Makin' Moves
March 16, 2004 11:48 PM | General
March 17, 2004
MORGANTOWN, W.Va. – Often West Virginia University point guard Yolanda Paige has defenders at her mercy. She breaks them down with moves that would make Soul Train’s Don Cornelius jealous. Most of the time Yolanda is not even sure what she’s going to do and then, bam, she zips a pass right by someone’s ear to a streaking teammate for an easy lay up.
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| Yolanda Paige scored 24 points and handed out a Big East tournament-record 14 assists against St. John's. (AP photo) |
Senior Kate Bulger admits she sometimes finds herself watching Yolanda in amazement while they’re out on the floor. As a personal rule, senior forward Michelle Carter always plays with her hands up because Paige once nearly gave Carter a bloody nose when she whipped one of her laser beams between two players during practice.
Now after playing more than 50 games with Paige, most of the time Carter is ready, “Yesterday in practice I didn’t even know she was going to throw the ball because it was between two players. I was going to go up and rebound the shot and all of the sudden she puts the ball right in my hands and I put it in the basket. I was like, ‘Okay Yolanda, good job.’”
What basketball fans see Yolanda Paige do during games is just a fraction of what she is actually capable of doing. Every single one of her teammates has a different Yolanda Paige story from practice.
“I’m out there watching her and I thought she passed the ball to someone totally different,” said Sherell Sowho, who possesses a pretty sweet playground game herself. “I’m watching over here and someone is over there shooting a lay up. It’s hard to describe; it faked me out so you can just imagine what the defender was thinking.”
“If you’re open Yolanda is going to get you the ball,” added Kate Bulger. “You can’t find yourself watching her because the next thing you know the ball is coming your way.”
It’s too easy to simply say that Yolanda Paige plays like a guy because that really doesn’t do her game justice. There are a lot of guys out there (some even playing college basketball) that would love to be able to do some of the things she does on the basketball court.
Paige says her fancy moves came about playing at Shoop Park just a block down the street from her grandmother’s house in Norfolk, Va.
A typical summer afternoon day for Yolanda and her younger cousin Rod Wiggins was to take their basketballs and go down to the neighborhood park where they joined 40-some other kids fighting for the chance to play on the park’s only court. Many times they stayed all day long.
Because she was the only girl and was also one of the littlest players, Yolanda knew she had to come up with the kind of game that was going to get her noticed by the other neighborhood boys. That’s where the moves came from.
“I always liked playing with the boys because they were better and they played rougher,” she said.
Because Carey was hired in the spring, the Mountaineers got off to a late recruiting start and only found out about Paige a couple of months before the start of school.
West Virginia was coming off a miserable 5-22 season and Carey was desperately looking for players. Not only was Paige raw but she was also in horrible shape. When Yolanda arrived on campus as a freshman she could hardly make it down the court before she gave out, her lungs on fire.
That’s when Sowho began calling her “Weezie.”
“Even though she was struggling I knew she was going to be a soldier and I knew once she got into shape she was going to do something for this program,” said Sowho.
Carey saw right away that Yolanda had extraordinary talent even if sometimes her decisions on the court weren’t always the best. He also knew she had to get into better shape and he came up with an ingenious way of doing that: he never took her out of the game.
“That’s just Coach Carey’s way of getting back at me,” laughs Paige.
Of a possible 1,120 minutes in 28 games during Paige’s freshman year, Yolanda played in all but 74 of them. Put another way she played almost 94 percent of the time.
Yolanda made mistakes, many times passing the ball to the wrong player on the break or pushing the ball when she should be slowing it down and running clock. Sometimes Carey, who spent 13 years coaching men’s college basketball at Salem, sat down in his chair and just rode it out. And then there were other times when he couldn’t take it any more and let her have it.
Paige averaged 11.4 points per game as a freshman, handed out 153 assists and had 109 turnovers. The Mountaineers won 14 games and had a .500 record for the first time in five years.
Once again last year Paige played the majority of the minutes, although Carey was able to rest her some with the development of backup point guard Ashley Dunn. Paige averaged double figures for a second straight season and handed out 45 more assists while turning the basketball over 34 fewer times.
The long season wore down Paige and after an impressive 11-0 start, the Mountaineers only won five of their remaining 18 games to finish with a 15-13 record. In the conference tournament Paige had nothing left.
“I just wanted to go home and sleep after the season was over,” said Paige.
But she was making better decisions and Carey thought that with the continued development of Dunn this year he was going to be able to give Paige more rest and keep her legs fresh at the end of the season.
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| Paige is one of just two players in school history to score more than 900 points and hand out more than 500 assists for her career. (Bob Stowell photo) |
Then seven games into this year Dunn came into Carey’s office and told him that she was giving up the sport to concentrate on academics. At the time Paige was averaging about 30 minutes per game.
The first game without Dunn Paige played all 45 minutes of an overtime loss at Delaware State. She has rarely come out of the game since then. Of 1,245 minutes this year Paige has played 1,187 of them. That’s 95 percent of the time and Carey really has no other choice.
In Yolanda’s three seasons at WVU, she has played a grand total of 3,190 out of a possible 3,485 minutes. Go find a player anywhere else in the country that has played a higher percentage of their team’s games than Paige. Remarkably, she has yet to foul out either.
“For a player like Yolanda who plays as many minutes as she does and to keep her composure is great,” said Carter. “I don’t know if there are many people who can play as much as she does and be as effective as she is. She is one of our most durable players.”
And while athleticism is the first thing people talk about with Paige, it is her amazing durability that is probably her most impressive attribute. It is also the one thing she has most in common with former WVU All-American point guard Rosemary Kosiorek -- the measuring stick for all West Virginia point guards.
Like Paige, Kosiorek had to play all of the time logging 986 minutes her freshman season and playing more than 1,000 minutes as a senior. Kosiorek averaged more than 24 points per game in 1992 in leading West Virginia to the NCAA Sweet 16; both of WVU’s previous NCAA appearances came with Rosemary running the point.
Paige and Kosiorek are the only two players in school history to score more than 900 points and hand out more than 500 assists. Paige is about to join Kosiorek in the 1,000-point club and she has already broke Kosiorek’s single-season assist record this year with 246 and counting. Paige is just two assists shy of 600 for her career and should have Kosiorek’s career record of 725 assists sometime during her senior season if she stays healthy.
The one major difference between the two is Rosemary was a much more prolific scorer and a better shooter than Yolanda is now. Paige understands that improving her shooting range is the one thing she has to work on to have a complete game.
MSN’s Jay Jacobs, the one person who has watched both of them play, offers this comparison: “Going baseline to baseline Yolanda might be better with the ball than Rosemary,” he said. “In transition Rosemary always seemed to make the right decision. If there were players on each wing on the break she always got the ball to the correct person who could finish.
“The offense went through Rosemary as it does today with Yolanda,” he added. “Both of them are spectacular players. Yolanda is probably a little quicker than Rosemary getting into the lane but Rosemary could always make the big play and she could always visualize the game two or three plays ahead of where it really was. She just had that knack.”
Jacobs admits that Kosiorek was more a lead guard often looking for her shot first. Kosiorek was great at creating offense from her defense gambling for steals and getting easy lay ups.
Jacobs points out that Kosiorek also had the benefit of a 1,600-point career scorer in the paint in Donna Abbott to finish off plays and keep defenses honest. Paige hasn’t been able to play with a post player yet as skilled as Abbott.
On the other hand, it can be argued that Yolanda has played against much tougher competition. When Kosiorek was at WVU the Mountaineers were in the Atlantic 10 when the conference’s three toughest teams were Rutgers, George Washington and St. Joseph’s.
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Paige faced seven NCAA tournament teams and national champion UConn in the Big East last year as a sophomore; this season the conference sent a record eight teams to the Dance.
That eighth team was West Virginia and a major reason why is Yolanda Paige.
Needing to win at least two Big East tournament games in Hartford, Conn., to get into the NCAAs, Paige turned up her game a notch and in the process got the attention of Connecticut basketball fans with her outstanding play. She was three rebounds and two steals away from a quadruple double in a first-round game against St. John’s. She scored a game-high 24 points and handed out a conference tournament-record 14 assists against the Red Storm, and followed that up with 16 points and six rebounds in a quarterfinal win against No. 23 Villanova.
Paige became the first WVU player to be named to the Big East all-tournament team and spent a good deal of the time between tournament games signing autographs for young Connecticut girls who know good players when they see them.
Paige says her goal wasn’t to be noticed at the Big East tournament, “The main thing I was trying to do was to get some wins and go to the championship game,” she shrugged. “If I did well then that was a plus.”
The time for her to really shine and get noticed is now in the NCAA tournament. She will get the opportunity to do just that before a national television audience against Ohio State in a first-round game Saturday morning.
“The Big East tournament is the Big East tournament,” she said. “This is the time to do it.”
What better way for Yolanda Paige to show off some of her fancy moves than in the Big Dance? Don Cornelius stay tuned.
