Goldman was famous for saying: “If I can’t dance, I don’t want to be part of your revolution.”

Hey, I’m not looking to incite any rioting, and I don’t want to be deported from the game. Especially when I’m just getting back into it!

But I do digress. This is a sobering time to assess where the sport is and where it’s headed. Mixing pleasure with business is on everyone’s agenda, but in my work on this blog I’m tackling some measures that are on the minds of coaches and administrators.

For example, looking over this year’s proposals to the spring and summer recruiting calendar, which number to 12 pages, they reflect the different desires and needs of coaches in their conferences. I want to ask coaches at all levels what they think will be best for them, and I expect to hear a variety of answers.

The truth is that the recruiting calendar, no matter how it’s scheduled, favors the coaches and leagues with the most resources. If the sport is going to grow, the opportunities for evaluation and canvassing of players have to be more balanced. Some people at the BCS level might say that it depends on how deep the talent level is, and there’s some truth to that. But setting a schedule that severely limits open periods, or makes travel too expensive or jagged, helps only those who have built-in advantages.

Another topic I plan to bring up with coaches and others is the new Youth Basketball Initiative, which the NCAA and NBA are proposing to elbow their way into the grassroots basketball scene. What is this really about, and how effective can it be toward correcting what its originators see as the problem? If the problem is largely on the men’s side with the involvement of agents as recruiting intermediaries (which forms the basis of the allegations against the UConn men’s program), then will this impose an unnecessary hindrance on girls’ summer basketball? What are the grassroots issues unique to the girls game that college coaches see?

The lack of major coaching openings is another story I want to pursue. I blogged about it earlier this week, but now the Southern Illinois job is open and there might be some other opportunities for coaches. How will this stagnation affect the coaching carousel? It appears to be creaking along right now, and it may do so for another year or two given the economy.

I’m also going to Saturday’s WBCA High School All-American game, where Brittney Griner will be making an appearance after her heavily publicized no-show at the McDonald’s game this week. I’ll be curious to see what the hype is all about, and whether or not reporters will be able to get easy access. Her family has hired a former journalist to act as a go-between. Wonder if this person will be like Tiger Woods’ agent, whom golf writers caustically dubbed “Dr. No” because he routinely turned down interview requests. This might be one of the last opportunities to get some time with Griner before she enrolls at Baylor and is under the control of that institution and Kim Mulkey.

The Final Four games themselves offer plenty of intrigue and storylines and ought to be good ones. Angel McCoughtry’s on the biggest stage in the sport after elevating Louisville into the national spotlight. So is Courtney Paris at Oklahoma. Jayne Appel has become a star in her own right as Stanford returns for a second straight year without Candice Wiggins or JJ Hones.

And UConn rolls in at 37-0, seeking a third undefeated national championship. Is this Maya Moore’s time to stamp herself as the biggest star in the sport after last year’s Final Four disappointment?

My approach in all of this is to take advantage of the experience and the contacts I have in the game to go deeper and get beyond the headlines and not fall for the fluff and the expectation of covering the women’s game in a “nice” way. I love the game but also think it needs more serious-minded journalism that examines how big of a business it has become.

My friend Dan Wetzel, who was an editor of mine at Basketball Times and who broke the UConn men’s recruiting story, explained his methods in an interview this week that sums up what I’ve always tried to do in covering women’s basketball:

“My opinion on a sports subject is as strong as my reporting. I think anyone can sit back and watch a game and have an opinion, if it’s just based on instant reaction.  Why is my observation worth more than somebody else’s? It’s easy to do, but what’s the point?

“My thing is using the access that I have reporting, doing investigative reporting, talking to people in person, and trying to find something that strengthens my opinion. Sports bloggers can do that, and some of them do. I find those ones the best.”

The unemployment reverberations that are touching nearly every sector of the American economy aren’t affecting the women’s college coaching world in quite the same way.

While the men’s scene was sizzling today with the news that John Calipari might succeed Billy Gillispie at Kentucky, there’s no such equivalent on the women’s side, at least yet, that could trigger a chain reaction of moves across many leagues and levels of Division I.

I don’t say this to sound that I’m wishing for something like this to happen, because I don’t want anyone to lose their job. But for the last few years the women have headed to Final Four Week abuzz with possibilities, and some very good ones. When they get to St. Louis by the end of the week, the WBCA job board might be as slim as it’s been in quite a few years.

This year there aren’t that many head coaching jobs on the Division I level that have come open at all. Only two are in BCS conferences, and they both are in unusual circumstances. Oregon opened and closed swiftly with the hiring of Paul Westhead last week. N.C. State has led a very stealth campaign to name a successor to the late Kay Yow. Although many have called for interim coach Stephanie Glance to get the job, university officials reportedly are weighing several options.

As of this writing, only Rhode Island, Loyola-Chicago, Penn, Long Beach State, Arkansas-Pine Bluff, Manhattan and Southern Utah are looking for head coaches. None of those have ever been household names except for Long Beach which faded out of the spotlight quickly after two Final Four trips in the late 1980s.

Part of the reason for this dearth of openings is that there has been quite a bit of turnover in the BCS conferences in the last three years, making a slower period of hirings inevitable. Of the 73 schools in the ACC, Big East, Big 10, Big 12, Pac 10 and SEC, a total of 26, or roughly one-third of those schools, will have had new coaches since the start of the 2006-07 season.

Both the Big 10 and SEC have had more than half their schools experience turnover during that period, with seven new coaches coming on board in each league. Half of all Pac 10 schools have been affected, including the hiring of Westhead at Oregon.

Many of these moves were performance-related, of course, as athletics directors are much more willing these days to replace coaches who weren’t winning enough or showing progress toward becoming more competitive. Some legendary coaches retired, such as Jody Conradt, Marsha Sharp and Theresa Grentz. Another one, Van Chancellor, moved back into the college ranks at LSU after a Hall of Fame WNBA career. Other established coaches who have left the sidelines are Rene Portland, Cathy Inglese, Carolyn Peck, Carol Ross, Cheryl Burnett and Joan Bonvicini.

A number of those openings didn’t occur until the contracts of some endangered coaches were due to expire. Even before the economy soured, ADs weren’t as willing to tender buyout sums to women’s coaches that are routine in the men’s game.

Combine that with some steady situations at a number of the most-committed programs in the country, and it makes for some rather slim pickings for job hunting.

I was still thinking about the rationale behind Oregon athletics director Pat Kilkenny’s hiring of Paul Westhead to be the new women’s basketball coach when a female friend nominally interested in the sport’s gender divide called this morning to ask me about it.

Earlier this week we met at an Atlanta sports bar to watch some of the second round games. She doesn’t have cable and wanted to see Georgia Tech’s game with Oklahoma.

As that game turned into a rout, ESPN switched to the LSU-Louisville game, featuring Van Chancellor against Jeff Walz.

My friend has been to the Women’s Final Four the last several years and is familiar with some of the veteran male coaches, like Chancellor, Geno Auriemma, Jim Foster, Gary Blair and Andy Landers.

But she’s also of a certain age (over 50) and has experienced firsthand the struggles of many women of her generation in a male-dominated corporate environment. So her perspective on seeing a certain number of men coaching in the women’s game was instructive to me given my views on the subject.

Isn’t it an ideal thing for women to be coaching women, since there aren’t any women coaching in the men’s game? This was her general question, put a bit more broadly than that, and it wasn’t accusatory but inquisitory. I cited as one example that Walz, even though a young man, has been around the women’s game for many years, from the time his younger sister Jaime was a Kentucky high school phenom. Walz also played a big role in Maryland’s national title run in 2006 before succeeding Tom Collen at Louisville.

For all the success that young men like Walz and Xavier’s Kevin McGuff and others are enjoying in the sport, they’re still part of a vast minority and always will be. I pointed out to my friend that the likes of Georgia Tech coach MaChelle Joseph are commonplace these days. Their backgrounds, first as players in the first wave of the Title IX era, then as they entered the coaching ranks at the dawn of the media age, transcend the generational gap that resulted in so much gender friction in the past decade.

To tie together my argument I offered up what I thought was a flippant, throwaway line that there’s more coaching diversity in the women’s game than the men’s for reasons not limited just to gender or race.

How that comment resonated in my mind even more when I saw that Westhead, age 70, was headed to Eugene. His only other experience with coaching women was with the Phoenix Mercury, which he led to the WNBA title a couple years ago, before returning to the NBA. But it left a lasting impression with him:

“I found out from them more so than most teams I’ve coached that, once you get them going, the women play a terrific game. It’s enjoyable to play, it’s enjoyable to coach. Without that experience, I don’t think I’d be here today. I didn’t know the women’s game, but now I do. . . .

“If there’s a singular reason why I’m here now, it’s because of that experience.”

Even Kilkenny, who’s soon stepping down in favor of former Oregon football coach Mike Bellotti, was reveling in what seems at least on the surface an unorthodox hire.

Obviously the recruiting component will be new for Westhead and he may be only an interim figure with the Ducks — he said he plans to fulfill the entire five-year deal he signed worth an estimated $3 million. But even if that’s as long as he’s around, so what? Especially if he grooms a successor who carries forward his laissez-faire style of play.

If someone who’s spent so much time in the sport wants to try his hand at something new, then the women’s college game ought to embrace it. As I’ve said many times before, the sport needs all the good coaches it can get, regardless of gender, age or background. Although this admission from Kilkenny might rankle a few who thought he could have taken longer than 10 days from his firing of Bev Smith to come up with a replacement:

“We went for the best coach. I don’t have this great Rolodex of names that I can draw to, and that’s a disadvantage to our department. A lot of athletic directors have great networks, and I don’t.”

This is a sport that is still developing, still evolving and needs some more innovative, creative, freethinking coaches. Westhead has been all of that in the pros and on the men’s college side. Watching Oregon play ought to be a real treat once he brings in some talent and gets his run-and-gun style going.

I’d rather watch the Ducks fumbling around for a couple years rebuilding their program than see Rutgers grinding down foes and winning by scoring in the 50s. When Vivian Stringer, for all of her good work during a magnificent career, complains that her school isn’t properly marketing her program, it’s time to take a deep breath. Who wants to watch that product? Better yet, how do you market that?

The Knights are coming off an 82-point effort against Auburn as Stringer seems a little more relaxed about turning over the scoring reins to Epiphanny Prince and company. With any luck that’s start of a trend and not just an anomaly in Piscataway, and beyond this season.

And so is what I hope Westhead will bring to the women’s game. His first words to his new team: “Bring your running shoes.”

That’s what I’m talking ’bout.