Women’s Basketball
Last April 25, in Storrs, Conn., 6-foot-5 Paige Sauer and some of her Connecticut teammates were on an athletic field playing touch football with a tennis ball.
It was WNBA draft day.
Jamelle Elliott, a Connecticut assistant coach, burst from a Gampel Pavilion doorway and ran down Sauer.
“You’re going to L.A.!” she shouted, informing Sauer she had just been drafted by the Sparks.
It figured, Sauer told everyone. She had recently returned from Huntington Beach, where she visited her sister, Gretchen. Now she was going back, to training camp. Back, too, to Huntington Beach, where the 22-year-old rookie now lives with her 25-year-old sister.
Know this about Sauer: Life on the road in the WNBA will be no problem. She has been on the road for the last eight years.
She and her twin brother, Bryce (yes, he’s 6-5 too), grew up in Fallon, Nev., where he and his father own a cabinet-making business.
Paige was introduced to basketball at a Fallon junior high school. Her coach there got a high school head coaching job in Midwest City, Okla., and Sauer left with her.
“My parents said I could go, so a guardianship was set up there for me and that’s why I played high school ball in Oklahoma,” she said.
“UConn recruited me, so I was off for another four years. The reason I’m living now with Gretchen is I’m really just getting to know her.”
Her boyfriend from college days, Jeff Sliva, is nearby. He’s a beach volleyball player in Hermosa Beach.
Spark Coach Michael Cooper is delighted so far with Paige, although he didn’t play her Saturday in the Sparks’ 82-75 victory at Minnesota.
“I’m going to pick my spots with her,” he said. “I didn’t want to put a 6-5 rookie in there because she’s new and would be like a target for the officials.
“She’s got a nice soft shot inside, and for a big [player] she gets up and down the floor really well. She’s really going to help this team.”
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After seeing Maylana Martin start for four years in UCLA’s blue and gold, you almost do a doubletake when she appears in Minnesota Lynx green.
Minnesota’s third draft pick in the first round, Martin is starting slowly, doing more watching than playing.
She played four minutes in each of her team’s first two games and not at all when the Lynx lost Saturday to the Sparks.
“Everything [Coach Brian Agler] wants me to do here is the opposite of what I did at UCLA,” she said. “It’s a huge adjustment--I had my back to the basket all the time at UCLA. Here that’s hardly ever the case. I was in the post all the time; here I’m in a motion offense. Sometimes I need to put the ball on the floor, which I never did at UCLA. It’ll take time.”
Said Agler: “Maylana is going to be a very good player in this league. But it’ll take some time. What I’ve liked the most about her so far is that she’s a lot stronger than she looks.”
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Around the women’s game: Linda Sharp, fired at midseason in the Sparks’ debut season in 1997, is back in the WNBA, in Phoenix, as an assistant coach for her one-time USC superstar, Cheryl Miller. . . . The April move of Kim Mulkey-Robertson from Louisiana Tech to Baylor as head coach continues to reverberate in Ruston, La. Mulkey-Robertson had been at Louisiana Tech for 20 years as a player and assistant under Leon Barmore, patiently waiting for him to retire so she could take over. Barmore announced his retirement last season, but Mulkey-Robertson balked at a four-year contract offer. She wanted five. When she didn’t get it, she interviewed for the Baylor job and got a five-year deal. The unretired Barmore will coach one more season. . . . Reports have it that Utah’s Jennifer Azzi, who had said she wouldn’t play this season when offered only a small raise over her 1999 $44,000 salary, agreed to play for the Starzz when she was boosted to $62,800. Her new teammate, Natalie Williams, makes a reported $62,000.