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There were plenty of both at the Big East championship game between Connecticut and Seton Hall on March 6, and even though the game was in South Orange, New Jersey, the gymnasium was clearly in the throes of blue-and-white Huskiemania. An 11-year-old girl, Caitlin DeAngelis, wore a Connecticut T shirt and a handmade necklace of tiny wooden boxes whose letters spelled UCONN HUSKIES WOMEN. Caitlin, who traveled from Willimantic, Connecticut, with her parents and three brothers, said, "My favorite player is Jennifer Rizotti. We're both short, and we're both Italian."
The heart of the Huskies, though, is Lobo, who has averaged 17.3 points, 10.1 rebounds and 3.5 blocks a game. Her personal story is even more compelling than her stats. If Lobo, whose parents are both educators, receives the Rhodes scholarship for which she has applied, she will undoubtedly be the first woman Rhodes scholar who: 1) made basketball All-America; 2) played the saxophone; and 3) spent five summers during her teens working in the tobacco fields of Southwick, Massachusetts. The tobacco work was tough, but Lobo did it to test her own dedication. Her inner strength has been put to a different challenge over the past two years during her mother RuthAnn's fight with breast cancer. The cancer is now in remission, and when both parents escorted Rebecca out to center court for Senior Night on Feb. 22, the fans cheered as much for RuthAnn as for her daughter.
Connecticut may be wild about the Huskies, but no state is as crazy about women's basketball as Tennessee, which sent four teams to stop Connecticut in the tournament: Tennessee, Vanderbilt, Tennessee State and Memphis State. Summitt has taken her team to the tourney 12 times in 20 years, and she won three NCAA titles between 1987 and 1991. Back in '75, she was Pat Head, and she had to drive the team bus. Now, Summitt is so cherished that she earns an annual salary of $118,000, not counting a shoe contract, a car and her own radio show. There was even talk last year that she should take over the Tennessee men's team.
Like their counterparts in men's basketball, the women's coaches have to do a lot of recruiting. But Summitt once had a recruiting experience Bobby Knight will never have. Four years ago, while the then pregnant coach was visiting Marciniak's home in Allentown, Pennsylvania, Summitt's water broke. She flew home to Knoxville, where she gave birth to her son Tyler. But she didn't deliver the point guard until Marciniak decided to transfer after her freshman year at Notre Dame.
Whatever the outcome of this year's tournament, the real winner is the sport, which--23 years after Title IX mandated equal opportunities for women--has come into its own without sacrificing ethics. "For years," says Greenberg, "I took a lot of ridicule for covering the women: 'Hey, Mel, what's it like in a girls' locker room?'- stupid stuff like that. But now my friends talk about Rebecca Lobo the way they did last year about Grant Hill. We're finally getting some respect here."
That's R-E-S-P-E-C-T.
--Reported by Sharon E. Epperson/South Orange and Elisabeth Kauffman/Knoxville