This was supposed to be a story about how well everything has been going for Duke's freshmen. How Alana Beard had pretty much made the ACC Rookie of the Week award her own personal property, how she and Iciss Tillis had started every game for the Blue Devils thus far, how Rometra Craig had been such a valuable asset off the bench.
|  | | Coach G has surrounded herself with some excellent freshmen. From upper right: Crystal White, Alana Beard, Vicki Krapohl, Rometra Craig and Iciss Tillis. |
Yeah, it was gonna be all about how the only major problem the three have faced thus far was homesickness. Talked to the kids, got it all written, just needed to update statistics after Thursday's game and ...
Found out Beard is out three to four weeks with a dislocated thumb.
Sigh.
Don't look so glum, one of my pals at work said. My story just got torpedoed by a thumb, I said.
But ... at least it's not the freakin' you-know-what. So let's salvage this thing.
Beard suffered the injury when she was fouled after a steal near the end of the first half in the Devils' victory over N.C. State on Thursday. She was taken to the hospital and had surgery about 2 a.m. that morning.
Beard, who was making a heck of a case for being the country's top rookie in a great year for freshmen, probably will be back quicker than three to four weeks if she has anything to say about it.
In the meantime, Duke's Gail Goestenkors is doing the proper coach thing: trying to find the bright spot.
"I look for us to get better as a team," Goestenkors said. "We found out (Thursday night) in the second half that we've been standing around, we've been watching her play and create things. I hope maybe we'll be a much better team when she comes back."
Then Goestenkors laughed ruefully.
"That's my positive spin on things," she said.
There is no good time for something like this to happen -- well, actually, May wouldn't have been all that horrible -- but as Goestenkors said, "This is a very bad time."
The 17-1 Devils' next game is against one of their traditionally most difficult road opponents: Virginia. And it so happens that the Devils were in this same spot last season: going into Charlottesville having just lost one of their best players to injury.
It was worse last season, though, because the player was senior Peppi Browne and the injury was ... that stupid ligament I've already written enough about recently.
"My heart just broke last year, because that was it for Peppi," Goestenkors said. "It was so hard. This is bad, but we know Alana's going to be back this year and she's got a great career ahead of her."
Yes, she does and so do her mates Tillis and Craig. And this is where we'll go back to the original tale as I intended to tell it. Each was asked earlier in the week about the beginning of the path that eventually led to Duke.
Beard thought for a second about her childhood athletic career and proclaimed it "wasn't anything that memorable."
Tillis recalled being a seventh-grader promoted to a summer-league team of 18-year-olds and how that "frightened me to death."
Craig knows everyone familiar with her lineage assumes her father, former NFL running back Roger Craig, handed down the genes to sports success. But much as she adores Dad and relies on him for training trips, Craig announced, "Honestly, I got my athletic ability from my mom. But no one believes me."
These three young women -- one from the South, one from the Midwest and one from the West Coast -- have found themselves together on the East Coast.
Now, it's not to say that they wouldn't be at Duke anyway. But you look at this Duke freshman class -- it also includes Crystal White and Vicki Krapohl -- and think back to the March night in 1999 when the Blue Devils officially arrived on the national scene by beating Tennessee in the East Regional final.
With everything else the school had to sell to potential recruits, it's immeasurable the value of being able to drop the words "Final Four" into a conversation.
Yet it's one thing for a freshmen class to be ranked high by so-called recruiting gurus, to be assigned a respected pedigree before even doing anything in college. That's all nice, but there was something much more striking about this class.
"They came in in the best shape. That usually doesn't happen with freshmen," Goestenkors said. "These kids came in making a statement."
Beard (16.8 ppg) and Tillis (9.0 ppg) both started the first 18 games for the Devils. Craig (7.6) has been so effective off the bench that Goestenkors is not sure now whether Craig will start in Beard's absence or continue to be the sparkplug coming in, with Missy West starting.
Duke already has two other senior starters. You've heard more about Georgia Schweitzer, last season's ACC player of the year. Rochelle Parent has had to put up with being "the other kid from Ohio," or being confused with another undersized warrior, her former teammate Browne.
Yet Iowa State's 6-foot-4 Angie Welle, one of the top centers in the country, said that the 6-0 Parent played the best defense on her of anybody this season. Perhaps not coincidentally, the Cyclones' only loss thus far was to Duke.
West is the Devils' other senior, and she's been through the ringer with injuries.
Goestenkors knew the character of these three, yet she was still just a little worried over how they and the other Devils might accept the large role the freshmen were going to play this season.
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They came in in the best shape. That usually doesn't happen with freshmen. These kids came in making a statement. ” |
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— Duke's Gail Goestenkors |
Turns out she didn't have to be worried.
"They know we need them," Goestenkors said. "And the type of people (the freshmen) are, they've made it easy.
"It was just very natural for everybody. Rochelle and Georgia have always been known as the hardest workers, and Missy, too. The freshmen came in and matched them in work ethic right away. And when you have respect of the seniors, there's not a whole lot anybody else is going to say."
Beard has been the superstar, if you will, thus far. At 5-9, it's hard to point out what she does well because ... "She does everything very, very well," Goestenkors said. "As good as she is an offensive player, she's that good defensively, too. You just don't see
that in a freshman.
"She's a money player; every time we've played a ranked team, her scoring average has gone up. When we've had a close game, she takes over."
Beard has won the ACC rookie of the week award five times; after a 33-point game at Maryland last week, she won both the player and rookie weekly honors from the league.
In the victory over the Terps, she was 10 of 10 from the field in the second half.
"Really?" Beard said. "I thought I'd missed a few."
Beard's earliest athletic memories were from about sixth grade, when she played football with her brothers at home in Louisiana.
"Tackle football," she says, a little shyly. "I was scared to get hit, but I always took it."
Actually, almost everything Beard says sounds a little shy. She is loathe to admit, in fact, that most people mispronounce her first name.
It's a-LANE-uh, not a-LON-uh. Yet this tells you a lot about the kid: She seems to think it's rather rude and poor form to tell anyone if they say it wrong.
"Oh, I don't care," she said. "I answer to either one. I hate to correct people."
Speaking of names, Iciss Tillis got hers, she says, from a fictional character and not the goddess. Yet you'd be hard-pressed to find anybody who sounds more like a goddess than Tillis does. She has the kind of resonant, authoritative-yet-pleasant voice that
makes you think she could be narrating documentaries some day, kind of a female James Earl Jones. She doesn't sound like she's 19 -- but nor does she play like she's 6-4.
"Since I was young, I've always liked to play outside on the perimeter," Tillis said. "My body size doesn't enable me to do it much. It's something I've really struggled with: wanting to be a perimeter player but having to play inside."
Goestenkors is willing to work with Tillis on achieving her goal of being a 3 (small forward) eventually. For one thing, Tillis is such a good 3-point shooter (19 of 42, 45.2 percent) that there's a lot of advantage to having her out there.
For another, the offense Duke plays -- in which there's so much fluidity between positions that the "name" of the position doesn't really matter much -- also lends itself to Tillis being on the perimeter.
For now, though, she's officially a 5, the big-kid spot. She'll deal with it, just as she deals with a far bigger problem right now: acute
homesickness.
Three Dog Night sang, "Well, I've never been to heaven, but I've been to Oklahoma."
It's not very likely anyone would confuse the two, although Tillis might argue with you about that. Tulsa, her hometown, seems a little more heavenly now than perhaps it used to.
"When you're choosing a college, you're like, 'I want to get away from home,' " Tillis said. "And then you get away and you really miss it."
Specifically, she misses her mother, a tower of strength and compassion and spirituality. Her biological father is the former boxer James Tillis. But her stepfather, Jesse Morris, is the one she calls "Dad."
"My mom remarried when I was 9, and my stepdad -- he's like the greatest guy in the entire world," Tillis said. "But before then, it was just me and my mom. For that period of time, we were inseparable. I'm sad about not being able to see her every day.
"It's like the times you're on the court, you're not thinking about it as much. But after a game, your mom has always been there for you. It's something ephemeral out on court, but afterwards, I think, 'I want to share all this with my mom.' "
That homesicknesss -- or, specifically, I-want-my-mom sorrow -- has affected all three of them. And if one starts tearing up ... pretty soon you've got three times the salt water.
"My family came for Thanksgiving, and I cried like a baby," Beard said. "But during Christmas, I think I grew up. I didn't cry as much and I was ready to come back and play."
Craig, from Portola Valley, Calif., is the one who came furthest to Duke and immediately bonded with Beard and Tillis.
"In the beginning, we sort of called ourselves the three amigos," said Craig, who is not only adjusting to being away from her parents but also her six siblings. "And Alana is my roommate, so after practice she's always there to talk to. But we're all three there for each other and we help each other if one of us is having a hard time."
Craig has already been a national champion at another sport -- taekwondo -- and was good enough to consider an Olympic future in that. But basketball, especially the team aspect, was more appealing to her. Some day, she may return to taekwondo -- "You can do that until you're, like, 40" -- and in the meantime she still applies what she learned from it in terms of discipline and concentration.
Having torn her freakin' thing-I'm-not-going-to-say last spring, Craig still played in a high school all-star game and then rehabbed to be ready for this season.
Her dad, she said, taught her about both mental and physical preparation.
"It was just amazing, how focused he was," Craig said. "I used to run in the hills with him; he'd sprint the whole way up the hill. I'd finish like an hour after him. He's really dedicated."
Craig also says her mother "knows a lot about sports, because she ran track. She would always say, 'Come on, you know you can do better than that.' "
Coaches have to figure out what to say to get what they need, and Goestenkors already has a good gauge on these three.
Go ahead and let Beard have it. She's very hard on herself, but prefers the coaches to be just as hard.
"Every time I've yelled at her," Goestenkors said, "she's gone out and been phenomenal."
Tillis probably would prefer, say, some kind of gather-around-Plato debate and discussion of theories on why we feel compelled to engage in physical competition ... but can probably deal OK with, "Iciss, shut up, get on the block for 5 seconds and stop that giant klutz."
Craig, however, is the most sensitive player on the team, Goestenkors said. Yelling is not the most effective tactic with her.
Such are the things all coaches must learn. What's so irritating for them, though, is that they can do everything else right -- and still can't keep kids from getting hurt.
Beard is almost sure to be a prominent figure in Duke's record books by the time she's done. We'll already create a stat for her. Most steals by a player with a dislocated thumb: one.
Beard missed her free throw after getting fouled, then got another steal.
"I could see her shaking her hand and pulling her thumb," Goestenkors said. "I had no idea it was that bad or I wouldn't have let her stay out there."
Beard acknowledged, before the injury, that something she needed to work on was patience -- with herself.
"I'm looking at expanding every aspect of my game," Beard said. "I was talking to (assistant coach) Joanne Boyle, she told me, 'You've got a lot of time.' So I'm working on slowing down, but I want things to happen so fast."
Now Beard has no choice to slow down a bit. And the Devils have no choice but to get things done without her. After going to Virginia, the Blue Devils face archrival North Carolina in Chapel Hill on Jan. 25 and then play host to the only team that's beaten them so far, Clemson, on Jan. 28.
So, no, it's certainly not the best time for Duke to be without Beard. But, hey, this story still got told despite the thumb, and likewise the Devils will navigate the next few weeks as best they can.
Beard's injury is a bump, not a detour. It certainly doesn't change Goestenkors' assessment of her freshmen: "This is a special group."
Mechelle Voepel of the Kansas City Star is a regular contributor to ESPN.com. She can be reached via e-mail at mvoepel@kcstar.com.
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