March 9, 2004

     NEW HAVEN - The hallways of the Ray Tompkins House are lined with formal photographs of all Yale sports captains. So a piece of Brynn Gingras will always live there, framed in a white sweater bearing the big blue Y, forever 21.
     That's what Gingras leaves behind tonight, when the point guard from Wallingford plays her final basketball game for Yale.
     Yale vs. Columbia, 7 p.m., Payne Whitney Gym: The end of a season and the end of a career in which Gingras went from ill-at-ease recruit to under-the-gun freshman to solid Ivy League court general.
     "I can remember going to see Brynn play in high school against Guilford and she was so embarrassed that I was going to go see that game,"Yale coach Amy Backus said Friday after Gingras and the Bulldogs thumped Cornell 83-60. "But I knew then that we were going to have a good one."
     Gingras looks much the same as she did when she left Lyman Hall in 2001 as the school's all-time leading scorer: Ball in hand, hair and chin up, the one in a ponytail, the other leading the charge down the floor. And yet looks deceive.
     "I'm a completely different girl," Gingras says. "Both ways, in life and basketball, I've matured so much."
     Indeed, everything changes. The girl initially leery of going to school so close to home now wouldn't trade Yale for anything. On the court, while her scoring record was being broken at Lyman Hall, Gingras took over the point guard position prematurely as a freshman due to injuries and learned the hard way under a demanding senior class.
     Now she is the senior, calling the plays, reiterating the defensive coverage. She plays focused on the big picture; she is the coach on the floor. It took some adjustment. Gingras, most comfortable when everybody's happy and everything's going swimmingly, had to be more vocal.
     "Completely different role," Gingras said. "This year being captain it's an even bigger role. It's a Yale tradition to have one captain for every sport. That's a big responsibility. I hope I've fulfilled it pretty well."
     Gingras has fulfilled it in a way that doesn't always show up in the stats or in the highlights and certainly not in the team's record in her four years (36-71). As Backus puts it, Gingras is blue collar, not flashy. Gingras had the go-ahead 3-pointer in a win last Saturday at Dartmouth, but it was the one turnover in 62 combined minutes against Harvard and Big Green over the course of the weekend that was just as key.
     Gingras scored a measly one point Friday. She shot just three times because Yale was able to burn Cornell with 6-foot-3 freshman center Erica Davis (28 points) and junior Tory Mauseth (26), who tied a team record with seven 3-pointers.
     Gingras kept things flowing with five rebounds and four assists. She had just two turnovers and helped limit her counterpart, Cornell's Karen Force, to 2-for-13 shooting.
     "Brynn truly had to learn trial by fire. She made her mistakes; she struggled," Backus said, looking back over the span of Gingras' career. "All along, I don't think people gave her the credit or the credibility that we saw. If you see Brynn now, you do wonder why, because I think she's one of the best point guards in the league.
     "Karen Force was 10 times better than Brynn three years ago," Backus added. "I think Brynn showed her up tonight. That's sort of a synopsis."
     Gingras will leave Yale ninth all-time in assists (212 plus whatever she gets tonight) and 10th in steals (128). She'll also leave with a degree in American studies with a concentration in sociology.
     "I wouldn't take back this education for anything," Gingras said.
     "I absolutely love the fact that I'm meeting so many different people from so many different parts of the world with so many different aspirations. That was the coolest thing, not the books and the professors. I think it was meeting so many people and learning from them."
     The career path is leading toward broadcast journalism. Gingras interned last summer with E! Network and will be moving to New York City to live with her sister Margaux.
     It will truly be an empty nest for Mark and Christine Gingras, who not only attended all of their daughter's games, which ranged from Payne Whitney all the way to Seattle, but often had the entire team over for dinner and sleepovers.
     "They traipse all over the country watching Brynn," said Backus. "They are the reason we have to have a Connecticut player every single year."