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Document 4 of 7.

January 19, 1998

SECTION: HIGH SCHOOL BASKETBALL [BONUS PIECE]; Pg. 84

LENGTH: 5713 words

HEADLINE: Full-Court Press;
Schoolgirl basketball stars are being recruited as heavily as boys, and the techniques used by college coaches are often just as crass

BYLINE: Steve Lopez

BODY:
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.

GRAPHIC: COLOR PHOTO: MANNY MILLAN, BY THE START OF HER SENIOR YEAR, KRISTA WAS AWASH IN CATALOGS,, MEDIA GUIDES AND LOVE LETTERS FROM DIVISION I PROGRAMS, [Krista Gingrich surrounded by promotional material from colleges and universities]; COLOR PHOTO: JOHN BIEVER, TAMIKA'S SIZE, SPEED AND ATHLETICISM MADE COACHES DROOL, BUT HER, DESIRE TO PLEASE EVERYONE HAMPERED HER IN CHOOSING A COLLEGE, [Tamika Williams in game]; COLOR PHOTO: MANNY MILLAN, KRISTA LEARNED THAT THE CAMPS AND TOURNAMENTS ON THE SUMMER, CIRCUIT WERE THE PLACES TO IMPRESS COLLEGE COACHES, [Krista Gingrich in game]; COLOR PHOTO: DAVID LIAM KYLE, TAMIKA AND KRISTA LOVED THEIR VISIT TO SOUTH BEND, BUT WHETHER, TOUCHDOWN JESUS COULD CONVERT THEM TO NOTRE DAME WAS STILL NOT, CLEAR, [Tamika Williams and Krista Gingrich on University of Notre Dame campus]; COLOR PHOTO: JAN SONNENMAIR, TAMIKA (IN CLASS) SAYS ACADEMICS ARE HER TOP PRIORITY, BUT SHE'S, AWARE OF THE MONEY BEING WAVED BY PRO TEAMS AND SHOE COMPANIES, [Tamika Williams in classroom]; COLOR PHOTO: JAN SONNENMAIR, KRISTA, WHO IS INTERESTED IN GOING TO MEDICAL SCHOOL, GETS A, HEAD START BY TENDING TO HER ANKLES BEFORE A LEWISTOWN GAME, [Krista Gingrich rolling tape around her ankle]

LANGUAGE: ENGLISH

LOAD-DATE: January 25, 1998

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