Life After Catchings Sadly Begins for Tennessee

The Tennessee women won’t have long to wait to find out what the loss of four-time All-American Tamika Catchings means. The second-ranked Lady Vols play host to No. 4 Georgia in Knoxville on Thursday.

Catchings, last season’s Naismith Award winner, blew out a knee in Tennessee’s win Monday over Mississippi State, ending her college career.

Coach Pat Summitt all but called her senior star irreplaceable.

“We’re not going to ask anyone to be Tamika,” she said. “This will be done by committee.”

The loss of Catchings, however, will put more pressure on Tennessee’s other All-American, Semeka Randall, who is not having a good season. She didn’t even take a shot in the first half Monday.

“Randall has to start playing like an All-American for us,” Summitt said.

Some in Knoxville Tuesday wondered if Catchings’ teammates would be emotionally recovered by Thursday.

“Tamika has been like a big sister to the freshmen,” Summitt said. “The four freshmen were really torn up, crying their hearts out.”

No one, of course, could have been more torn up than Catchings, who will never get another shot at Connecticut. The Huskies dumped Tennessee, 71-52, in last season’s NCAA title game, and again Dec. 30, 81-76.

The way she went out Monday, with 5:34 remaining, was typical--an all-out, attacking drive to the basket. She had 17 points and 13 rebounds. Only she and former teammate Chamique Holdsclaw are members of Tennessee’s 2,000-point, 1,000-rebound club.

Knoxville columnist John Adams put it well Monday when he wrote of those two:

“Holdsclaw made basketball look ridiculously easy at times. If you put her game to music, it would be classical.

“If you put Catchings’ game to music, it would be hard rock. Hers is a pulsating style of basketball that never ebbs. . . .”

Catchings’ injury also throws into question the WNBA draft in April. She was projected as a possible first pick but now the holder of that pick, Seattle’s Lin Dunn, will delay her decision.

“First, we need to know if Tamika will even enter the 2001 draft,” Dunn said.

“She has the option of using all year to recover and enter the 2002 draft. In the meantime, Ruth Riley’s [6-5 Notre Dame center] stock is soaring, particularly after her game Monday against Connecticut.

“How do you pass on an opportunity to draft a low post player like her?”

Riley was the leader in a 92-76 Notre Dame ambush of unbeaten Connecticut, before the first capacity crowd for a Notre Dame women’s game, 11,418.

“Ruth has already changed the draft,” Houston Comet Coach Van Chancellor said.

“She’s a player who can help a WNBA team right now. I had a couple other posts rated ahead of her when the season started but now I can’t see a team with a high pick passing her up.”

Riley had 29 points and 12 rebounds against Connecticut and made all 13 of her free throws.

UCLA’S MIGHTY MITE

She is, by three inches, the smallest player in the Pacific 10 Conference. So one might assume that, at 5 feet and one-half inch, she would be the NCAA’s smallest Division I basketball player.

She’s “Nat the Gnat.”

So how did Natalie Nakase, UCLA’s sophomore Mighty Mouse point guard, wind up starting for Kathy Olivier’s team instead of being one of Bela Karolyi’s gymnasts?

“I used to get that all the time, about how being small meant I should be in gymnastics,” she said.

“And I was a gymnast for a while. That was when I was really young and everyone else was short too. But I never liked it as much as basketball. It wasn’t nearly as exciting.”

Now, Nakase has created her own definition of excitement.

Defensively, she zips around bigger players, making them look klutzy, infuriating them by stealing the ball. Offensively, she drives the lane and makes impossible-looking layups, or no-look passes in transition breakaways.

Just being on a basketball court, Nakase is impossible looking, coming up to mid-chest of the 6-2 and 6-4 women around whom she runs circles.

She is not a gifted shooter and is almost Shaq-like from the free-throw line, where she is shooting 52%.

“Part of that is Natalie’s work ethic,” says Olivier. “Her work ethic is ridiculous. Much of the time she’s exhausted, because she plays so hard and for so many minutes. She shot 70% from the line in high school, so fatigue is part of that.

“She knows she has a lot of work to do on her shot. She has a hitch in her stroke and even if you’re 5-10, you can’t have a hitch.”

Olivier can’t fault any other phase of Nakase’s game, though. Nakase averages 32 minutes a game, 1.9 steals and four assists.

She had her best game yet for UCLA on Sunday when she scored 11 points in the Bruins’ 65-53 upset of USC at Pauley Pavilion, making three consecutive baskets in a 16-1 UCLA surge in the second half.

UCLA was the only Pac-10 school to actively recruit Nakase and that’s because Nakase herself saw to it.

At Huntington Beach Marina High, Nakase was a star, yet few schools recruited her.

“She came to my office one day and said to me, ‘I really, really want to play for UCLA,’ ” Olivier said.

“I’d seen her play, I liked her game. But at her size, I did wonder if she could make the transition to Division I.

“I made her understand that . . . I could offer her a scholarship the first year and we’d evaluate her after the first year. She didn’t seem to care--she just knew she was going to play for us. I liked that.”

That first season went awry when Nakase blew out a knee in a summer league game. Last season she backed up senior point Erica Gomez. This season, her teammates voted her co-captain with her roommate and UCLA’s leading scorer, Michelle Greco.

Her scholarship would seem secure.