Basketball: Women

New champs, Stiles and knees mark year in hoops

 "It was kind of disconcerting at first," said McGraw, the women's basketball coach at Notre Dame. "You'd be out shopping and people were constantly stopping you to say, 'Congratulations.'

 "It's really great that so many people knew who we were. On the other hand, it is kind of different."

 Ah, the demands of fame. Not that McGraw is complaining. Nothing can replace the thrill of that Sunday night in St. Louis when Notre Dame beat Purdue 68-66 in an all-Indiana final to win its first national championship.

 Five months later, the WNBA had a first-time champion in the Los Angeles Sparks, who ended the Houston Comets' four-year hold on the title.

 The year in women's basketball also will be remembered for Jackie Stiles, who enthralled fans with her scoring and gritty play during Southwest Missouri State's improbable run to the Final Four.

 And, sadly, it was a year marked by screams of pain. Dozens of players, including All-Americans Tamika Catchings and Shea Ralph, went down with torn knee ligaments.

 The WNBA wasn't immune, either. Houston star Sheryl Swoopes, the league's MVP the year before, missed the entire season because of a torn anterior cruciate ligament.

 Notre Dame kept everyone healthy and that was critical for the Irish because they had little depth. Led by center Ruth Riley, they finished 34-2, tied Connecticut for the Big East title and swept the top awards. Riley was the national player of the year, McGraw the coach of the year.

 Along the way, Notre Dame ended Connecticut's 30-game winning streak with a 92-76 victory in South Bend and a week later, the Irish became No. 1 in The AP poll for the first time.

 McGraw began thinking it could be a special season much earlier, when the Irish beat sixth-ranked Georgia in the fourth game.

 "We were playing so well so early," she said. "I was worried we were going to peak too soon. But that was when I thought, 'You know what, we could be pretty good. We could make it to the Final Four.'

 "When we beat Connecticut, I thought we could actually be national champions."

 Connecticut had started the season as the favorite but was dealt a blow when All-American Svetlana Abrosimova was sidelined in February by a torn ligament in her left foot. A month later, Ralph sustained the second torn ACL of her career against Notre Dame in the Big East tournament.

 The Huskies still made it to the Final Four, where they lost to Notre Dame 90-75 in the semifinals.

 "For Connecticut to lose two seems almost unfair," McGraw said. "People said we were a team of destiny."

 Stiles broke the NCAA career scoring record in early March, then became the most compelling story in the NCAA tournament even with everything Notre Dame accomplished.

 In games against Rutgers, Duke and Washington, all seeded higher than Southwest Missouri State, Stiles rang up point totals of 32, 41 and 32. She finally ran out of gas at the Final Four and Purdue beat the Lady Bears 81-64 in the semifinals. Stiles scored 22 to run her career total to 3,393 points.

 "The way she handled herself with such grace and class was remarkable," Oklahoma coach Sherri Coale said. "For her to go out in the Final Four, to play in that venue, it was right. That was how it should be."

 The Sparks made it a pro basketball double for Los Angeles, following the Lakers' NBA title with their own impressive playoff run. They swept Houston in two games, beat Sacramento 2-1 in the Western Conference finals and beat Charlotte 2-0 in the finals, finishing with an 82-54 victory.

 "It was like a big sigh of relief," guard Tamecka Dixon said. "For four years, Houston held the championship in Houston. For once, it's out of Houston's hands and it's in ours.

 "It feels really good, especially knowing that since the beginning of the WNBA, people have been saying the Sparks should have won the championship. It adds a little bit more to it knowing that."

 Los Angeles center Lisa Leslie was voted the league's most valuable player. Sparks coach Michael Cooper, who played on five NBA title teams with the Lakers in the 1980s, became the first to win championships in both leagues.

 "He was able to draw from that experience with the Lakers and somehow correlate that for us," Dixon said. "He put us in situations that would make us successful."

 Notre Dame's victory over Connecticut was one of two significant events on Jan. 15. In Knoxville, Tenn., Catchings, the national player of the year in 2000, tore her right ACL and was done for the season.

 Hers was one in a series of such injuries during the year. The St. Louis Post-Dispatch reported that at least 95 Division I players missed all or part of the 2000-01 season with torn ACLs, a list that included prominent players such as Oregon's Shaquala Williams, Louisiana Tech's Catrina Frierson, Old Dominion's Lucienne Berthieu and Stanford's Susan King.

 The injuries haven't stopped this season. Two Oklahoma players already are out with torn ACLs: Jen Cunningham, who had it happen for the fourth time, and Antoinette Wadsworth, who was injured as she was jumping.

 "I said to my assistants, she disappeared," Coale said. "Here she goes up and all of a sudden she disappears. You know then it's an ACL. That's sort of the way that injury is. You don't hobble for a while and fall. You just disappear."