David Steele Posts

LORETTO, Pa. -- Delaware women's basketball coach Tina Martin let the phrase "triple-double'' creep into her comments following her team's season opener Tuesday night, and once it was out, she couldn't reel it back in. But anybody who had watched the highly anticipated, unusually delayed college debut of Elena Delle Donne wouldn't have needed prodding to envision such feats in the future.

"If Coach says it, then yes, I can, definitely. Whatever I can do to contribute to the team the best I can to my ability, I'll try it,'' said Delle Donne, the redshirt freshman who, on her way back to her favorite sport, had once been the best high school player in the country, then one of its best-known victims of intense homesickness.

"We'll see what the future holds,'' she added.

Jim Phelan will remind you in a heartbeat that he's already in the Hall of Fame, a bunch of them. It's not that he wonders why he keeps getting asked about the one in Springfield, Mass., the one that won't let him in. It's that it doesn't bother him as much as it bothers so many others.

"I really don't care,'' Phelan said Monday morning, after knocking golf balls around the lawn of his home in Emmitsburg, Md., less than a mile from the college he put on the basketball map half a century ago. "When I was active, it was a nice trivia question --- who has the most wins and is not in the Hall of Fame?''

The answer is Phelan, who won 830 games in 49 seasons at Mount St. Mary's, the tiny historic Catholic university in the mountains near the Pennsylvania border. Exactly three men have won more games coaching at Division I colleges: Bobby Knight, Dean Smith and Adolph Rupp. Two, Smith and Rupp, have won more games at a single school. None, at any level, has ever coached more games at one school than the 1,354 Phelan coached at "The Mount'' from 1954-2003.

Kentucky is used to the madness surrounding the official debut of a new basketball coach, even a new big-name, highly touted, expectation-driving coach. It's just not used to the madness taking place twice in three years.

The fact that the implosion of the coach he's replacing is so fresh in the Kentucky faithful's memory, seems not to be bothering John Calipari -- but signs are that he isn't blissfully ignorant of it, either. He takes the court at Rupp Arena Friday evening for the first time as Wildcats coach in a game that counts, against Morehead State, and the anticipation is as high for this night as it was two years ago when Billy Gillispie, the savior from Texas A&M, did the same thing.

Gillispie's downward spiral began not long afterward, of course, with the now- (and then-) infamous loss at home to Gardner-Webb in the second game of the 2007-08 season.

Football forever altered the course of Brian Stokes' life, but not until after he had served two tours in Iraq as a Marine.

His military experience also forever altered the course of his life, but not until long after football had already kicked Stokes to the curb.

In his 34 years as Syracuse's head coach -- even during the years when his face was one of those synonymous with Big East basketball, not even when he won a long-awaited national championship -- never was Jim Boeheim the type to dwell for long on his own accomplishments. On Monday night, when he earned his 800th career victory over Albany at the Carrier Dome, he was quoted in the Syracuse Post Standard this way: "I guess there's a 'wow' factor, winning 800. But then, it's not like playing golf with Tiger Woods. I mean, that's a real 'wow' factor.''

Boeheim playing down his feat was as expected as was his reference to his other favorite sport. But is it really possible to look at 800 victories, all at one school, with that school being his alma mater, and not greet it with at least a 'wow'?

If the fact that only seven other coaches with at least 10 years in Division I have done it doesn't elicit that reaction, then consider some of the legends who either have not gotten there yet, or never got there at all.

GREENSBORO, N.C. -- The preseason media poll that predicted North Carolina would share the Atlantic Coast Conference championship with Duke was still hours from being released. The national polls that picked the Tar Heels sixth (by the media) and fourth (by the coaches) were more than a week away.

But Roy Williams didn't feel a need to wait to issue a disclaimer about the early exuberance over his defending national champions.

"The expectations of our young kids, and the way they were evaluated or ranked as a recruiting class, puts a lot of expectations on kids who have never done it,'' Williams said last month at the ACC's media day, on the day his team -- missing the top four players and 74 percent of the points from the group that had waxed Michigan State in the national title game -- split the voting for the conference title.

When John Calipari told an interviewer at the SEC's basketball media day last month, "These fans -- I'm saying this lovingly -- are nuts,'' he was being very narrow-minded. In the SEC, this season and the last few, why single out the fans?

The idea has been thrown around that the arrival of Calipari (and his history) at Kentucky (and its history) is going to suck all the attention toward them and away from the rest of the conference. Truth be told, this might not be a bad thing. The SEC might not lead Division I conferences in dysfunction, but it's near the top. Only three seasons ago, it was celebrating one of its programs, Florida, completing the rare feat of repeating as national champion. But literally from the moment the Gators made that official by winning the 2007 title in Atlanta -- remember, coach Billy Donovan spent much of the postgame interviews fending off speculation that he was going to take over at, yes, Kentucky -- the SEC has been the home of constant chaos.

Half of the league's 12 schools have changed coaches since then, three this season; two newcomers, at Alabama and Georgia, follow coaches who departed in midseason, making Kentucky, which fired Billy Gillispie and hired Calipari, an isle of calm by comparison.

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NEW YORK -- Neither Norries Wilson nor Tom Williams had circled the date when, respectively, the Columbia and Yale football schedules had come out. But Dr. Keith Harrison had. So when two African-American coaches met in an Ivy League game for the first time ever on Saturday, Harrison -- the associate director of the Institute for Diversity in Sport at the University of Central Florida -- made sure not only that he was at Columbia's Wien Stadium, he was on the field before the game to greet both men.

"I wanted to take a picture,'' Harrison said, as what was eventually a stunning, come-from-behind 23-22 Yale victory unfolded. "It's history.''

GREENSBORO, N.C. -- The talk of the Atlantic Coast Conference's basketball media day Sunday was the trouble a player could get into if he talked too much.

Or said the wrong thing, or gestured the wrong way, or celebrated excessively, or did anything else that might be considered "unsporting behavior,'' according to a new zero-tolerance policy approved for this season by the NCAA.

Many of the players and coaches gathered at Greensboro's Grandover Resort bluntly said they either did not like the change, didn't understand why it was necessary, or both. The biggest issue: there is too much room left for the wrong interpretation.

The independent investigation into Binghamton's troubled men's basketball program will take extra steps to make sure that anybody with information about it has access to the lead investigator, the chairman of the State University of New York (SUNY) system board of trustees told an executive committee meeting Tuesday.

That should come as welcome news to one of the key figures in the ever-growing scandal. Sally Dear, an adjunct professor of human development at Binghamton, said in an e-mail Monday night that at that point, she had not been contacted by nor spoken to anybody involved in any of the investigations connected to the basketball program.

Since last spring, when she was quoted in a New York Times article critical of the Binghamton program, Dear had accused athletic department officials of trying to get her to alter her grading system in favor of the basketball players in her classes. She was fired under questionable circumstances Sept. 29, then had the firing rescinded three days later as the latest investigation was announced.