January 18, 2003

     STORRS — Maria Conlon hesitated at the top of the key for an instant, perhaps thinking about the shots she had missed earlier in the game. She was open, she had swished thousands of 3-pointers in her life, and her University of Connecticut women’s basketball team led Virginia Tech by double digits Sunday. She had every reason to launch the ball. But Conlon, a junior guard, could not let it go.
     She flinched once, twice, and then her feet moved before she dribbled. Traveling. Amid the silence — a stilted silence only 10,167 folks in Gampel Pavilion can produce — an exasperated Geno Auriemma rose from his chair and shouted, "Shoot the ball!"
     An anonymous voice, from high in the stands, responded to the UConn coach: "You tell her, Geno!"
     After two years as a valued contributor off the bench, Conlon has risen to a position of prominence for the defending national champions, and she is still adjusting to the role. During her first two seasons at UConn, she averaged 3.9 points in 13.8 minutes per game.
     This year, with the graduation of four All-Americans and an injury to freshman Nicole Wolff, Conlon is starting at point guard, averaging 28.3 minutes, 6.7 points and 3.3 assists. She has been thrust into the spotlight, and much of UConn’s success toward March will depend on her ability to hit key shots, make defensive stops and distribute the ball.
     But when Conlon hesitates, Auriemma cringes. He would like to see more consistency. She made three 3-pointers and played 41 minutes in the 63-62 overtime win over Tennessee on Jan. 4, but followed that up by struggling against Rutgers (1-of-6 from the field, 3-of-6 from the free throw line).
     "Who’s the real Maria?" Auriemma asked last week. "Am I surprised at the way she played against Tennessee? No. Am I surprised at the way she played against Rutgers? No, because Maria’s inconsistent in practice. Every day is a new day with her."
     And in the what-have-you-done-for-me-lately atmosphere of big-time college basketball, nobody at UConn faces greater scrutiny than Conlon, who grew up in Derby. She is the first player from the state of Connecticut to take on such a pivotal role since New Fairfield’s Jennifer Rizzotti helped lead the Huskies to a national championship in 1995.
     Everyone seems to have an opinion about Conlon, and it would be easy to understand if these voices sometimes worked their way into her head. Conlon graduated from Seymour High as one of the more decorated prep athletes in recent memory, but would she ever make a significant contribution at UConn? She scored eight points against Notre Dame in the national semifinals as a freshman, but was she fit enough? She provided depth behind Sue Bird last winter, but was she starting material?
     "I think she knew it was going to be tough," said Steve Bethke, one of her AAU coaches. "But that’s the challenge she wanted. She told people that’s the challenge she wanted, to play at the highest level possible."
     This much is true: Conlon knows winning. When UConn meets Georgetown at the Hartford Civic Center today at noon, the Huskies will go for their 55th consecutive victory, which would break the 21-year-old women’s Division 1 record held by Louisiana Tech. At Seymour, Conlon’s teams compiled a 96-4 record that included a 62-game win streak, and she has helped UConn to an 84-3 record during her first three years in Storrs. That’s seven losses in seven years.
     Her public profile has only grown since age 13, when she first signed autographs for other little girls who dreamed the same big dream: to play for UConn. The difference is, she made it. And so here she is, on full display for all the state — and all the country — to see. Most people can cultivate their passions in private, but Conlon’s has carried her to the stage, where her next shot is always her most important. Will it go in or out? Everyone waits.      Roots in concrete
     At the behest of Maria and her younger brother, Tim, their parents turned the family backyard on East 9th Street into a basketball half-court. Her father, Tim Sr., began the process by laying out frames for the concrete and arranging for a foundation of gravel to be delivered. He was out of town when the shipment arrived, so Maria led an effort by neighborhood friends to hammer together a wooden chute that would feed the gravel into the yard. She wanted to speed up the process, her father said. She was 8.
     Her father painted the 3-point arc at NBA distance so that the college line would seem like a layup as she grew older. When she told him that she wanted to develop a left-handed layup as a fourth-grader, he taped an X to the pavement and showed her how to plant her right foot on the mark and elevate for the shot. She practiced left-handed layups for the next month, nothing else.
     Her mother, Kim, fed her passes after school. A pair of floodlights were installed so that Maria could practice after dark. The neighbors never complained.
     As a fifth-grader, she played for the eighth-grade co-ed team at St. Mary-St. Michael School in Derby. The team only played against boys, and any laughter that greeted Maria and her teammates at visiting gymnasiums — girls?! — quickly evaporated.
     That same season, Maria, age 10, stepped to the free throw line in the waning moments of a game against Assumption of Ansonia, but she missed the front end of a one-and-one that would have sent the game to overtime. She came home later that afternoon, went outside to the hoop, chipped away a layer of ice and spent the next 6 hours shooting free throws by herself. "You couldn’t console her," her father said. "You had to find ways to reach her to make her feel good, because she wouldn’t listen to you."
     During another game, her coach, Charlie Stochmal, sent her in to set some screens. On the first one, she got popped with an elbow and lost a baby tooth. She calmly handed it to Stochmal, who put it in his pocket. She twice more set hard screens and twice more lost teeth. At the end of the game, Stochmal handed all three to Maria’s parents. "Well, it saved us three extractions," Kim Conlon said, laughing. "She was getting ready to have braces."
     Maria constructed her toughness behind the house on Conlon Court, where she played endless games with her brother, father and several older cousins who lived next door. "I don’t think they treated her like a little girl," said Joe Frager, the women’s coach at Southern Connecticut State. "I think they probably pegged her into the fence."
     By the seventh grade, she had received her first autograph request. A little girl approached her after she claimed MVP honors at a boys’ tournament, and Maria looked to her own mother: What was this? Someday, another parent told her, we’ll see you playing for UConn. Soon enough, word of this Conlon girl got around to Frager, then the coach at Seymour. Out of curiosity, he said, he went to one of her eighth-grade games. Settling into the bleachers, he realized that she was playing against boys. And then he noticed that the opposing team had constructed a triangle-and-two defense in an attempt to shut her down. Conlon dissected it, finishing with more than 20 points, and Frager drove home in a stupor. "You didn’t need to be a rocket scientist to know that she was a special player," Frager said.
     The rising
     One spring afternoon in 1996, Frager was in the middle of teaching a U.S. history class at Seymour when he got a knock at his door from vice principal Ed Rostowsky. Rostowsky was curious: A girl named Maria Conlon had enrolled at the school for the fall semester, and she said that she played basketball. Was she any good? Frager pumped his fists and tried to contain himself. Rostowsky surmised that, yes, she was good. Frager then turned his attention — or whatever was left of it — back to his puzzled students. "Usually when you lecture," Frager said, "you don’t have an ear-to-ear grin when you’re talking about the Civil War."
     Conlon considered several schools before choosing Seymour. Some of her friends from middle school were enrolling there, the basketball team was strong and she had heard good things about Frager and his practices. Her parents said they didn’t mind paying the $7,000 in tuition because they had adhered to one rule when their children were growing up: feed their passions. Derby did not have a particularly strong basketball program, so they sought an alternative.
     "Let’s put it this way," Tim Conlon Sr. said. "We look real smart because things worked out. But for every kid like Maria and Diana (Taurasi) and Morgan (Valley) who has made it to a UConn, there’s probably 10 others growing up — and we’ve seen it — who were just as solid, but this one blows out a knee at the wrong time, this one just didn’t like the game anymore, this one had a parent who was too crazy and lost interest."
     "Going through it, you wonder if it’s worth it," Kim Conlon said. "Honestly, all the girls have to absolutely, in their hearts, love what they’re doing, or they can’t do it. Because there are so many things they give up." Maria sacrificed summer vacations for AAU tournaments, journeys to outposts such as Des Moines, Iowa (where she survived a tornado) and Clarksville, Tenn.
     "You ever been to Clarksville?" Bethke asked. "Not a great vacation spot. We were there in the middle of August. Had to be 110 degrees. And humid."
     These experiences only toughened her up. When her friend, Christin Morgatto, accidentally clipped the side of Conlon’s face with a javelin toss at a track practice, Conlon passed out, went to the emergency room, got six stitches and showed up at an AAU practice that evening. (Her coach wouldn’t let her play.) As a freshman and sophomore, she led Seymour to state championships. When Frager left for SCSU, Eric DeMarco inherited the team, a 52-game win streak and the best player in the state. It could have been worse, DeMarco said.
     Morgatto, now a junior forward at Western Connecticut State, said the hysteria surrounding the program only intensified as the winning streak continued. The bandbox gymnasium, only five rows deep, sold out before the JV games even started. There were the requests for Conlon to read to third-graders. There was the local newspaper, tapped of fresh ideas, that wanted to do a story on the team’s sneakers. There were the autographs, the camera crews, the caravans to road games, the recruiters.
     "It was insane," DeMarco said.
     By the end of her career, Conlon had established school records for points (1,727), assists (672) and steals (650), as well as state records for 3-pointers in a season (86) and a career (246). Conlon was named Register All-Area four times, All-State twice and the state player of the year as a senior. She committed to UConn without taking any official visits. It was preordained.
     "Growing up here," Conlon said, "it was hard not to want to play at UConn, or to imagine going someplace else to play." DeMarco said he decided to retire her number, 5, "about three days after I became head coach," though she was still two years from graduation. Her jersey, enclosed in a wooden frame, hangs on the wall near midcourt at Seymour.
     Bright lights
     While Conlon is known around her team as someone who likes to keep the atmosphere light, she is also a very private person. She has always been that way, her parents said. But she has most likely grown more guarded since joining the UConn program. Asked what the general public might not know about her but maybe should, Conlon offered a quick response. "Nothing," she said. "I think all the people I want to know anything about me know everything about me. And that’s good enough for me."
     If only it were that easy. The players here are both beloved and scrutinized by the community. More members of the media trail UConn than any other women’s program in the country, and all 29 of the team’s regular-season games will be televised. (By comparison, 16 of Tennessee’s 29 games this season are scheduled to be on TV.) This, of course, is popularity that should be celebrated. It is indicative of the success Auriemma has engineered during his 17-year tenure and, on a broader scale, the growth of women’s athletics in the three decades since the inception of Title IX.
     But these student-athletes live in a fishbowl, and there is little doubt that Conlon faces more pressure because she is from the state of Connecticut. Unlike her teammates, she was under the microscope before arriving in Storrs, and familiarity provides fodder for criticism.
     "People have read about her since she was a freshman in high school, and it just makes it easier to follow," DeMarco said. "For some reason, I just think that when you get a kid who’s a special kid, as many people are happy for her success as there are who want to see failure. They want to see a flaw, they want to see a mistake that gets printed up in the newspaper. I don’t understand it."
     Asked if she feels more pressure, Conlon said: "Some people say yes and some people say no. Some people say they have less pressure because they have more support. But some people say they have more pressure because there are so many people who doubt me, who don’t think I can do it. But it doesn’t make a real difference to me at all. A lot of times, I don’t even look at it like that – me, being the homegrown kid. I mean, I know I am and that people say I am. But your teammates, your coaches, your family and your friends – those are the only people that matter. And the fans are great – don’t get me wrong!"
     Tonya Cardoza, the UConn assistant coach, said that when Conlon was recruited, the coaching staff did not expect her to play 35 minutes per game. She would do the little things, play hard and knock down some 3-pointers. "But you could see that she wanted to be a good player, that she wanted to contribute," Cardoza said. "I remember talking with (Auriemma) during her freshman year, and I told him that by her junior year she would be a starter. I don’t think anyone ever envisioned that before she came her. Maybe no one, except her."
     Conlon has struggled lately, mired in a 3-of-16 shooting slump over the last three games. She needs to improve her defense, Cardoza said, and make certain she is contesting shots. As the Big East schedule grinds on, she also will be expected to relieve the ball-handling burden from Taurasi, who has been bothered by sore ankles.
     Conlon improved her overall fitness during the summer, understanding that more minutes would be up for grabs. She has less than two years remaining at UConn, and she said she does not ponder the future. "All I think about is school and basketball," she said.
     These days, neighbors in Derby know when Conlon is home by the pounding of a basketball against the pavement, by the soft echo that bounces down the street. There is a purity to the scene: Conlon alone in her backyard, the cool leather in her hands, away from the crowds and the questions and the praise and the doubts — all of it. During these quiet moments, she is back where she began. And she has no regrets. How could she?
     "If someone offered you your dream," Christin Morgatto asked, "are you going to push it away?"