ustxtxb_obs_1979_03_16_50_00022-00000_000.pdf

IF YOU ARE an occasional reader and would like to receive The Texas Observer regularlyor if you are a subscriber and would like to have a free sample copy or a one-year gift subscription sent to a friend here’s the order form: . SEND THE OBSERVER TO name address city state zip this subscription is for myself gift subscriptionsend card in my name sample copy onlyyou may use my name $14 enclosed for a one-year subscription bill me for $14 MY NAME & ADDRESS THE TEXAS OBSERVER 600 W. 7th, Austin, Texas 78701 FREEWHEELING BICYCLES. 2404 San Gabriel, Austin. For whatever your bicycle needs. BOOK-HUNTING? No obligation search for rare or out-of-print books. Ruth and John 8, Box 173, Austin 78703. TYPING. Can’t do it yourself? Or don’t have the time? Professional typing at reasonable rates in Austin or by mail around the state. JOIN THE ACLU. Membership $20. Texas Civil Liberties Union, 600 West 7th, Austin 78701. BINGO A FELONY? Send S.A.S.E. Tasar, Box 50667, Dallas 75250. MAMA’S JALAPENO CORNBREAD and a batch of other favorite recipes, $1. Mama, 607-A West 17th, Austin 78701. BACKPACKING MOUNTAINEERING RAFTING. Outback Expeditions, P.O. Box THE SAN ANTONIO Democratic League meets the first Thursday of each month. For information, call Jim Bode at 344-1497. Classified advertising is 30 per word. Discounts for multiple insertions within a 12 month period: 25 times, 50 percent; 12 times, 25 percent; 6 times, 10 percent. and all of them see plenty of action. Among them, to name just a few, are: Retha Swindell, 6’2″ senior and the team’s top rebounder and shot-blocker; 6’2″ junior Jackie Swaim, the Longhorns’ leading scorer; junior Linda Waggoner, whose quickness is the key to UT’s fast break and full-court press; and senior Kim Basinger, an all-around player who stands out especially on defense. All of the nine first-stringers are good percentage shooters and aggressive defenders. This team plainly has more depth and balance than the SFA Ladyjacks, and it’s a tribute to Sue Gunter’s players that they beat the Longhorns at their own fast-moving game in last month’s state AIAW finale. Overtaken Regardless of whether SFA or UT is the best team in the state, one thing is certain: Wayland Baptist, for 30 years the class women’s basketball team in Texas, no longer is. The Flying Queens, who used to travel nationwide in airplanes provided by Wayland alumnus Claude Hutcherson to find worthy competitors, now have a 20-8 record for the ’78-’79 season, and included in those eight losses were two to UT-and three to SFA. The problem for coach Dean Weese is not that the Queens are slipping; it is that his opponents have caught up with Wayland. To be sure, Weese’s current squad has two All-Americans-6’3″ junior Jill Rankin, who hits 61 percent of her shots, and Kathy Harston, a 5’10” junior who is a wizard at ball handling and playmakingbut Wayland, a tiny school with a student body of a thousand or so, is not the only place in Texas for such talented players to go nowadays, as more and more colleges offer women opportunities to play in good programs. Compounding the Flying Queens’ recruiting problems are certain characteristics of the Weese regime at Wayland. Weese thinks it his province as coach to regulate the behavior of players off the court as well as on; so, he says, “very sound Christian kids” are “the only kind of kids we try to recruit.” He concedes that his insistence on controlling the Flying Queens’ personal lives according to his own fundamentalist tenets “cuts out a lot of kids who would be very good basketball players”but, he says, “they would not probably fit into the mold of Wayland Baptist College.” \(Neither, by the way, do blacks seem to fit the Wayland mold during Weese’s tenure as coach of the Flying Queens, the team has not had even one black player. But the word has gone out over the grapevine that this, at least, may be about to change, because Weese is now trying hard to recruit two blacks from This season Wayland, UT and SFA UT’s Swaim tries shot against Wayland are all thirty points better than the rest of the teams in Texas, but other universities can be expected to come on fast now that the Title IX policy on equal opportunity in collegiate athletics \(promulgated by the right direction. And there’s no question that if Texas universities want to support first-class teams, the state has a staggering abundance of home-grown talent. In fact, Texas has by far the largest high school women’s basketball program in the U.S.-1,026 high school teams with over 23,500 players were competing this year, and the numbers are going up. Quite a few of the top players coming out of these high school programs are signing on with Texas college teams other than the big three, which means teams like Houston, Baylor and Texas Tech could offer strong competition in a few years. But for now, while these developing teams dream about next season or the one after, Texas’ three national powers have a more immediate concernSFA, the midst of the Southwest AIAW Regional Tournament in Tulsa, and there’s a good chance that one or even two of the Texas clubs could advance all the way to the national \(and nationally telein Greensboro, North Carolina. And there’s more than mere provincial partisanship to the hope that a Texas team does make it that far, for what better way could there be to let the uninitiated know what they’ve been missing? Gary Underwood teaches English at the University of Texas and is a devoted basketball buff. 22 MARCH 16, 1979