| U of M Alumni Association | U of M Twin Cities |
 |
| ||
| |||
|
9/8/2003
Lindsay Whalen's face is a study in intensity. Her light brown hair is pulled back, framing her blazing hazel eyes. The 5-foot 8-inch point guard studies the target, aims, and knocks it down with the easy confidence that has enthralled fans and impressed critics during her three years as a Gopher women's basketball player. No one is better. This is no regular contest, however. This is an epic game—of Nintendo Duck Hunt—against housemate and former Gopher teammate Kim Nelson. Despite Whalen's constant stream of jokes and trash-talking, the stakes are high. The loser has to go to the kitchen to fetch more Mr. Freezes, the colorful frozen snack pops. Later in the summer, Whalen will travel to Croatia to play basketball. So for now she is happy to have the time to play video games. She is glad to hang out with friends, or head home to Hutchinson, Minnesota, to shoot a little golf and see her parents and four younger siblings. Mostly, she is happy not to wonder what changes another new coach—she's had three in three years—will bring. This fall, Pam Borton will run drills Whalen has already run and teach players a system Whalen has already learned. "There's relief," Whalen admits. "I'll have a better feel for what to expect; what the coaching staff expects." Whalen is as understated as she is positive. Leave it to her—head student in the lead-by-example school of optimism—to see the upside of the coaching carousel. "The more coaches we've had, the more styles we've had to adjust to. We actually have an advantage [because of it]. We've gotten a good feel for a lot of different styles of coaching." When Whalen was a freshman, the team was adrift in a sea of losses and stormy personality clashes under Cheryl Littlejohn, who declared herself the "big dog" and barked at players. Players looked to each other for support. "You have to stick together," says Nelson, a senior. "We needed to be able to trust each other when we didn't know what was going on." Littlejohn was let go for NCAA infractions (including making gifts to student athletes and violating practice time limits). When Whalen was a sophomore, Brenda Oldfield came to the Gophers and became, at age 31, the youngest head coach in the Big Ten. But she knew this about the game: It should be fun. Oldfield's system featured positive reinforcement and an up-tempo offense that both players and fans craved. The Gophers shocked Big Ten rivals, going 22-8 and advancing to the second round of the NCAA tournament. If opposing teams overlooked Whalen as a freshman, they could no longer. She streaked into record books. She reached 1,000 points faster than any Gopher woman ever; led the team in points, assists, and steals; and was named the Big Ten player of the year. Oldfield was named AP coach of the year but a month later took the coaching job at the University of Maryland, leaving shocked and crestfallen Gophers in her wake. Like many, Whalen was upset and hurt. But like they had before during adversity, the Gophers drew together and used their disappointment as motivation. "I haven't looked at the box score," Whalen told the Twin Cities press, "but I don't think she [Oldfield] played very many minutes for us this year." When Whalen was a junior, Pam Borton observed the athlete's set-jaw self-reliance. Borton met with the Gopher players when she interviewed for the Gopher coaching job and was left with the impression that Whalen and her teammates followed their own North Star. "I don't think she cared who her coach was," Borton says of Whalen. "She knew they were going to win." Coach Borton brought defense back to the Gophers, dumping Oldfield's zone game and introducing players to the more arduous one-on-one scheme. "I think she [Whalen] was challenged
By the start of the 2002-03 Big Ten season, players put the pieces together. With a stingier defense, the Gophers found the ball in their hands more often. When it was in Whalen's hands, fans—7,800 of them on average—knew not to blink. "Explosive," Borton calls Whalen's moves. And, "acrobatic." Sometimes Whalen anticipates so well, it seems she sees the highlight reel before the tip-off. She smells opponents' passes and picks them off with the soft hands of an NFL cornerback. She dashes down court and spins no-look, behind-the-back passes to teammates. She drives fearlessly into the paint, freelancing her way past traffic to the hoop, finally finger-rolling the ball into the bucket. "She is like a hummingbird," says former Minnesota Lynx player and FOX commentator Andrea Lloyd Curry. "She is just moving along and then BANG! She changes speed or direction and your senses can't keep up." Lloyd Curry traces that lightning-fast playmaking to Whalen's body control, ability to process information on the fly, and hand-eye coordination. "I would guess that Lindsay has had a ball of some sort in her hands most of her life," she says. "It begins to become a part of you, like breathing. If you don't have to worry about the ball, you have a huge advantage." At the end of the season, Whalen was unanimously named a first-team all-Big Ten player. * Whalen's first "ball" was a puck. Her father, Neil, used to take her along when he coached hockey. Before long, she wanted to play. She learned how to skate, shoot, and manage the constant transitions of the game. "The first time I ever played basketball with Linds was in a fifth-grade tournament," recalls Emily Inglis, a pal since she and Whalen were in kindergarten together. "We needed another player and asked her to play. She was playing hockey at the time. She pulled out a left reverse lay-up with her right hand." Hutchinson, population 13,000, is the kind of place with a grassy square, a red popcorn wagon in the middle of town, and a giant clock atop the jewelry store along Main Street, and you can see storms coming for hours before drops splatter the windshield. When rain threatened, Inglis and Whalen headed to the basement, where they held dunking contests on mini-hoops, played a stunted version of hockey they called "kneeball," and shot home-movie spin-offs of America's Funniest Home Videos. "Lindsay was the host and the whole thing was basically ad-lib. I honestly don't think I ever said a word," Inglis recalls. A poster of Charles Barkley hung in Whalen's bedroom. As a grade school and junior high student, she would watch televised basketball games and then go out in the backyard and replay the matchup. Year-round, she would draw up detailed brackets and play out real and imagined tournaments, starring for each team. "I was picking paper up all over the yard," Neil Whalen recalls. During high school, Whalen had to be the first one in the gym on game day, says her mother, Kathy: "If you were there 15 minutes early, you were late." When Whalen began playing Amateur Athletic Union basketball after her sophomore year in high school, she caught the eye of recruiters. She was a junior before she realized she could—and wanted to—play college ball. Now her sights are setting beyond the gloss-varnished "M" in the center of the Barn. "As a freshman, I just wanted to play for a Division I team. I wanted to have 'Minnesota' written across my chest," says Whalen. "Now, I want to play in the WNBA. I think the women's game can get better as it evolves. I want to be part of that." Named a Kodak All-American
Borton wants Whalen to develop her mid-range game, become a better outside shooter, and keep an eye on those low-percentage decisions she sometimes makes. She also wants her to know that she doesn't have to do it alone. Dominating center Janel McCarville, a junior, is back. So are starters senior Kadidja Andersson and sophomore Shannon Schonrock and top reserve Tanisha Gilbert, a junior. The Gophers also have three incoming players who comprise what some experts call one of the 10 best recruiting classes in the nation. Not that anyone really expects the double-teams and full-court presses to get to Whalen. She's got what Lloyd Curry calls "emotional competence." If you watch very closely, you can see Whalen's eyes glow after smashing home a particularly satisfying fast break. She wants to grin, to throw up her arms in jubilation, to celebrate. But she won't. She wears a poker face. "You do not see her allow emotions to get in the way," Lloyd Curry says. "She is able to deal with the stress and pressure, the excitement, the anger of a bad call, all without letting her game suffer." And, despite her focus on basketball, Whalen has managed not to allow her studies to suffer either. A sports management major with a 3.23 G.P.A., Whalen was named a third-team academic All-American this past season, becoming the first Gopher women's basketball player to earn academic all-American acclaim. "Her love is basketball, but she has as high a commitment to her grades as basketball," says Neil Whalen. "She knows basketball isn't going to last forever and she needs a degree." Once the Nikes are unlaced, though, the story is different. No one in Whalen's vicinity is safe from her dry, witty, silly, or dorky—depending on the moment—sense of humor. Stoic on the court, Whalen is a clown off it. She makes faces at teammates while coaches are talking and wears mismatched outfits, big hats, and sunglasses when it's cloudy in winter. "We're always joking about mullets," roommate Nelson says of the hairstyle, sometimes called "hockey hair," that is short on the sides and long in back. "Last year we bought mullet wigs at Ragstock. She wore hers to the shoot-around at Wisconsin. Then she wore it to give a speech on mullets in a class [she argued in favor of mullets]. Normal people would save it for Halloween, but she wears it any day of the week." Despite the fact that she is so rhythm-impaired she can barely clap to a beat, Whalen makes up rap rhymes for the outgoing message on her cell phone ("I'm not in the mall/I'm not in a bathroom stall . . ."). "She's very, very funny," says Kathy Whalen. "A lot of people who see her on the floor would never get that." But those who see Whalen on the floor get plenty. They get to see an unusual brand of unselfishness. They get to feel the buzz when Whalen breaks into the open court. They get to see an intense, 5-8 point guard with blazing eyes, unbound by the laws of gravity. When Lindsay Whalen is on the floor, they get up out of their seats. Robyn Dochterman is a Minneapolis writer and editor. | |||||||||||||||||||
|
Last modified on 11/16/2004 12:49:17 PM ©2009 by the University of Minnesota Alumni Association. The University of Minnesota Alumni Association is an equal opportunity educator and employer. | Trouble seeing the text? | Contact Alumni Association | Privacy |
Print View
