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Friday, March 28, 1997

Coaches say women's basketball better, faster and more accepted

By DAVE CALDWELL

The Dallas Morning News

DALLAS - To really understand how far women's basketball has come, you must understand where the sport came from. First, you must hear the stories. Everyone who has been around the women's game long enough has one.

Marsha Sharp, the women's basketball coach at Texas Tech, will tell you the story of the 1984 Final Four at Pauley Pavilion in Los Angeles. Women's basketball coaches hold their annual convention at the Final Four, and the coaches were asked to sit together on the side of the arena facing the TV cameras, so the arena would look more full.

This year's Final Four, to be held this weekend at Riverfront Coliseum in Cincinnati, is a sellout. It was sold out a year ago.

Sonja Hogg, the women's basketball coach at Baylor, will tell you about the Blue Goose. The Blue Goose was the nickname for an old bus owned in the mid-1970s by Louisiana Tech, her first coaching stop. Louisiana Tech liked it when its athletic teams used that bus, she said, because it cost the school only 16 cents a mile.

"I can still remember the times when it would break down," Ms. Hogg said. "The girls would get out in the mud and start pushing it to get it started."

Now Baylor, Louisiana Tech and almost every other major-college women's team flies to every road game, usually on a charter, and almost always the day before a game. Women's basketball teams that don't fly on jets and stay in hotels the night before a game are asking to be beaten.

Jody Conradt, the women's basketball coach at Texas, will tell you how she used to go to goat ropings and chili cookoffs and Lions Club meetings to lure ticket buyers. She said: "Anybody who was willing and wanted to hear about women's basketball, I went there."

Now they come to Texas. Conradt's Lady Longhorns averaged 7,466 people at their home games this year and drew 100,000 fans for the fourth straight season. Conradt said she rarely gets calls from reporters asking her to trace the progress of women's basketball. She also noticed that the hours of the media hospitality suite at the Big 12 Conference Tournament were moved back until after the games.

"Now, at least, y'all are waiting to get started on that," she told reporters in a conference call last month.

Muffet McGraw, the women's basketball coach at Notre Dame, will tell you about her days a decade ago as the coach at Lehigh. She said she would set up the 30-second shot clock and the video camera herself. A crowd of 400 people, she said, was a great crowd.

The Fighting Irish made their first regular-season appearance on national television this year. Every Notre Dame women's game was carried by a South Bend, Ind., radio station.

Women's basketball has undergone a sonic boom.

Two professional women's leagues have popped up in the last year. Last year's national championship game between Tennessee and Georgia drew a sellout crowd of 23,291 to Charlotte Coliseum - and so did both semifinal games. By contrast, the 1986 national championship game between Conradt's Texas team and Southern California drew only 5,662 to the 23,000-seat Rupp Arena at the University of Kentucky.

Ticket sales to the women's NCAA Tournament have increased more than tenfold since the NCAA held its first tournament in 1982, taking over from an organization called the Intercollegiate Association of Athletics for Women.

Ticket sales for the 32-team tournament held 15 years ago: $229,311. Ticket sales for the 64-team tournament last year: $2,779,817. Average attendance at the 1982 women's tournament: 2,166. Average attendance at the 1996 women's tournament: 6,116.

Coaches say the quality of play has improved dramatically and the competition has gotten tougher. As a result, women's games have become more entertaining and fun to watch.

Leon Barmore, the veteran coach at Louisiana Tech, remembers the days when only four or five women's teams had a realistic shot to win the national championship. Now, he said, when a team beats a team from the Southeastern Conference, the most powerful women's conference in the country, no one regards it as much of an aberration.

"Some of those games used to not be games," Barmore said.

"They're games now," he said.

The women's game is different now. It is faster-paced, more aggressive.

"It's much more accepted," said McGraw, the coach at Notre Dame. "When I was playing (in the mid-1970s at St. Joseph's in Philadelphia), a 'tomboy' was always a negative connotation to women playing sports. Now, it's just something that women do."

Hogg took nine years off between coaching at Louisiana Tech, one of the first nationally famous women's basketball powerhouses, and coaching at Baylor. When she returned to the game in 1994, she noticed something different about her team.

"Our players have gotten stronger, bigger, faster, quicker," she said. "The game has gotten faster. It's more entertaining. It's fast-break basketball.

"You still don't see the slam dunk. But you see the three-point shot. You see the fast break, and you see pressing defenses. You see the up-tempo game. Because we can't play over the rim, we have to rely on other things to help each other."

Oh, yes: HELPING EACH OTHER.

John Wooden, the legendary former coach at UCLA, has said that women play a purer form of the game than men. The men's game is played by acrobats who hover over the rim. The women's game is played by players who often make five or six passes so their team can get a better shot.

Just look at a few statistics from the men's and women's championship games from a year ago. Kentucky and Syracuse combined for 34 assists and 39 turnovers in the NCAA men's final in 1996. Tennessee and Georgia combined for 35 assists and 26 turnovers in the women's final. More teamwork, fewer mistakes.

Coaches have said that the women's game has improved because of one key factor: television. Because more women's games are on TV, more girls have been exposed to women's basketball in general. Sharp has said that players are taller, and they are more polished.

"Back when I was playing, whenever a big girl took an outside shot, it was like, 'What the heck are you doing, girl?' " said Nancy Lieberman-Cline, the Dallas resident who is a women's basketball commentator for ESPN and plans to resume her basketball career this summer in the Women's National Basketball Association. "Now, it's a part of everybody's offense."

As a result, the game has been on a steady climb - "a five-year snowball," as Lieberman-Cline put it.

Sheryl Swoopes scored 47 points to lead underdog Texas Tech to an 84-82 victory over Ohio State in the 1993 women's championship game. Swoopes was so phenomenal that day, Sharp said, that whenever she travels to other places in the country and says she is from Texas Tech, the first thing they say to her is often: "Sheryl Swoopes."

"She was a little different," Sharp said.

A year later, Charlotte Smith hit a three-point basket at the buzzer to lift North Carolina to a 60-59 victory over Louisiana Tech in the women's title game. Lieberman-Cline said a message was sent that day: Women can play thrillers, and women's coaches are not afraid to take risks.

In 1995, the University of Connecticut women's team finished 35-0 and won the national championship. The Huskies became the first team from the East Coast to win the NCAA women's title, and they drew the attention of ESPN, the cable network based in Bristol, Conn., and the New York media.

Last year, the U.S. Olympic women's team, comprised of many of the best players in the history of the women's game, won the gold medal at the Atlanta Games, wrapping up a season in which it went 60-0 and played all over the country.

And the women's NCAA Tournament, portions of which had been carried on CBS-TV in order to televise the men's tournament, jumped to ESPN. CBS had given the women's tournament some valuable air time; ESPN gave it an identity. This year's women's national title game will be played in prime time Sunday night.

Now, some women's coaches have their own weekly television shows.

The women's Final Four is an event. Lieberman-Cline has been appointed coach of a shooter who will attempt to win $1 million with a three-point shot in Cincinnati.

"It's just part of the whole growth of women's basketball," she said.

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