‘At Forward, 6-Feet and Mother of 5 . . .’ : Basketball: Susan Helm, 36, sticks with the game at Rancho Santiago.

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

It’s known as the tuck-in.

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

When the 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.”

Compared to the other problems Helm has faced, however, she considers tucking in her children a joy.

After 15 years of marriage, Helm was divorced in 1988. It was a difficult time, but her five children helped pull her through.

Sarah, 13, Karen, 12, Lisa, 10, and twins Katie and Rebecca, 8, helped Helm see the brighter side.

Helm, a 1972 graduate of Tustin High, had 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 played only one year of organized basketball, 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 simply 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, (Brown) asked me to come back. I just looked at him and said, ‘Really?’ It made me feel great.”

Her statistics that first year were not overly impressive. She averaged about four minutes and three points a game during the 1988-89 season.

This season, she started five 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 stressed. When she first started playing, he praised Helm’s work habits so often that he feared other team members would begin resenting her. Helm left each practice about 30 minutes early to pick her children up at school. To make up for the lost time, she worked out in the weight room and trained alone before practice.

Brown, who has four children of his own, 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 may not be a star, but she was seldom without a loyal cheering section. Her children attended nearly every game and are becoming interested in basketball. Sarah is learning how to dribble and can already play “in-your-face defense,” according to Helm.

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

Helm’s collegiate basketball career ended last Friday when Rancho Santiago played host to Cypress in the team’s final game of the season.

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 laughed at the thought of trying out for the basketball team. “They’re better than I could ever dream of being,” she said.

Nonetheless, Helm has 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.”