Ruth Riley and Jackie Stiles both competed in the 2001 Final Four, but they were friends before that. They met playing USA Basketball where they were roommates, and hit it off right away. They could tease each other about who came from the smaller town. Riley grew up in Macy, Ind., and Stiles in Claflin, Kan.

“We still don’t have a stoplight,” Stiles said recently as she sat in a locker room at a gymnasium in Coldwater, Kan.

Claflin, which is right in the geographic  center  of the Sunflower State, would strike you as rural, of course, but … the area of Kansas where Stiles and Riley were last week was truly deserving of the description “in the middle of nowhere.”

It was funny, actually, to hear Stiles looking out a car window at the landscape and expressing amazement at how empty it was of houses and humans. This is coming from someone who used to drive a half-hour to get to the closest McDonald’s.

“That was in Great Bend,” she explained. “The nearest ‘big’ city to Claflin.”

Riley and Stiles were out in southwestern Kansas coaching in a benefit basketball event called the WEPAC Hoops for Hope game. I was out there, too, along with my pals, broadcasters Brenda Van Lengen and Patti Phillips.

We three live on the Kansas side of metro Kansas City, some six hours away from the communities _ Wilmore, Englewood, Protection, Ashland and Coldwater – that the acronym “WEPAC” stands for. For Brenda, who’s from Nebraska, and me, from Missouri, these little towns are very familiar. They’re like the places we grew up.

But for Patti, who grew up first Norfolk, Va., and then greater KC, it was more like, “Wow, we’re REALLY way out here, aren’t we?” At one point, the GPS had us on a little dirt road apparently headed into nothingness instead of the school we were looking for, and Patti pointed out that fact with just the tiniest hint of semi-annoyed panic.

Brenda and I, being somewhat mischievous, acted like it was quite reasonable to believe maybe the road did go somewhere.

Hey, I’ve seen smaller roads go places.

***

And what I found myself thinking about a lot on this trip was how paths intersect.

The exhibition contest, involving area high school girls’ players and former college women’s standouts from Kansas State, Kansas, Missouri State, Nebraska, Wichita State and Iowa, raised money to help provide cancer-screening services for women in this rural area of Kansas.

Along with Riley and Stiles, another big name in women’s basketball came, despite having no ties to Kansas: Cynthia Cooper. The WNBA legend who now coaches at Prairie View A&M in Texas lost her mother to breast cancer and readily agreed to take part in both the game (as a co-coach of one team along with Stiles) and in a health-issues forum the next day.

“Any cause that helps encourage women to get their mammograms and take care of themselves, I want to be involved,” Cooper said. “The enthusiasm to help in the fight against cancer is universal. Here it’s a small town, but when I walked into the gym and saw that sea of pink, the energy that they’ve generated, it was amazing.”

Benjamin Anderson, CEO of the Ashland Health Center, was a driving force for the event. A part of the proceeds go to the Kay Yow/WBCA Cancer Fund. But the majority of the funds raised will allow things such as a mobile digital mammogram machine to come to the WEPAC area once a month. Otherwise, women there had to make about a five-hour round trip for that service.

Stiles knows a lot about such drives. She used to regularly travel long distances from Claflin to play on an AAU team in Kansas City. Often, her grandfather, Joe Stiles, would take her.

“My family always says it added years to his life,” Stiles said. “He would drive me all over the country for basketball. We just had a special bond because of all those hours we spent together.”

Stiles also knows about how the proximity to health care might change your life if you’re in a small town or rural area. She won a junior-high hoops championship game the night her baby sister, who had health issues from birth, stopped breathing.

“I can remember the whole day vividly,” Stiles said. “I remember dressing her in overalls, and she was at my game, I talked to her afterward. Then later I saw my grandpa’s car rushing by our bus.

“They ended up having to rush her on to Wichita … well, that’s a two-hour drive. Unfortunately, there was an accident somewhere else, so they didn’t have the helicopter to get her there. It was being used. They had to take her in the ambulance.

“And I’ve always wondered: Would she have survived if she had care closer or could have gotten there quicker?”

Stiles is the oldest of four children, and none of them will forget the sibling they lost. One of her brothers, P.J., is in his fourth year of medical school. The youngest, Roxanne, followed Jackie to Missouri State, but her basketball career was cut short by a hip problem that eventually will require replacement. Roxanne, 21, hopes to attend medical school, too.

Jackie has had enough surgeries, she jokes, that she should have been a doctor, too. Injuries limited Stiles to just two seasons in the WNBA, and she never really has been able to play much basketball since.

She has tremendous aches physically whenever she even tries to seriously play hoops now. She aches emotionally because she can’t play. She tried competitive cycling for a while, but that was too much of a toll on her body as well.

To fill the void, she does camps and personal training. She loves the number of kids she can reach even in just one camp setting; that sheer volume has been part of what’s kept her away – so far – from coaching at the high school or college level.

“There are far fewer kids on just one team,” she said of considering a coaching career. “But I don’t know. I miss the competitive aspect. I still have that itch to compete.”

***

Riley is still competing, having just finished her ninth WNBA season as San Antonio lost in the first round of the playoffs to eventual champ Phoenix.

Riley’s path first crossed with Stiles in USA Basketball. Then they played in the same Final Four in St. Louis – although not against each other’s teams _ where Riley’s Notre Dame squad won the NCAA title. Then they were both on WNBA teams that eventually folded, Portland (Stiles) and Miami (Riley).

However, Stiles’ career was over quickly, even if it took her a few more painful years to realize that. Riley went from Miami to Detroit _ where she won two WNBA titles – to San Antonio.

Riley, who also has won an Olympic gold medal, was born in Kansas but soon moved to Indiana when her parents divorced. Notre Dame coach Muffet McGraw told the story at the 2001 Final Four about going out on a home visit to see Riley and becoming lost in what seemed like miles and miles of nothing but cornfield.

Riley has become one of the WNBA’s best ambassadors, involved in AIDS awareness programs in Africa and the “Nothing But Nets” program to protect people from mosquito-borne diseases. Whenever she can say “yes” to helping with something, she always does.

At this WEPAC event, Riley coached one of the teams, along with Kristi Leeper-Meis, who’s from Protection and captained Fort Hays State (which is further north in Kansas) to the 1991 NCAA Division II championship.

“You’ll find that most of the time, small communities support their local sports at a high level,” Riley said. “These gyms will be packed for a girls or boys basketball game during their seasons.

“But also, you know, in larger cities you might not care as much about your neighbor. In small towns, there’s more a sense of caring for one another, bringing what you can. In an event like this, so many people have just brought what they could. And that’s the beauty of these small communities providing for each other.”

Well … that’s a romantic and hopeful view of little towns, and one that certainly has validity. However, it’s not altogether a complete picture. Not that I want to be Scrooge by pointing it out. But I grew up in a town that had less than 400 people _ there were both nice folks and not-so-nice folks. There were people who cared about their neighbors and people who couldn’t have cared less.

There were those who gossiped incessantly. The types who would have nit-picked an idea like this “Hoops for Hope” game to pieces. They would have felt put-upon if asked to do too much and slighted if asked to do too little.

So I’m sure that there were such elements to be dealt with out in southwestern Kansas, too. Nobody has to tell me this; being from a little town, I just know. But there are always snags to any such endeavor. The bottom line is when it came time to participate, a lot of people took part in an area where there really are not a lot of people to begin with.

They hosted the visiting players in their homes. They wore pink and white “Hoops for Hope” T-shirts and filled the Ashland High gym, in which hangs banners for achievements in 8-man football (which is what the smallest schools in the state play), track, basketball, Academic Olympics, Quiz Bowl, etc.

They bid on silent-auction items, purchased game programs and pink/white lollipops, and then cheered on the girls and women who played the game.

And this part might surprise you, given how such an exhibition might have turned out: The game was actually fun to watch.

***

I’ll admit we weren’t expecting that as we drove out there. Brenda, Patti and I had figured high school kids mixed in with former college players would produce a lot of turnovers and missed shots. But that everyone watching would be good-natured about it, since the purpose was to raise money for fighting cancer, not to re-enact the Final Four.

Brenda and Patti are both former coaches, and we talked about basketball almost the entire trip there and back. On the way, as mentioned, we figured they would have to steel themselves for broadcasting a mistake-fest. But after an 89-81 victory for the Riley/Leeper-Meis team, we were all commenting on how we got much more entertaining basketball than we’d bargained for. (OK, not a lot of defense, but that was a good thing.)

On the way back, I managed to get pulled over going 40 mph through a 10-second-long 30 mph speed trap around midnight. But the world’s nicest police officer let me go with an admonition to be more wary of the speed limit. The funny thing was, as “lead-foot” Patti pointed out, I was doing well under the limit everywhere except that particular stretch.

One of the small towns we passed through going to and from the WEPAC region was Greensburg, which might have affectionately been referred to as just a dot on the map until it was, horrifically, almost wiped off the map by a monster tornado in 2007. Virtually 95 percent of Greensburg was destroyed and 11 people died – the relatively “low” death total thanks to the warning systems.

It is still eerie to drive through Greensburg, especially at night as we did on the way home. It was shortly before 10 p.m. on May 4, 2007, that a tornado a mile and half wide went right through the town as if it were a giant eraser. You consider how small geographically Greensburg is and how randomly unfortunate it was that this storm took the exact path it did. A slight move east or west by the funnel would have spared Greensburg entirely.

We imagined what it must have been like during those initial hours of darkness amidst the utter devastation of a place where the nearest “medium-sized” town – Dodge City, with about 25,000 people – is nearly an hour away. And the soul-shaking shock of the first sunrise that showed just how complete and total the calamity was.

Now, two and half years later, Greensburg – home to around 1,400 people at the time of the disaster _ is rebuilding as a “green” town with wind-powered energy and all construction being to LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) standards.

It’s the kind of impossible-to-foresee situation – a small town left in ruins turning into an experimental project for some of the best technological ideas for sustainability _ that makes you marvel at how our planet gives and takes away and gives again.

The WEPAC communities are south of Greensburg, near the Oklahoma border. And even further west is the town of Sublette, Kan., now known as the home of Shalee Lehning, who completed her stellar career at Kansas State last season and played well for the Atlanta Dream this past summer.

Lehning had a collision with Washington’s Lindsey Harding on the final day of the WNBA’s regular season that left her with a shoulder injury doctors proclaimed was like what they usually see only with football players.

Lehning had surgery and couldn’t play in the postseason or this WEPAC game. But she was still on hand for the WEPAC event, as were her parents, who had made the absurdly long drive from Sublette to Manhattan probably 100 times when she was at K-State.

Then again, as Stiles said, it is on such lengthy drives that people bond. You have time to actually talk to each other in person.

Umm … especially when you’re not getting a cell-phone signal.

***

Jackie and Roxanne had come from Springfield, and Jackie had to be back there quickly the next day. Why? She’d been asked to judge the Miss Missouri pageant.

“Never done that before,” she said.

A man involved in the pageant whom Jackie had befriended said, “No problem,” and let the Stiles sisters use his six-seat plane to go to Coldwater, Kan., where a practice was held in the afternoon before that night’s game in Ashland.

You might wonder what kind of “airport” is in Coldwater … well, there is a runway. That’s good enough. Jackie said it was “kind of frightening” as they’d encountered some rough weather and then thought, “Really? We’re going to land here?”

But it all turned out fine… they got to the Coldwater gym and the pilot left for Dodge City, where the Stiles’ parents were going to take them after the game was over for the flight back to Springfield. Only one thing had been left to chance: Who was going to drive them the half-hour from Coldwater to Ashland?

There would have been any number of volunteers – Jackie is legendary in Kansas, after all, and an incredibly friendly person – but our intrepid media crew was on its way to Ashland after watching practice, and we had room for two more in Patti’s car.

During this stretch of the trip, Jackie told us about one of her workouts, which involves doing pushups with your hands and feet balanced on basketballs. Yeah, one of those core-strength show-off things that most of us would not even attempt out of the certainty we would land on our faces and break our noses. Jackie, of course, did the exercise for the cameras once we got to Ashland, to be shown during the broadcast.

Jackie seems to have been born with enough energy to have completely worn out about seven bodies in a normal lifespan, but sadly, she only has one body. She runs her own business now, J. Stiles Total Training, but says she actually has no problem not pushing other people too hard.

“It’s one of those ‘Do as I say, not as I do’ things,” she says, laughing at herself as she frequently does. “I’ll tell people to back off if they are over-doing it. I wish I could do that with myself.”

During the WEPAC game, she got a chance to coach along with Cooper, who had been one of Stiles’ idols. Further, Nike’s Cynthia Cooper shoe was the only one Stiles wanted to wear in college, because she said it fit her perfectly.

After the game, Stiles was headed to Dodge City and then back to Springfield, Mo. Cooper spoke at the health forum the next day, then returned to Texas.

Riley is recovering from postseason surgery and expects to play overseas starting in January. Where? “I don’t know,” she said, smiling. “It’s always kind of ‘whatever comes up.’ ”

Brenda, Patti and I went back to our homes in suburban Kansas City, and each of us will be on the road again soon to college games all over the place this winter.

Our paths intersected for a brief time in an area of Kansas that we had never been to before … and yet now will always mean something to us.

A few years back, I was discussing overseas women’s hoops with someone very familiar with international basketball. I asked her if the players who competed in Russia, especially, knew how their team owners had amassed their wealth.

“The question,” she said wryly, “is whether they want to know. And the answer is no. They don’t want to know.”

But one of these days, I suggested, this could come to a bad end, couldn’t it? Of course, she said, and it probably will.

Alas, I thought back on that conversation after hearing the news Monday that Shabtai von Kalmanovic, who bankrolled the Spartak Moscow women’s team, had been murdered in Russia’s capital.

Kalmanovic was considered a “fatherly” figure to players such as Diana Taurasi, Sue Bird and Lauren Jackson – someone who paid them far more than they earned in the WNBA and set them up to live in palatial digs while they endured the Russian winter to play basketball in large part for the gratification of his ego.

Kalmanovic is one of those fellows who’d be very amusing as a fictional character … but is not so funny as a real person. Among other things, Kalmanovic had served five years in an Israeli prison for passing along technology secrets to the KGB. He was released in the early 1990s, when the Soviet Union was well into the process of falling apart and a couple dozen businessmen seized much of the industrial and natural-resources wealth of the nation.

Was he a real “spy” … or someone who did certain things to survive at a time and in a place where all the choices were bad? He kept saying sometime in the future, when the conditions of his release from prison would allow it, he’d tell the “real” story. But he didn’t live to do that.

As for the state of things the last couple of decades in Russia, the word “chaos” comes to mind.  There were those who’d profited from the black market during the era of communism. They continued their businesses in what essentially became a more lucrative but also even more dangerous and lawless new age where many former government officials, if they weren’t already involved in crime, descended into it.

And this is the world in which a handful of women’s basketball players not all that long ago began making several hundred thousand dollars – despite their teams not earning any profit for their owners.

The combination of ego, enormous wealth and a type of patriotism linked to sports all combined to make what didn’t seem like it was sensible actually, in fact, happen. That is, athletes got paid a lot of money to play for teams that didn’t make any money.

Authorities are using terms like “contract killing” in regard to Kalmanovic, whose car was strafed with bullets. We’ll wait to see if the perpetrators are found and punished, and if it’s publicly revealed exactly what Kalmanovic’s alleged transgression was against whomever wanted him dead. Unfortunately, drive-by killings like this are not exactly rare occurrences in Russia.

We’ll also wait to see how Kalmanovic’s death affects the entire marketplace for women’s basketball overseas. Might the bottom fall out for foreign talent going to that part of the world now?

Suffice to say, if any of this is really shocking to you, just remember what went on in the 2002 Winter Olympics.

A reputed Russian crime “boss,” Alimzan Tokhtakhounov, was arrested several months after the Games, in which a scandal over the pairs figure skating judging resulted in a “second” gold medal given to Canadians Jamie Sale and David Pelletier. A French judge had admitted she felt pressured into giving better scores to the Russian skaters, Elena Berezhnaya and Anton Sikharulidze, and a bizarre “plot” was subsequently unraveled.

Tokhtakhounov allegedly had tried to fix the outcome of competition in both the pairs skating (in favor of the Russians) and ice dancing (in favor of the French) by pressuring the respective federations for both countries. The whole thing was so bizarre – just seeing the terms “Russian mob” and “ice dancing” in the same sentence is ludicrous _ that it would be laughable if it weren’t actually deadly serious.

Of course, there were far-reaching consequences in the wake of the Salt Lake Games judging scandal: The entire points/judging system for figure skating was changed. Out went the 6.0 system that was inherently arcane but at least familiar, and in came a more complicated points-accumulation system that many spectators still don’t understand.

At any rate, the involvement of crime figures with sports is hardly unique to Russia. But the fact that organized crime has become imbedded in so many aspects of Russian life since the fall of the Soviet Union made it impossible for any of us who follow women’s basketball to avoid speculating about whether the “mob” just might be into that, too.

Which is not to say Kalmanovic was involved with organized crime … just that it’s very difficult to do business in Russia and completely avoid it. Ultimately, how one defines the lines between what’s legal and illegal in Russia, what’s legitimate and what isn’t, what is politically motivated by forces and beliefs that are largely alien to an average American’s way of thinking … well, we pretty much can’t fully understand it. Or even partially understand it.

I’m sure it was no different for the foreign players who’ve gone to play in Russia; they saw Kalmanovic as a “good guy” because it was in their economic self-interest to see him that way and not attempt to dig any deeper. Kalmanovic treated his favorite players extremely well and seemed to care about women’s basketball – or at least about winning championships in the sport. His well-rewarded favorites came to be very fond of him, but how much they really knew of his wealth and his business and political dealings was limited. Which is how they preferred it.

But it isn’t something they can really ignore now; not when their patron has been gunned down on the street and their future overseas is surrounded by doubt. Grief, fear and uncertainty are emotions they’re experiencing. And now they’re going to have to try to get some real answers to questions they probably never wanted to ask.

  A lot going on today, but that’s good. I’ll soon be talking with Kathy Betty, head of the new Dream ownership group, and will have a story on ESPN.com.

  Also today, though, I head out toward Western Kansas for an event called the WEPAC Hoops for Hope charity basketball game. Former players from the likes of Kansas, Kansas State, Missouri State, Iowa and Nebraska will be teaming with high school players in a game that is raising money for the WEPAC Alliance, a foundation that pays for cancer-preventative care for women in five small Kansas communities (Wilmore, Englewood,Protection, Ashland, and Coldwater.) The other 10 percent of the proceeds will go to the Kay Yow/WBCA Cancer Fund.  

  The game is from 8:30-10:30 Central time on Friday night, with Fox Sports Midwest airing it in the states of Kansas, Missouri, Nebraska and Iowa.

  My friends Brenda VanLengen and Patti Phillips and I are driving out to Ashland, Kan., where the game will be held. Brenda and Patti will handle the broadcast duties for FSN Midwest.

   One current WNBA player, San Antonio’s Ruth Riley, is involved as is former WNBA legend Cynthia Cooper, now coach at Prairie View A&M, and all-time NCAA scoring leader Jackie Stiles.

 More info on the event can be found at:  www.wepacthehouse.org. I’ll be writing a story about it for The Kansas City Star and will have more on it here at this blog, too.

    I told you not to look!

  You know that goofy and annoying Carfax commercial, where the customer wants to see the a vehicle’s history report, but the nervous sales guy gets out a hand puppet as a lame form of distraction? 

  ”You want to see the Car Fox?” he says, ridiculously.

  OK, yes, it is really stupid. But that’s not going to keep me from stealing from it as I try to tell you what I sent in this week to the Associated Press. It’s my ballot for …  uh …

  Top five Carpenters songs? OK, sure ….

  1. “For All We Know” 2. “We’ve Only Just Begun” 3. “A Song for You” 4. “Merry Christmas Darling” 5. “Crystal Lullaby”

  Oh, wait, no … that’s not what I sent into the AP. Let’s see if I can remember what it was …

  Five most desired types of Halloween candy as a child? 

   1. Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups 2. Crunch or Krackle bars 3. M&Ms (preferably Peanut) 4. $100,000 bar 5. Mounds 

  Or maybe it was five least-wanted types of Halloween candy as a child?

  1. any hard candy 2. Necco wafers, 3. Red Hots 4. Candy Corn 5. taffy

   Nah … it wasn’t that, either. What COULD it have been? I know it took me a long time to figure it out. Well, actually, it began really easily. I remember putting down No. 1 and No. 2 in a snap. Piece of cake. Which reminds me …

Five snack cakes I most hoped to see in my “Hair Bear Bunch” lunch box in grade school:

   1. Ding Dongs 2. CupCakes. 3. HoHos 4. Sno Balls 5. Fruit Pie (OK, not really a cake, obviously. Just didn’t like Twinkies. Surely I can’t be the only one. All of this junk is terrible for you, of course). 

  No, no, no. It wasn’t that. Yeah, Nos. 1 and 2 were easy, but then it started to get difficult. Then it became troublesome. Then it got nearly impossible. 

  Was it top five Steffi Graff matches? Five best 1960s black and white movies? Five vegetables I dislike even more than celery?

  All right, enough of this. If you’re still reading, I’ll stop trying to distract you. Let me just say, again, the polls really don’t mean anything. It’s just guesswork, especially in the preseason. If you think, “Oh, this list is all wrong, you pinhead!” … you’re probably right. Or maybe not. 

  Without further nonsense … my preseason (sigh) top 25:

 1. UConn, 2. Stanford, 3. North Carolina, 4. Ohio State, 5. Notre Dame, 6. Duke,  7. Baylor, 8. Michigan State, 9. LSU, 10 Tennessee, 11. Texas, 12. Oklahoma, 13. Xavier, 14. Virginia, 15, DePaul, 16. Florida State, 17. Cal 18. Georgia Tech, 19. Arizona State, 20. Middle Tennessee State, 21. Georgia, 22. Kansas, 23, Gonzaga, 24. Rutgers, 25. Mississippi State

  Yep, there it is, flaws and all. Grand Poobah Mel Greenberg always says half-jokingly and half-seriously that, really, we ought to not start voting until around January, when we actually know something – or at least think we do. But that’s not the way it works. We have to start now when we know very little.

  There are years (every year) when at the end of the season, I look back on my preseason ballot and shudder. And cringe. And laugh. This season should be no exception. So …

  Friday, the AP is supposed to release the preseason poll, and then you can see how wrong all 40 voters are. Seriously … don’t take it seriously. If you don’t see your team in the top 25 and really think it should be, don’t get too angry. The rankings will evolve. Relax. It’s not worth getting upset over. 

  Or (distraction alert) take your mind off it and just watch Jim’s and Pam’s wedding again from “The Office.” That could cheer up anybody, right?

  Unless it distresses you to see blissfully happy fictional characters, in which case …

  Wanna see the Car Fox?

   A Facebook friend posted the other day that he had “that dream” … the one where he is back in college and realizes that he has not gone to a certain class all semester, surely has missed tests/projects, and is totally unprepared for the final.

  This seems to be one of those near-universal dreams. And as someone who’s had it numerous times, I am still surprised how frightening and upsetting the dream seems, like your entire life is in shambles because of missing this class. But I assume it feels like that because of what your state of mind would have to be if this happened in real life.

  For you to go almost a whole semester  just “forgetting” you had a class, it would mean you were kind of losing your mind, right? And that you couldn’t account for/explain how something had happened. It’s not like you made a conscious decision (in the dream) not to go to the class. You just forgot you were supposed to. So you’re thinking (in the dream), “What is wrong with me? Am I going crazy?”

  One of the scariest dreams I ever had was when I was working at a newspaper in Tennessee (right out of college, where I never actually had forgotten I had a class) and was a tad stressed. I was only 23, and looking back now at how much I had to get done in a shift, especially for Sunday’s paper, it was absurd. I didn’t realize that then, though, so I worried about it constantly.

  One night, I had this dream that I came home, and all my laundry was done. It was folded and stacked on my couch. Why is this scary, you ask. Because in the dream, I had absolutely no recollection of having done my laundry. I was living in this little duplex then that didn’t have a washer/dryer, so I had to go to the laundromat.

  Aside: Incidentally, whatever is the exact opposite of an endorphin release … that’s what I always get the second I step into a laundromat. Which, luckily, is never these days. When I was a kid, we didn’t have a dryer and it was too cold to hang clothes outside in the winter months. So about every other Sunday, we’d have to go to the laundromat, an inherently depressing place. Adding to it, somebody used to leave these hellfire and damnation religious pamphlets in there. I guess my parents never looked at them. But I did. They had the reverse effect of what they apparently intended. They didn’t make me wary about hell. They made me (more) wary of people trying to scare me about hell. Alas, I was already on the way to being a Sunday School dropout anyhow.

  So back to the dream … I was standing there looking at my folded laundry, realizing there was no way I could have gone to the laundromat (where as an adult, I would read Stephen King novels while waiting) and not have remembered it … unless I was … LOSING MY MIND!!!!!!!

  I woke up in the typical cold sweat and clearly, the dream has stuck with me. So here I am, admitting it. One of the scariest dreams I ever had was about laundry.

  But … the stress dreams I most often have as a sportswriter tend to be variations of this: I’m at a game, but can’t actually “see” it. For instance, I’m at the Final Four, a game is going on, but I can’t find my way inside to the playing floor. I’m out on the concourse, I can hear the crowd inside, but I can’t find a door that opens to let me in. 

  Or I’m on some press row in the rafters that is so far from the court and has such an obscured view that I have no idea what is going on in the game. 

  Or sometimes it’s that I’m trying to find the interview room after a game, but I can’t locate it and miss the press conference entirely. And then I also can’t find the locker rooms to talk to anybody. 

  So … last night, I had a dream that I was covering what I thought was the Final Four, except the arena was really small and there weren’t many people there. I was like, “Oh, jeez, where IS everybody?” I walked past a section and there were three Louisiana Tech fans there. They told me the rest of their traveling party went home after Tech lost. I said, “When did you lose? Did I miss that game?”

  Yeah, it was in the first round, they said. Then why are you at the Final Four, I wondered. And suddenly, as happens in dreams, I realized I wasn’t really at the Final Four. I was at an early-round site. But I had no idea what was going on at that site, except apparently it wasn’t good for Louisiana Tech.

  Then, I looked out on the court, and North Carolina was there. I thought, “Of course, Louisiana Tech fans went home.” Considering the history (1994, Charlotte Smith, .7 of a second) you couldn’t expect Tech fans to stick around and watch North Carolina. Still kind of painful. But then I thought …

  Who is North Carolina playing now? Where is the other team? What arena is this? What city? How do I not remember what went on in the first round? Wait a minute … I don’t even remember anything that happened this whole season! What’s going on?

  About that time, I woke up, and it took me a minute to determine why I felt so out of sorts. What a relief to realize that I had not actually missed the entire season.

  But if Louisiana Tech does play North Carolina in the first round of the 2010 NCAA Tournament, I’m going to be a little weirded out.

   Geno Auriemma couldn’t select UConn to win the Big East like every other coach in the league did. Same for Tara VanDerveer and Stanford in the Pac-10. 

   OK, this is NOT something I get upset about or anything. It’s just that every year before the start of the hoops season, I remember that it kind of annoys me.

  When coaches do their preseason ballots to make predictions about their league _ how they think teams are going to finish and who the top player and freshman of the year etc. are going to be _ it seems to be standard procedure that they are not allowed to vote for their own team or their players.

  But why not?  

  I can understand regulations such as not being allowed to vote for your own player when it comes to giving out “real” awards at the end of the season. In that case, the thought is that coaches might be too biased by how much they personally like their own player or by how it might be beneficial to their program to have an award winner. It’s not really because the coaches wouldn’t try to be unbiased. It’s just hard to be completely neutral about something in which you may have a personal/professional stake.

   But the preseason predictions are just that: predictions. They are NOT actual awards. There is no plaque that goes with being picked to win your conference or being projected as your league’s top player. In fact, how many times (I’d guess upward of 5 billion, although maybe I’m exaggerating) have I heard a coach say, “Well, I don’t put much stock in predictions … it’s just on paper. They don’t mean anything.”

  Exactly. They truly don’t mean anything. Zippo. Zilch. Nada. The reason these preseason predictions are done is just to increase publicity for the upcoming season by informing fans what the coaches expect. So why put any restrictions on the coaches in voting for what they think will happen? And is it really logical that coaches can’t put their team first in the league but can put it in any other slot? 

   Anyway, we sometimes get these goofball press releases from leagues that say, “In a near-unanimous vote, Team X was picked to win the Blahblah Conference.” I see these and go, “Arrrrrrrrrgh! This is dumb! It really IS unanimous. You just didn’t allow Team X’s coach to vote the same as everyone else!”

  But … I admit that there might be another aspect to this. Could it be that coaches _ superstitious as they are  _ do not actually want to be allowed to vote for their own team in a preseason poll? Do they fear they might be jinxing themselves by picking their own team?

  And might they also not want to be allowed to vote for their own player for a preseason honor, in the event that they may have more than one player who is deserving? That way they wouldn’t have to “pick” one of their players over another.

  I suppose both of those things are possible. But tell you what. If that’s really the case – and I don’t know that it is _ then it shouldn’t be worded the way almost all leagues do: “Coaches are not allowed to vote for their own teams and players.”

  Instead, it should be, “Coaches are protected from having to vote for their own teams and players.”

      This past July, I went to see “Six-on-Six: The Musical,” which is an homage to girls’ basketball as it used to be played in the state of Iowa.

   Playwright and director Robert John Ford witnessed the famed state tournament himself while in high school in Iowa in 1978, and then again in 1987 when the six-on-six game was in its last decade of existence.

  The experience of watching a packed arena in Des Moines going crazy over girls’ basketball _ and what that said about community pride in Iowa _ made so strong an impression on him that he was able to overcome his peers’ skepticism to write a musical about the sport.

   There is nothing that I am aware of in American sports history that was quite like the phenomenon of Iowa’s six-on-six girls’ basketball tournament. I say that because of the factors involved. This started in Iowa in 1920, and even in what I call the “backlash” decades for girls’ and women’s sports _ the 1950s and ‘60s _ it not only survived, but was in its heyday.

   The six-on-six sport was somewhat popular in other states, too, most notably Oklahoma and Tennessee. But nowhere except Iowa has there been a state tournament for girls’ basketball every year since 1920. Nowhere was it so large a part of a state’s historical “quilt” _ a tournament that lured entire towns (small-town pride was the very essence of this event) to empty out and head to Des Moines each March, even in blizzards.

      Imagine it: Something that could be wildly popular in one state … but was like that ONLY in that state. For instance, girls growing up in the 1930s-60s in the six states that border Iowa may have lived mere minutes away from a place that could have given them a chance at a completely different athletic experience in high school. Yet for so many years, their states still did not offer it to them. 

   Although for that matter, basketball wasn’t available even to all the girls in the state of Iowa. The larger schools, for the most part, stopped girls’ basketball in the 1920s (it had existed in many places since the turn of the century) and then did not bring it back until the late 1960s or early 1970s.

  Janice A. Beran, in her book, “From Six-on-Six to Full Court Press” explains some of the factors for this. Among them were that in larger schools, boys’ basketball coaches had more power and also tended not to also coach girls, as was the case at smaller schools. So the boys’ coaches, for the most part, did not want to share gym time. 

  Beran also points out that, ironically, there were many women involved in physical education that actually fought against competitive sports for girls. There were the old stereotypes about how girls might be “hurt” by too much exertion or that they would adopt “non-ladylike” behavior through competition.

  But also, the phys-ed women of that day tended to think they had to choose between providing resources for all girls to participate in athletics in some way or limiting the resources for all by giving most to the girls who were actually competitive. They generally favored the first option, and sadly it took some of them a long time to realize they should insist on both. It was mostly a small group of influential men involved in Iowa high school athletics that fostered and championed girls’ competitive sports.

  Girls’ basketball in Iowa in small towns took root and didn’t wither. It provided these communities with entertainment and something to rally around. Also, the idea of physical activity getting too “strenuous” for girls was obviously an absurd concept in places where daughters were raised doing heavy labor the same as sons on family farms.

  Iowa introduced a state five-on-five tournament for girls in 1985 (letting schools pick which style they wanted), and that existed along with six-on-six until 1993, when the old style was fully abandoned. While total five-on-five for girls was inevitable and obviously the right thing to do, there are still Iowans who mourn the loss of six-on-six. Which is a mindset that the musical sympathizes with. 

   So why am I bringing up all this stuff? Well, I never get tired of talking about Iowa’s six-on-six history and all the fascinating social factors that went into its success and its eventual end. Which parallel, among other things, the tragic demise of the family farm and a way of life. But I do have a more specific and timely reason in this case, which is …

   Sitting there, side by side at Big 12 media day this past week were Alison Lacey and Kelsey Bolte, the two returning starters from Iowa State’s Sweet 16 team of last season.

  And I really love such juxtapositions of life stories. Lacey is a native Australian, from Canberra, that nation’s capital city. Bolte is from Ida Grove, Iowa, about two hours northwest of Ames.

  Ida Grove is a bit south of Correctionville, which won the very first official Iowa high school state title in girls’ basketball in 1920. Ida Grove itself won the six-on-six title three times: in 1924 (when it “tied” – and no, I don’t know exactly how that happened _ with Aplington) and in 1928 and ’29.

   So in Bolte, you have a true small-town Iowa girl, the kind who for decades played basketball in the state, albeit for much of that time not the full-court version that Bolte excels at now.

   She’s a 6-foot-1 junior guard who averaged 9.4 points last season and is expected to do even more this year as she and Lacey will have a lot on their shoulders with a team that doesn’t have many experienced players. There are five newcomers, four of them freshmen.

  I asked Bolte when she knew she wanted to go to Iowa State.

 “I think I always knew,” she said. “My dad has had season tickets to Iowa State games for as long as I can remember. I’ve always been a Cyclone fan; my dad graduated from there.

   “I remember watching Stacey Frese … and Megan Taylor was my favorite player. And Angie Welle, with the way she ran the floor. I’d watch them, thinking about what it would be like to play there.”

   But while Bolte was growing up in western Iowa envisioning being an Iowa State Cyclone, Lacey was in eastern Australia with absolutely no idea there even was such a thing.

   “It is unbelievable,” Lacey said. “Five years ago, I never thought I’d be living in the United States by myself without my parents. And it’s been the best thing I’ve ever done in my life. I’ve grown up, I’ve learned so much, and I love Iowa State.”

  Lacey came to the Iowa to finish out high school, along with her twin brother, Mark, and they lived with host families. She went to Ballard High in the greater Ames area, and has transitioned into a player who perfectly fits Cyclone coach Bill Fennelly’s system.

  Last year as a junior, the 6-0 Lacey averaged 11.2 ppg and also did a blog for the New York Times that provided insight into being an Australian living in the middle of Iowa. This season, the senior guard is unquestionably the head honcho among the Cyclone players.

   “We have a lot of new faces and they are going to have to play,” Lacey said. “It’s Kelsey’s and my job to make sure they’re ready to go. The biggest thing is helping them understand the pace of the game. We tell them, ‘You have to pick it up.’ We have to get them on a fast-track pace.”

   The Cyclones had quite an NCAA Tournament run last season until they encountered the buzzsaw of Stanford. But what they did to get into the game – an amazing rally to top Michigan State in the Sweet 16 – is what they’ll remember most from 2009.

   Iowa State was down 68-61 with just over a minute left against the Spartans and … here’s how Lacey describes what happened then.

   “Seriously, we thought we’d lost it,” she acknowledged. “It was a lot to come back from. But we thought, ‘Why not press? Give it our best effort.’ And then Heather (Ezell) banks in a 3, we get a quick steal, our press – that we never run – works. We hit key shots … everything fell into place.”

   Yep, that’s pretty much what happened.  Except Lacey neglected to mention she made a 3-pointer in that 8-0 at the end of the game, which Iowa State won 69-68. Lacey, in fact, had a game-high 29 points that evening in Berkeley, Calif. But she didn’t talk about that … as I wrote about in an ESPN.com story during the WNBA Finals about Penny Taylor and Tully Bevilaqua, Aussies are not big on chatting about their individual play, but they love discussing their team.

  However, Lacey’s individual talent is indeed worth talking about.

  “I think if Alison is completely healthy for a year, she’s as good as any player in this league,” Fennelly said. “I really believe that. She’s our best player. She’s our point guard. She’s the leader of this team. It’s her team. And she wants it to be her team.”

  Indeed, when I asked them who did most of the “yelling” at the freshmen in practice, Bolte smiled and looked at Lacey, who said, “Oh, I do. It’s my job, so if they need it, I’ll do it.”

   Even though she’s not an “Iowa girl,” Lacey fits in so well on that timeline that goes back 11 decades for females playing basketball in that state.

  Oh, and one last cool “connection:” sitting a little ways down from the Iowa State duo on media day was the Nebraska contingent. Huskers coach Connie Yori won the six-on-six state championship as a star player at Ankeny High in Iowa in 1980, then lost the title game on a buzzer-beater in 1981.

  Just another piece from the remarkable puzzle of girls’ basketball’s history in Iowa.

    My thoughts about the move of the Detroit Shock to Tulsa are on ESPN.com now, and I’ll look at that more on that site and here later as well. 

  But here’s a question for readers/followers of women’s basketball in terms of media coverage. Essentially, it’s this: What are the things you most look for and find to be informative or insightful? I realize this is going to be a mixed bag, because people have very different views on these things. But I’d like to hear various opinions.

  Do you like the live chats we do on ESPN.com? Do you prefer more quick-hit blog entries on that site? What did think of Cover it Live, the interactive chat thing we did during the WNBA All-Star Game and WNBA Finals?

   I’ll be blogging for the Big 12 conference at its league media day in Kansas City on Wednesday. You can go on-line and read all the coaches’ comments in the press conferences because they will be transcribed. So what do you look for in blogging from an event like that?

  Just some background: I started writing a regular women’s basketball notebook in 1994 for the paper I was working at in Virginia. At that point, I’d covered the sport with game stories and features for a decade. The weekly notebook was a different outlet, but back then our newspaper did not have much Web presence. I never got a sense if anybody at all was reading the notebook.

  Nonetheless, I did it for a couple of years, then changed jobs and moved to the Kansas City Star in 1996. At that time, someone from ESPN told me that its Web site wanted to start a women’s basketball weekly presence, and that’s how I got started there. So this will be my 14th college season writing for ESPN.com.

  It’s strange how long ago 1996 seems in terms of things with the news-gathering industry. We didn’t know for sure then how the Internet would affect our business, but for an excellent look at that from a newspaper perspective, I refer you to this article. At any rate, back in ‘96 I usually wrote my weekly piece more in notebook style, trying to touch on several different conferences and matchups each time.

  As both the site and the women’s basketball audience grew, I stopped doing notebooks and focused more on columns and features. Writing “short” is not my strength, so the quick-hit blogs are actually the hardest for me. During the WNBA Finals, though, I was able to keep them to 10-12 inches ling (which to me is really small) and make whatever point I had quickly.

  This blog, which I started a year ago this month, has been more an opportunity for me to write essays, mostly on women’s basketball but also other women’s sports topics. And it also presents more of a direct way to communicate with readers because it doesn’t go through an outside editing process. For better or worse, it’s just me.

  I do scan message boards about women’s hoops topics and definitely take to heart readers’ suggestions or complaints I see on them. But I never have posted anything on any message board. The reason is that I always felt those were forums for readers and fans of the game. Some in the media feel differently and regularly post on those boards. And there are people who are fans and have their own blogs or contribute to web sites, and they post on boards, too.

  I don’t think there’s anything wrong with any of those options. I just think if I have something to say, I can say it here or on ESPN.com. But I really do like to hear what readers think about what we do. Because in the changing media world, it’s more important than ever to pinpoint and serve your interests.

     A few more thoughts as the WNBA season hands off to the college season …

    With the pro league’s season being done, we once again are in a waiting mode about various franchises. I just accept this is a part of the business, and perhaps will be for the foreseeable future. Economics being what they are, times are tougher even than usual for a niche sport still in the early decades of building its fan base.

   Indiana appears secure now, at least for 2010, thanks to the Fever’s success and the spectator response to that. But now eyes are on the viability of franchises in Detroit and Atlanta, while the good news is that investors in Tulsa really want a team.

  The best-case scenario is that Tulsa joins the league as a 14th team and no city loses its franchise. But if that’s not the case, the bottom line is that the WNBA will keep persevering. Losing the Houston Comets last year was a tough hit to take, but it didn’t sink the league. The WNBA came back in 2009 and had what few would argue were its best Finals to date.

   That doesn’t make it easier for Comets fans to deal with no longer having a team. And I could give them a pass if they needed to take a break from the WNBA in 2009. But if that were the case, I hope they come back.

  And I also hope that more and more folks who like women’s basketball start making a greater effort to watch and support the WNBA. It struck me during these Finals – perhaps more than ever before – how much I enjoy covering the professional game.

  The players are not just better-skilled and more experienced, they are also – for the most part – real grown-ups. They have had to live overseas – some of them in several different countries – and navigate their way in a foreign society with different customs. They have to manage their time and their finances in ways most of them never thought about while in college. They tend to offer insights that reflect more a feeling of global perspective than you might get from the average person in their age group.

  None of this means that covering college is any less enjoyable … to the contrary, it’s more so because I know the best of the people I get to follow in school are going to continue with their basketball journeys.

  But I sometimes feel this need to “stick up” for the WNBA in the very community of people who should be most supportive: women’s basketball followers and overall women’s sports followers. 

  I will hear things from readers such as, “The WNBA doesn’t have enough games on television, and so I just can’t get into it.” To that I say two things.

  First, even if it’s one game a week you get on TV, that’s certainly something. Besides, if you really want to watch, the games are available on-line. I know that isn’t appealing to people the same way television is, but the option is still there. 

  And second … well, it’s a story about my dad. He passed away in April of 1994, just a few weeks into baseball season. I was eating breakfast with him a couple of days before he died – when, of course, I didn’t know it would be one of the last times we would have a long conversation.

  We were talking about baseball, which we tended to do a lot and always had. But somehow, I’d never quite put the pieces of the puzzle fully together until that morning. My dad was born in 1915 and grew up on a farm about 40 miles from St. Louis. I knew he’d followed the Cardinals since he was a child, but hadn’t seen them play in person until he was older.

  This particular day we were discussing the Cardinals’ game of the night before. And my dad mentioned how, as a little boy, he used to get so excited running out to get the newspaper in the morning to see if the Cards had won the previous day. I said, “You mean when you didn’t hear the games on the radio?”

  And he explained that his family hadn’t always had a radio during his childhood. He couldn’t quite recall how old he was when they got one, but a least for a while, their only source of news was the newspaper. 

  It took me just a little while to process this. 

 ”Wait a minute,” I said. “You loved the Cardinals before you ever saw or heard a game? You were a fan just by what you read in the paper?”

  Indeed, that’s how it happened. He knew what baseball was from watching and playing it in his little town. But what the Cardinals and their games looked like … that was all created in his mind from reading about it. 

  So … I would tell anyone who says there aren’t enough WNBA games televised to pique or maintain your interest, just work at it a little harder. There are a lot of ways to connect to and follow the league. You don’t even have to use your imagination the way my dad once did.

   Have plenty of thoughts about the WNBA finals over on ESPN.com, but want to take the opportunity on the blog to follow up on the previous post about the Sunflower State connections in the series. 

  With Phoenix’s 94-86 victory over Indiana in Game 5 of the WNBA Finals, Kansas State grad Nicole Ohlde wins her first league title. Kansas grad Tamecka Dixon, a solid bench contributor for the Fever this season, wasn’t able to add to the two titles she won with Los Angeles.

  Dixon was still in good spirits after the game, as it seemed like most of the Fever players were disappointed but not necessarily devastated by the loss. I think they realized how well-played the series was and how tough a team Phoenix is for anyone to beat.

  As for the Mercury, one of the trades the team made preparing for a run at the 2009 title was bringing Ohlde in from Minnesota, where her only previous playoff experience was her rookie season in 2004. This summer, she came back from foot and wrist injuries and gave Phoenix some good minutes off the bench.

  Ohlde’s parents are experienced travelers from their days of following her at K-State. But with work commitments and a new grandchild back home in Kansas, they weren’t sure they could get to Phoenix for Game 5. When I asked after Game 4 if she thought her parents could make the trip to Arizona, Ohlde jokingly said she might be trumped by her new niece.

  However, in the joyful locker room of the Mercury after Friday’s game, Stan and Marlene Ohlde were indeed there with other family members of the team, celebrating with their daughter.

  ”I mean, it’s pretty indescribable,” Ohlde said. “I was just telling my mom and dad that, after never winning a playoff game before and then coming here and being around such amazing people, I am so happy.”

  Ohlde played in the NCAA Tournament three of her seasons at K-State, making the Sweet 16 as a sophomore, but then losing very tough second-round games as a junior and senior. After the Wildcats lost to Notre Dame in 2003, their locker room was one of the most despondent I’ve ever seen.

  And my vivid memory of the Wildcats’ loss at Minnesota in 2004 is of Ohlde, waiting to inbound the ball near the end of a blowout loss, knowing her college career was over. I recall the sad, weary way she looked … as if many disappointments were all hitting her at once.

  Of course, it’s not fair at all to say that there was really anything that “disappointing” about her days at K-State. She was a two-time All-American who helped change the whole way the Wildcat women’s basketball program was looked at. Yes, she and the Wildcats never got as far in the postseason as they hoped, but they gave fans many, many great moments.

  Ohlde is known for her smile, and it couldn’t have been bigger than it was on Friday night here in Phoenix.

  ”I have a lot of great memories at Kansas State and want to represent the school as well as I can,” she said. “This is for all the times we put in sweat and tears at (Bramlage Coliseum).

 She wants to be an even bigger contributor to the Mercury next season. 

  ”I’m going overseas right away, and I think it’s a matter of playing a lot of minutes over there to get back in my rhythm,” she said. “I hope to be injury-free, so when I come back here I can help these guys out more.”

   Ohlde is heading back home to Clay Center, Kan., for a few days with family and friends before leaving for her overseas commitment in Hungary. She wasn’t going to ride back with her parents, however. They had to return early Saturday … she still had a champions’ parade to attend in Phoenix.