College recruiting story
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<by Steve Lopez
You're 17 years old, and they follow you everywhere. Chattanooga, Las
Vegas, Indianapolis, Washington, D.C. Look at them. One hundred, 200,
as many as 250 college basketball coaches and their assistants show up
in each city and study your every move on the summer trail of AAU
tournaments and all-star camps. They sit in bleachers like birds on
telephone wires, whispering comments into one another's ears, making
discreet entries on clipboards and imagining you wearing their
uniforms. Tennessee. UConn. Stanford. Notre Dame. North Carolina.
UCLA. They're all here, along with colleges you've never heard of.
You're 17 years old, your senior year of high school hasn't even
begun, and virtually every college in America would kill to have you.
There's no break at home. If anything, it's more intense there,
because the coaches know your address and phone number, along with the
names of your pets, the lipstick your big sister uses, the hobbies
your little sister enjoys in the summer. Anything that might give them
an edge when they call. Watch George Williams answer the phone in the
kitchen of his tidy split-level on the west side of Dayton. "Tamika?"
he calls, holding the receiver 12 inches from his ear and summoning
his daughter in a tone that says, Of course it's some coach.
Call-waiting was invented for this girl.
All George wants to do is eat his breakfast in peace. Is that too much
for a retired General Motors factory worker to ask of the world?
Sometimes he doesn't even get his food to the table before the first
ring. If it isn't the phone, it's the doorbell, another coach's daily
prayer delivered by UPS, Federal Express, the U.S. Postal Service.
Every time a truck pulls up to the house, Pooter, the miniature
schnauzer many of the coaches know by name, goes nuts. "I understand
my daughter's an outstanding basketball player, and I was a jock
myself, but this is ridiculous," George proclaims. He is proud, for
sure, but hungry, too. "Can I have just one uninterrupted meal?"
George's problem, which isn't really a problem, is this: His daughter
might be the best female high school basketball player in the country
this season. Ten years ago that was good for a plaque with a crooked
nameplate, a pat on the back from the assistant principal and the
promise of four more years of anonymity at a college that didn't
charge admission to women's games. There was a time when colleges
lured female recruits on academics alone. But those were the Dark
Ages.
Today colleges make pitches to girls based on their conference's
television contracts. They stress the size of their sneaker
sponsorship deals. They list graduates who have gone on to the
Olympics, the WNBA or the ABL. As they recruited the high school class
of '98, the coaches were already looking beyond those girls--way
beyond them. "It's not like you know only who the top seniors are,"
says Tennessee coach Pat Summitt, whose teams have won five NCAA
championships, including the last two, and whose current squad is 17-0
and ranked No. 1 in the nation. "Now you know who the best
eighth-graders are."
"It's a war," says Duke coach Gail Goestenkors, and in war you use
everything you've got. On July 1, when the NCAA allows coaches to make
their first phone calls to girls who have completed their junior year
in high school, coaches pull out all the stops. "It's got to be a hell
of a phone call," Goestenkors says. "You have to have your sales pitch
ready. I hate to call it a sales pitch, but that's what it is."
What this means is that the best schoolgirl athletes have nearly all
the opportunities that their male counterparts have and experience the
same pressures. Tamika Williams, a 6'1" forward, a Parade All-America
as a junior and an honors student who has somehow not let any of this
go to her head, has had coaches all but beg her to keep them on her
list of possible college choices. She isn't alone. It used to be that
only 10 or 20 schools recruited nationally, says Connecticut's Geno
Auriemma, one of the game's most prominent coaches since his 1994-95
team went undefeated, won the national championship and helped turn
one of its star players, Rebecca Lobo, into a wealthy poster girl for
the WNBA, not to mention Reebok. "Now everybody is out there trying to
build a championship team," Auriemma says. But there aren't enough
good players to stock all the schools. "The drop-off in talent between
the 20th-best player and the 50th is huge," he says. So the pressure
to grab one of the elite players is enough to keep coaching staffs
awake at night for months. Enough to keep George Williams, a warm and
engaging man still recovering from the loss of his beloved Cleveland
Browns, from getting a bite of food into his mouth.
Tamika's friend and sometime AAU teammate Krista Gingrich, a
lights-out shooter from Lewistown, Pa., is chased into her dreams each
night by the soft-soled patter of coaches in relentless pursuit. The
5'7" Gingrich, widely regarded as one of the top five point guards in
the nation, took her bouncing ponytail and feathery shot on the summer
circuit for two weeks last July. Two weeks and she returned home to
find 167 pieces of mail. She shoveled it into one of the 10
overflowing boxes that together hold between 2,000 and 3,000 pieces.
"That's just from the last year and a half," says Krista. "I started
getting mail when I was in seventh grade."
But regular mail just doesn't convey the level of urgency the coaches
feel. And how does a coach who uses regular mail look next to one who
sends a more impressive overnight package? Here's how crazy it is:
Dayton UPS deliveryman Ron Atwater made so many visits to the Williams
house, he became a family friend. Now he and his buddies go to
Tamika's games at Chaminade-Julienne High.
You're 17 years old, and they're all after you. At times it is
exhilarating, and you get that tickle of immortality's faint,
weightless tease. These people will pay your tuition if you'll come to
their school and play basketball. "I knew the game was progressing,
and I knew my time would come, but I never dreamed all this," Krista
says.
"I started with a list of 80 schools in December 1996 and began
narrowing it down," says Tamika, a prototype of the new women's
player: big, fast, strong, athletic. Although she led
Chaminade-Julienne to a 24-1 record in '96-97, averaging 22 points and
14 rebounds a game, she has never been a gym rat, and she needs to
work on her ball handling and outside shooting. The rawness of her
game is somehow seen as another plus by coaches; there's no telling
how good she might get under the right direction, and every one of
them, naturally, is the one for the job. "I cut the list to 40 early
last year, then 20 in May, and I had it down to 12 last summer." In
August she had it down to eight, but the list was still changing a
little every day. "Sometimes I'll get a call from one of the coaches
and end up putting a school back on the list."
In her family room, which looks out onto a backyard basketball court,
she names the anointed eight: Notre Dame, Purdue, Connecticut,
Georgia, Rutgers, Virginia, Florida and UCLA. "What about Tennessee?"
asks her mother, Jo, a retired high school teacher who stands just as
tall as Tamika but never played ball. "Yeah, I guess you could put
Tennessee on it," Tamika says, and there you have it, the girl's one
weakness: She cannot say no. Tamika is everybody's friend, selfless to
a fault. Her high school coach, Frank Goldsberry, says he has to harp
to make her stop feeding teammates and just take over the game.
There's still something missing from Tamika's list, but she can't
remember what. "Oh, and Dayton!" she says. She can't leave out Dayton,
which is only a few minutes from her door and is coached by a
confidante, Clemette Haskins (daughter of Minnesota coach Clem
Haskins), with whom Tamika sometimes talks when nothing makes sense.
Now the list is back up to 10 schools. George Williams exhales like a
bear and rolls his eyes across the ceiling.
If Tamika is the prototype of the new woman player, Krista is a
throwback. Her style is more John Stockton than Gary Payton. Nothing
is flashy; everything is solid, controlled. At full bore on a fast
break, Krista executes a behind-the-back dribble so smoothly that you
almost don't see it. She does it in the service of practicality, not
ego. She does it to get the ball where it should be, which is what her
game is about, a game she has refined over the years with a religious
commitment to daily training.
"I realized in sixth or seventh grade that I wanted to try to get a
Division I scholarship and also to try to get a shot at the Olympics,"
says Krista, whose father played safety for Penn State from 1963
through '65. Dick Gingrich, now an attorney with an office across the
street from the Mifflin County courthouse in Lewistown, about a half
hour from State College, was All-East and played in an East-West
Shrine Game. Says Krista, "My father said that he always figured there
might be one guy working even more than he was, so he trained even
harder."
She usually works out two hours a day, six or seven days a week,
year-round, regardless of whatever else is going on in her life. She
might do 30 minutes of pull-up jump shots, 30 minutes of crossover
dribbling, 30 minutes of a speed drill, ping-ponging across the key to
sharpen her lateral movement. Then it's on to the weight room. When
Krista started this routine back in junior high, her father worked
with her each day. Now it's her brother, Aaron, 26, who played point
guard at Dickinson. Once or twice a week Krista plays a pickup game in
which she is the only girl. "The idea of a workout," she says, "is to
work harder than you ever would have to in a game. That way the game
seems easy."
Last season Krista was the toast of the town of nearly 10,000 after
leading Lewistown Area High to a state championship. She averaged 22
points a game, shooting 50% from the field and 88% from the foul line.
Krista was at the top of her class academically going into this school
year and thinks she wants to be an orthopedist one day. Among the
schools waving a stethoscope at her is Stanford, whose coaches became
gotta-have-her interested after trailing Krista on the summer tour.
"She's the smartest player on the court," says Mike Flynn, the
Philadelphia-based AAU coach with whom Krista has worked for seven
years. She has made the three-hour drive from Lewistown so many times
that she can probably tell you how many trees there are along the way.
"But the best thing about the attention she's getting is that she
worked to get her game in this shape. She didn't have the physical
talent some other kids have. This is a kid with great heart."
This is how coaches recruit a top player in girls' basketball these
days: First, they get a scouting report from Flynn or one of the other
guys out there who charge $100 and up for monthly ratings. Second,
they go watch the player and see if she's the one for them. Third,
they do some detective work to find a way inside her mind. Fourth,
they charm and flatter. Fifth, they grovel and beg.
When the Williamses went to Chattanooga last summer for an AAU
tournament, Tamika's 11-year-old sister, Tiffany, went swimming in the
hotel pool. Back home Tiffany had barely unpacked when she got a
letter from Georgia assistant coach Sharon Baldwin. Hi Tiffany, it
began. I hope you had a great time while visiting the South. I know
you enjoyed the swimming in Chattanooga! Hopefully, you can come back
down to Georgia in the fall with Tamika and jump off our high dive!
Take care!
Tamika once received a card from Virginia coach Debbie Ryan, who was
vacationing in Bermuda. At the top of the card was an engraving of an
airplane pulling a sign that said tamika above the beach. Printed on
the card were the words I THINK ABOUT YOU EVERY DAY and, to sign off:
HAVE A NIKE DAY AND COME TO UVA!
Next to that was the word peace, a heart and a swoosh. Penn State
showed a little more creativity, filming a video of members of its
basketball team spelling out Krista's name on the gym floor. Yes,
folks, these are institutions of higher learning. America's finest
universities. But Notre Dame might have them all beat. Knowing that it
was on Krista's list of finalists along with Penn State and Duke,
Notre Dame sent her a card with the middle cut out and told her to
hold it against a mirror and have a look at Notre Dame's next
All-America. Notre Dame outdid itself, though, with a creative-writing
foray: It sent Krista a mock AP press release dated 2002. The release
read in part, Krista Gingrich, who just led Notre Dame to the NCAA
National Championship, will play for the Atlanta Glory of the American
Basketball League. Atlanta, who will pay Gingrich a reported $650,000
a year, said all along that she was their number one choice.
Says Krista, a wise 17, "I think I realized a long time ago that this
is a business."
In girls' basketball, as in boys', summer is the season that matters
most. Nearly all the players in the summer tournaments and camps are
exceptional, and that's where girls go to improve--and to find out if
they have a future in basketball.
From city to city the scene is much the same. On shiny, waxed
hardwood, male AAU coaches implore their girls to execute game plans
scratched out on napkins and hotel-room stationery. In the stands,
representatives from most of the major college basketball programs in
the country are watching. One coach, two, sometimes three from each
school. NCAA rules forbid the coaches to talk to the parents who are
there, but that doesn't mean they can't jockey in as close as possible
to fawn, wink or strut their school colors like peacocks in mating
season. "You'll see the parents of a player in the stands, and then
you'll see a coach from one school on one side of them and a coach
from another school on the other side," says Duke's Goestenkors, who
says she tries not to play that game. Some parents thumb through AAU
brochures with tips on how their daughters can market themselves. One
thing they should do for inspiration, said a brochure available at the
AAU nationals in Chattanooga last summer, is watch Touched by an
Angel.
Reps from the sneaker companies are in the crowd too, because they are
the angels, aren't they? Through a strategy more sophisticated than
any coach's game plan, they have made their brands into religions so
powerful that they can influence life decisions made by girls barely
old enough to drive.
Tamika's mother was out shopping one day and saw a bargain. "If you
bought a pair of shoes, you got a pair of shower shoes at half price,"
Jo recalls. "It seemed like a good deal to me." She didn't notice that
the shower sandals were made by Adidas. But when a Nike rep saw them
at a tournament sponsored by her company, she told Tamika she had
better ditch the sandals. Tamika laughs about that, but she doesn't
laugh when she tells about the time last spring when two tournaments
to which she was invited were held simultaneously. One, sponsored by
Adidas, was in Washington, D.C., and the other, hosted by Nike, was in
Hampton, Va. "I picked Nike," Tamika says, "because it had better
competition and all the college coaches were going to be there. But I
got a call from the manager of my Dayton [AAU] team saying, 'Tamika,
you have to do the Adidas camp. These people sponsor our program.'"
"I don't cry a lot, and I hadn't cried in years," Tamika says, "but I
just cried about that, and I was so angry too." But the one who really
flipped was her 25-year-old sister, Tangy (TAN-gee), who played
basketball on scholarship at Bowling Green and is Tamika's fiercest
protector. "It's great the way the game is growing, but the way some
adults are handling kids really bothers me," says Tangy, who got on
the phone during the Nike-Adidas flare-up and put a shoe to the
backside of some so-called adults, warning them to back off. "I didn't
appreciate the way people tried to pressure Tamika. She's a child, and
you should consult with a parent before putting a child in a spot like
that."
Tamika, true to her spirit, played in both tournaments. When her team
lost in Hampton, the coaches of her other team drove down from
Washington to get her. They picked her up at 3 a.m., and she was on
the court for a 9 a.m. game. But as bitter as she is, even now, about
that episode, the power of the brand is always a consideration. Tamika
was on the phone one day with another player, talking about adding a
new school to her list of finalists. "Girl, you can't go there," the
friend told her. "That's not a Nike school."
This too makes Tangy crazy. "The academics, the athletic program, the
attendance, the media coverage--those are all legitimate concerns,"
she says. "But the shoe thing is a little ridiculous."
It's the two pro leagues that have done this, says Flynn, whose Blue
Star camp is Nike-sponsored. "This is the first graduating high school
class that has to look at the viability of a professional career," he
says, in choosing a college. The higher the school's profile, the
better a girl's chance of getting noticed by the pros. "It adds a
whole new economic consideration to the pressure of a decision," Flynn
says.
When a game ends at the nationals in Chattanooga, the college coaches
rise as one and fall into single file to schmooze with the AAU
coaches, some of whom they have just privately dismissed as blowhards
and wannabe agents. The idea is to try, in 15 or 20 seconds of
ring-kissing, to steer the best players to their universities. "It's
like the reception line at a wedding," says Erika Lang, an assistant
at Southern Cal. What do you do as you're standing there fretting over
all the competition? "You try to listen to what the coach in front of
you is saying," Lang says.
The coaches can't talk directly to the players, so during this strange
postgame ritual they sort of pretend the girls don't exist. It's all a
bit too silly for Tamika, who can't help but smile at and make eye
contact with her pursuers. Krista is more demure. A smile is all the
coaches get out of her before she retreats with her teammates. Flynn,
her AAU coach, answers questions about her future. "They want to know
what she's thinking, where she's leaning, do they still have a chance,
what's their best angle?" he says. What does he tell the coaches? "I
tell them the truth."
"You won't see me in those lines," says Sylvia Hatchell, the coach at
North Carolina. "There are a lot of good AAU coaches, but what I don't
like is AAU coaches trying to be agents." She says the potential is
always there for an AAU coach "to look for advantages for himself.
There's the possibility of favors, opportunities, working certain
camps, being recommended for different things" by a college he
encourages one of his players to attend. Because many AAU teams are
sponsored by shoe companies, a coach might be motivated to steer a
player to a college with the same shoe affiliation as his team. "You
have to work really hard these days to keep your integrity," says
Hatchell.
If that's true, then Connecticut's Auriemma has a question: "What have
we created?" Auriemma got on a plane to leave Chattanooga and pulled a
resume out of his briefcase. "A parent handed me this at the gym," he
said before going on a rant about parents who market their children,
recruiting as a form of begging and the humiliation of having to
hustle AAU coaches, let alone players and parents. The resume Auriemma
showed contained a statistical summary of everything the girl had done
since getting out of diapers. At the top of the first sheet was a
color photo of her. "Look at her," Auriemma asked. "Does she look
happy? Do any of them look happy out there on the court?"
Three weeks later, at the invitational Nike All-American Basketball
Camp for girls, in Indianapolis, Auriemma was still complaining. "I'm
going to make more money from my shoe contract [an undisclosed six
figures] than 75 percent of the [women's] college coaches make in
coaching salary," he said. "Is that fair? It's great for me, but it's
a system in which the rich get richer. We're going down the same road
as the boys and seeing all the same things. Television money. The
pressure to fill a building. The pressure to win." He pauses before
adding one more. "Recruiting violations."
All very disturbing, especially in light of Kansas State's recent
punishment by the NCAA. (Last July the Wildcats women's basketball
program was put on probation for two years for recruiting
violations--including improper payments to recruits--committed under
former coach Brian Agler, now coach of the ABL's Columbus Quest.) But
listening to these coaches is like listening to politicians talk about
campaign contributions. Yeah, they're out of control. Yeah, we've got
to do something about them. Now, where can I get mine?
Late one day at the Nike camp, one coach stood alone at the end of the
gym watching all the tireless girls. Stanford's Tara VanDerveer, coach
of the 1989-90 and '91-92 national champions and the '96
gold-medal-winning U.S. Olympic team, was slump-shouldered with
weariness. "Sometimes I think I've got the best job in America," she
said, "but our priorities are all screwed up. I'm not averse to
recruiting, but there's a certain used-car-salesmanship feel to it.
We're going down a bad road."
O.K., Tamika. What are your three most important factors in choosing a
college? "Academics," she says in identifying her No. 1 priority, and
if you look far enough into her brown eyes, you can see Mom and Dad in
there. Both George and Jo have master's degrees, and Tamika's
28-year-old brother, Mike, who played at Miami of Ohio and a year of
pro ball in Europe before going to work for a communications company,
was a real brain. "Academics," Tamika says for No. 2. As for No. 3?
"Academics."
O.K., another question. There's talk that Tennessee star Chamique
Holdsclaw, a junior, will leave school early to go pro, which might
blow the ceiling off women's basketball salaries. There's also
speculation that women's basketball might soon reach the point where a
player goes straight from high school to the pros. If a pro team were
to offer you a half million dollars to skip college, and a sneaker
company ponied up another half million, would you grab it? "Yes,"
Tamika says, jumping on the question as if trying to beat the buzzer.
"Well, I'd have to think about it, at least." If it's the WNBA, which
plays in the summer, she could still go to college during the school
year, she continues. "I want to go to college. I do want that
experience."
Early in the summer Tamika said she wanted to study sports medicine.
By the end of the summer she'd switched her focus to communications.
Auriemma probably had something to do with it, she admits. He was the
color commentator on ESPN's broadcasts of WNBA games. Plus, UConn is
in the New York media market, which would mean a lot of exposure and
possible connections. "ESPN is based right there, too, in Connecticut.
Maybe Coach could hook me up."
But every other school on her list has something going for it, too. If
Tamika went to Georgia, she'd be near Tangy, who lives 50 miles from
the Athens campus. If she went to Notre Dame, the academics would be
strong. Sorting through all these factors means daily telephone
discussions with friends. Sometimes the girl on the other end of the
line is Krista. "It would be great to go into a program together,"
Krista says, meaning as a threesome: Tamika, Krista and her friend
Lauren St. Clair, a highly recruited forward from Flourtown, Pa. They
played on a U.S. all-star team in Paris last spring and then on
Flynn's Philadelphia Belles, who won a tournament in Washington, D.C.,
in July. There is one school that all three girls have on their lists
of finalists and that wants all of them. Just one problem: Notre Dame
is not a Nike school. It's an Adidas school.
Krista believes the Nike affiliation signifies "a first-rate program"
because of the barrels of money the company pours into its schools.
For example, North Carolina's new $11.1 million contract with Nike
includes $200,000 for an overseas trip for the women's team. Also,
Nike claims that it has 35% of the WNBA players under contract and
that, for 70 out of the league's 80 players, Nike is the shoe of
choice. Nike means connections. It means you're with the elite.
Nevertheless, academics are the biggest consideration for Krista, too.
Her father has some thoughts about that. "You should pick a college
that you'll want to be at for four years even if, on your first day,
you have a knee injury and never play again," Dick Gingrich says. "I
think that Krista's most important contribution will come 10 years
from now, when all of this is behind her. Something outside of
basketball, whatever it might be."
As the mail poured in over the last year, Krista kept a chart to
organize and whittle down her options. Besides academics and shoe
affiliation, she considered other factors: What's the campus like? Is
the team likely to contend for a national title? Is the budget big
enough to maintain a first-class program? How is attendance at games?
Is the school a good stepping-stone to the pros? Am I likely to be an
important part of the team or just a role player?
She knows the last question carries the most uncertainty. "Recruits
always ask me about playing time," Auriemma says. "I say, 'If you're
good, you'll play a lot. If you suck, you won't.'"
There is another consideration, and it's one a lot of girls talk
about, according to Tamika and Krista, both of whom say they are
heterosexual. Some college basketball programs have reputations for
being more comfortable for lesbians, and some coaches use homophobia
as a recruiting tool. But figuring out which programs those are isn't
easy, despite all the supposedly authoritative information that's
exchanged.
"I wanted to go to a straight school, and I asked people about it,"
says Holdsclaw, the best college player in the nation. "But most of
what you hear out there is just people talking, and you can't trust
it. I was told not to go to Tennessee, but then I get down there, and
Pat [Summitt] is married and has a little boy who comes to the games,
and some of the other coaches have boyfriends. I had coaches telling
me, 'Oh, you know about that school, don't you?' What I did was cross
off all the schools whose coaches did that."
Tamika says she's played with lesbians, and it's no big deal. But she
doesn't want people to think that because she plays basketball, she's
homosexual, and she thinks there are schools that feed such a
perception, though she would not name one. Krista, who also professes
no bias against lesbians, nevertheless says, "I would prefer not to go
to one of those schools. My teammates are people I want to hang out
with, and if we have different interests, it might not be the kind of
social experience I want in college."
On one thing everybody agrees. The players don't seem nearly as
concerned about homosexuality as their parents are. "There's hardly a
home visit in which the parents don't directly or indirectly ask me
questions about it," says North Carolina's Hatchell.
Flynn says parents have asked him what he knows, too. "The perception
is that if a coach is gay, it's a bad situation, which is incredibly
false," Flynn says. "I know of some [gay] women coaches who are some
of the best coaches and best people I know. But people try to make a
bigger deal of it than it is."
Tamika would make her own decision in the end, and so would Krista.
There would be no arm-twisting by Mom and Dad. The parents would be
available if called upon, but they had already done their part,
really. They had loved and respected their children, and now it was up
to them.
As the 1997-98 school year drew near, Tamika and Krista appeared to be
narrowing their lists mentally, if not on paper. Krista talked more
and more about Penn State and Notre Dame. She hadn't given up on Duke,
though, and she was flattered by Stanford's interest in her as both a
student and an athlete. But Krista lives 35 minutes from Penn State,
which is like growing up Islamic just down the road from Mecca. "It
would be great to be at Penn State and have all the people who
followed me in high school be able to come to the games," Krista said.
Of course, it could mean more pressure too. "There's so great an
expectation, I wonder if I could ever meet it." There's also the
question of whether college should be a time to move beyond the
comfortable and familiar.
Tamika began crossing schools off her list in September, making
painful calls to coaches with whom she had become friendly. There goes
Virginia. So long, Penn State. Rutgers, Florida and Dayton? Sorry.
Virginia couldn't accept the news and hung on for a while, trying to
talk its way back onto the list, according to Tamika's mother.
Tamika began focusing more and more on Purdue, Notre Dame, Georgia and
UConn. One night she was having dinner at a Dayton burger joint with
her high school coach when she was asked to fill out a grid that rated
those four schools on four factors: academics, campus environment,
quality of the basketball program and a combination of media exposure
and postgraduate opportunities. Her decision wouldn't necessarily be
that scientific, she said. Sometimes you have to just go with a
feeling. But she eagerly filled out the grid anyway.
Coming in fourth was Georgia. Coming in third was Purdue. The
runner-up was Notre Dame. On Sept. 10 the coach of the team that came
out on top flew to Dayton. Auriemma had lined up the first home visit
with the player many coaches believe is the pick of the class of '98.
Schmooze-hound that he is, Auriemma was with Tamika all afternoon,
joining her at Chaminade-Julienne, following her to the Westwood rec
center where she does volunteer work, then meeting her family and
staying at her house half the night. The media are not allowed to
witness these encounters, but by all accounts it went pretty well.
The problem for both girls was that all of it had gone pretty
well--the home visits, the campus visits. "What I really want to do is
get something negative from one of the schools," Krista said. Anything
to help narrow her list. "I know for a fact that basically every one
of my schools thinks it has me signed and sealed, and it's going to be
hard to tell any of them no."
On Sept. 6 and 7, Tamika, Krista and Lauren visited Notre Dame with
their families, and they all loved it. Recruits get the red-carpet
treatment on these flings, which are usually scheduled around football
games. On the field Notre Dame nosed out Georgia Tech, and George
Williams, for one, absolutely loved being there. Of course, he was
already in good spirits because, as Tamika's list of schools had
shrunk, so had the volume of mail and phone calls. He was getting to
eat breakfast without interruption now and then.
During the weekend of Oct. 4 and 5, things got a little more
complicated for both Krista and Tamika. Krista and her family went to
Stanford, which was a long shot in her mind, and she was knocked out.
"I'm afraid if I went there, I'd never come home," she said. The
weather was the weather northern California is known for, soft
Indian-summer breezes finding the eucalyptus trees and turning the air
into a hypnotic balm. On top of that, the football team punished Notre
Dame 33-15.
While Krista was in California, Tamika and her family traveled just 90
minutes east of Dayton to a school that had never cracked her list of
finalists. By Sunday night Tamika had added Ohio State to the other
four. She was impressed with coach Beth Burns, who had pursued her
quietly but relentlessly. It was exciting for Tamika to be a big deal
at a school that dominates her home state. Oh, and the Buckeyes
football team buried Iowa 23-7. George Williams was ferried around
Columbus like a dignitary and got to meet two-time Heisman Trophy
winner Archie Griffin, who is now Ohio State's associate athletic
director. "Yes, sir, had myself a real good time," George said. "This
almost makes up for losing the Browns."
By the first week of November, Krista had eliminated Stanford (too far
away) and Notre Dame (it didn't feel right). She was down to Penn
State and Duke and leaning toward Penn State. But she decided to make
one last visit to Duke, partly because of its highly regarded medical
school. The women's team was playing the Russian national team on Nov.
7, and Duke students were flashing WE WANT KRISTA signs. After the
game she and Goestenkors talked for four hours. "The easy choice is
not necessarily the best choice," Krista remembers the coach telling
her. Goestenkors, who grew up in Michigan, had turned down a chance to
coach at Michigan in 1996 after thinking it was the only job she'd
ever wanted. The more Krista thought about it, the more she realized
she didn't want the easy, the familiar, the comfortable. She wanted
something a little scarier and more challenging. "Penn State was
always a dream for me," she says. "But as I got older, I guess my
dreams changed."
It got much quieter in both Dayton and Lewistown. Too quiet,
sometimes. Tamika and Krista said a different kind of pressure had set
in. "If you have an open moment in a day, you can't help but think
about it," Tamika said just as practice was beginning for the new
basketball season.
"Yeah, I'm very anxious, too," Krista said. "It's going to be hard to
choose just one, but I worked for years to be in a situation where I'd
have these options."
Whenever panic or confusion set in, each girl looked at her list of
finalists and told herself this: They're all great schools. No matter
which one I pick, how could I go wrong?
You're 17 years old, and they all want you. This experience has taught
you something about sports and business. About your feelings for your
family. About who you are and whom you want to be. About what it means
to be a woman and an athlete in the '90s.
Now, that chapter of these girls' lives has ended. On Nov. 14 Krista
Gingrich chose Duke. On Nov. 18 Tamika Williams chose Connecticut.
But first, there's this other thing to take care of: senior year of
high school.>>