Organization Keeps Helm on Right Track : Basketball: Single mother, 36, has found way to care for her five children, take classes at Rancho Santiago and participate in sports.

Forget the turnaround jump shot and the no-look pass. The toughest move for Susan Helm, a forward on Rancho Santiago College’s women’s basketball team, is slightly more delicate.

It’s known as the tuck-in.

Helm is a 36-year-old sophomore. If that’s not unusual enough, she has several other matters--five daughters to be exact--to attend to during an average day. In her most important role, Helm is a single mother.

When classes are over, the homework is finished, the dishes are washed and the laundry is clean, her toughest job starts: getting five energetic girls to bed.

“Nights are the hardest because I want to make sure they can talk to me,” Helm said. “We reinforce each other. It does take a long time to get them to bed.”

But compared to the other problems that Helm has faced, she considers tucking her children into bed a joy.

After 15 years of marriage, Helm was divorced in 1988. It was a difficult time, but her children helped pull her through. Looking at Sarah, 13, Karen, 12, Lisa, 10, and twins Katie and Rebecca, 8, helped Helm see the brighter side. She kept telling herself, “If I’m so bad, how could I have these five kids?”

Helm, a 1972 graduate of Tustin High, married one year after high school. Her only college experience, she said, was “a few night classes.”

She enrolled at Rancho Santiago for the 1988 fall semester. And after returning to school, things started looking up for Helm. She ended up on the court, however, only because she was looking down.

After leaving a computer class one day in October, 1988, Helm saw a flyer taped to the sidewalk announcing tryouts for the basketball team. Although she had only one year of organized basketball experience as a high school senior, she decided to meet with the coach. “I thought to myself, ‘Maybe I can keep stats or something,’ ” she said.

Coach Myrond Brown met with Helm and convinced her to work out with the team for a while. At her first practice, Brown saw some shooting ability and much-needed height in the 6-foot Helm. He didn’t, however, see a basketball future for Helm, who struggled to catch passes and keep her balance.

“She had a couple of hard falls and she was very discouraged about not being able to catch the ball very well,” said Brown. “I remember thinking to myself, ‘I will not see her tomorrow.’ I’ve seen people come out after being away from the game for a long time. Normally, a person like that will disappear.”

But Helm, who had never even learned to dribble, kept coming back until she had earned a spot on the team.

“I told Coach if he didn’t tell me to stop I wouldn’t,” Helm said. “I’d keep trying. That’s what I did with my marriage. You figure if you work hard enough, things will work out. At the end of the season, (coach) asked me to come back. I just looked at him and said, ‘Really?’ It made me feel great.”

Her stats that first year were not impressive. She played about four minutes, averaging three points a game during the 1988-89 season.

This season, she has started five of 22 games, averaging 3.2 points and 4.6 rebounds a game. A measure of how far Helm has progressed came in mid-December when she scored 12 points on a six-for-six shooting performance.

“She was shocking,” Brown said. “Every time the ball went to her, she scored. She used to have to be wide open to score.”

But numbers fail to tell Helm’s worth to the team, Brown said. When she started playing, Brown praised Helm’s work habits so often that he feared other team members would begin resenting her. Helm leaves each practice about 30 minutes early to pick up her children at school. To make up for the lost time, she works out in the weight room and trains alone before practice.

Brown, who has four kids, marvels at Helm’s ability to manage her time. “I like to point her out to the other players, hoping they can get as organized as her, not just in basketball, but in life,” he said.

Helm isn’t a star, but she is seldom without a loyal cheering section. Her children attend nearly every game and are becoming interested in basketball. Sarah is learning how to dribble and already can play “in-your-face defense.”

“My kids are great,” Helm said. “They’re the most important thing to me.”

Helm’s college basketball career will end Friday when Rancho Santiago (7-15) plays host to Cypress in the team’s regular-season finale.

An environmental planning and ecology major, Helm has two semesters remaining at Rancho Santiago. She hopes to transfer to UC Irvine when she leaves Rancho Santiago, but laughs at the thought of trying out for the basketball team. “They’re better than I could ever dream of being,” she said.

Nonetheless, she will walk off the court Friday with more than passing and shooting skills, said Brown. “Last year you could see the wear and tear of what she was going through,” he said. “Now, she’s smiling more. I know she’s a changed person.”

Helm agrees.

“I always felt I’d take care of the house, take care of the kids, be the room mom and stuff like that,” she said. “I never thought of myself as being able to do the things I’ve done now. But I was put in a position where I had to look inside myself and see if I had the strength to stand up on my own, and I did.”