COLLEGE BASKETBALL NCAA TOURNAMENTS : Toast of the Town : Women: Southwest Missouri State is all they’re talking about in Springfield, Mo.

Not to suggest that the Southwest Missouri State women’s basketball team is happy to be out of Springfield, Mo., but it might find Los Angeles a little less distracting.

The Bears, to the surprise of many, are here for their first Final Four. They will play Western Kentucky in a semifinal game Saturday at 9:30 a.m. at the Sports Arena.

And Ozark eyes will be watching carefully.

The small-town folks of Springfield, a city of about 150,000, are big on basketball. And their “Lady Bears” are huge.

The Bears (31-2) haven’t lost since Jan. 9. Since then, they have been bad news to not only the pushovers of the Gateway Conference, but to powerhouses of the Big Ten and Southeastern conferences.

Springfield Mayor Tom Carlson said Southwest Missouri is a “hotbed” for basketball to begin with, “And to have the Lady Bears just come in and blow everybody’s shoes in the creek (adds to the excitement.)”

The Bears’ latest victim, Mississippi, champion of the Southeastern Conference, was worn down under constant pressure by the seemingly interchangeable Bear players--nine played 17 minutes or more--and defeated, 94-71, in the Midwest Regional final Saturday night at Boulder, Colo.

After that, they were dancing in the streets of Springfield.

People young and old flocked to the airport to greet the players. The fans held signs and tossed flowers.

“Everybody was videoing everything,” Coach Cheryl Burnett said. “They wanted autographs, they were patting us on the back, screaming and hollering.”

And the crowd would have been much larger, had not another 1,200 or so been busy driving across the plains of Kansas en route home from the game at Boulder.

Karen Rapier, a 5-11 senior forward, said after her return to Springfield that she had trouble getting used to her celebrity status on campus and around town. It was something she had not experienced in her first three years at Southwest Missouri State, when the Bears finished 7-20, 19-8 and 26-5.

“You go into grocery store and the checkout people know who you are,” Rapier said. “The people behind you know who you are, people in cars will roll down windows and start talking to you about the game. They just know you everywhere. It’s amazing. I feel like I hardly know anybody, and everybody knows me.”

They should.

More than half of Springfield was reportedly watching on television as Burnett threw everyone on her roster at No. 5-ranked Mississippi, just as she had done in a regional semifinal against unranked UCLA and earlier in a second-round game against No. 7 Iowa.

This is a team that was seeded No. 8 in the Midwest, one that had little respect because of the caliber of teams it had played to get to the tournament. It is a team that plays as hard as it can from start to finish, a team that during the fall semester had a cumulative grade-point average of 3.37.

Moreover, it is a team composed largely of locals.

Rapier hails from Jefferson City, two hours from Springfield by car. Sophomore guard Tina Robbins, MVP of the Midwest Regional, is from Duenweg, 60 miles from Springfield. Sophomore guard Melody Howard grew up 20 miles from the Southwest Missouri State campus, as did her sister Julie, a freshman on the team. Charity Shira went to Fair Grove High, a mere 15 miles from the school.

“Now a lot of people from my hometown will come to watch us,” Melody Howard said. “We have had crowds over 9,000.”

City Clerk Deborah Anderson said the hoopla is for real.

“I think people that don’t normally watch basketball have become more interested,” Anderson said. “In the last week I’ve talked to older women who normally don’t watch basketball, who are watching these games. They say, ‘ . . . These girls are good, and they’re fun to watch, it’s entertaining. A lot of men that play basketball don’t move around as much as these women do.’ ”

Anderson gave another number for the mayor. An answering service picked up the phone and on the line was Marsha Taylor, who said the mayor was at lunch.

When told what the call was regarding, she responded: “Oh, yeah, people are going crazy. My little sister (Laura) has been to every game--in Iowa, Colorado . . . and she’s only 11. My father had to buy her a basketball.”

Taylor said talk around town has it that the father of junior forward Tonya Baucom sold two cows so he could afford to travel to Boulder for the Midwest Regionals. “Now he’s going to have to sell two more to go to Los Angeles,” Taylor said.

Melody Howard said she and her sister will be accompanied by their parents and grandparents, two aunts and uncles “and my little sister, who plays at Marshfield.”

Mayor Carlson returned the call. He reported that, as of Wednesday morning, 809 airplane tickets to Los Angeles had been sold.

“And that’s a heck of a lot for Springfield,” he added.