If Indiana Could See Her Now

Not every player in the NCAA basketball tournament is 5 feet 6, let alone the leading scorer of a hotshot team that has rattled off 16 victories in a row. Not every player wears a nose ring, either, or has an uncle who starred for the college level’s last undefeated champions.

By any standard, Dana Wilkerson, who has been to the Final Four before and is keen on going again, is not just any basketball player. The special ones never are.

Wilkerson is distinctive and instinctive. She has a unique sense of style as well as a sixth sense common to the most creative basketball players, the combination of which makes her a particular crowd favorite at Cal State Long Beach and a big woman on campus.

From fourth grade on, basketball has dominated her daily life. Being a senior, though, the next game Wilkerson’s side loses could very well be the last one she ever plays, except for an occasional pickup game. An academic All-American, she will stick around to get her engineering degree and then undergo a kind of basketball withdrawal with which so many excellent women basketball players are familiar.

“Unless some miraculous offer from overseas comes falling out of the skies,” she says.

The niece of former Indiana University hero Bobby Wilkerson has been making a name for herself since her freshman year, when Long Beach last reached the Final Four. Funny thing is, in Dana’s case, this is one Hoosier who, despite all the stories over the years about all the high school hoopla in her home state, actually left Indiana for California to find a place where women’s basketball would be paid some attention.

Her high school gym in Indiana held an astounding 9,500 spectators, which to Wilkerson’s knowledge makes it “the second-largest high school gym in the country.” Trouble was, while the boys’ games would fill the place, particularly at tournament time, the Anderson girls would look up into the stands during games and see nothing but a whole lotta empty.

“After being involved in a kind of overshadowing experience, I wanted to go somewhere where women’s basketball would be taken more seriously,” Wilkerson says.

Every head in the crowd in University Gym was counted during last week’s opening round of tournament play, and there were 2,023. They were loud and rowdy, though, and they saw Wilkerson at her best, when she swirled and curled around a USC lineup led by 6-5 Lisa Leslie to score 24 points and lift the 49ers to Thursday’s West Regional semifinal game at Las Vegas against highly regarded Georgia.

Wilkerson’s specialty is taking the ball directly to the likes of Leslie or Cal State Fullerton’s 6-3 Genia Miller or any of the other high-rises she encounters who, when they raise their arms on defense, must look as physically intimidating as Manute Bol. With an explosive first step and a deft little left-handed flip, Wilkerson doesn’t let much of anything get in her way, tall or small.

She was more concerned about stopping herself, frankly.

“Recently, I had to have one of those little talks with myself,” she says. “It occurred to me that I could be playing a lot better and producing a lot more than I had been doing. I had to go back to my old ways from high school days, the days of basically taking over the game when it was necessary.”

That means playing with assertiveness, not selfishness.

“That doesn’t mean becoming a hog with the ball,” she says.

When Wilkerson has the ball, she knows what to do with it. The USC game was 10 minutes old before anybody but Wilkerson and one teammate had a point. And once the opponents started concentrating on stopping her, then Long Beach’s front-line players--Penny Moore, for instance, who pulled down 10 rebounds--could start dominating the play.

Uncle Bobby had been a defensive specialist on Bob Knight’s unbeaten 1975-76 team, which Dana was too young to appreciate at the time. With the boys hogging the gyms and playgrounds and most of the adults’ attention, it took a while before basketball piqued her interest as an extracurricular activity, where it helps to start early, same as with piano or ballet.

“I didn’t really start until fourth grade, which is pretty late these days,” Wilkerson says.

All these years later, she is a leader on a team with a record of 24-7 that still has a chance to win the national championship.

The men’s Final Four, to be played back home in Indiana, will get more attention. But Dana Wilkerson can take satisfaction, if she likes, in knowing that she and her teammates already have gone further in the 1991 NCAA basketball tournament than any California school’s males.