Hot Stuff -- Kate Starbird Brings Star Power And A Dazzling Game To Abl

Expectations are high. As college basketball's player of the year and in the formative and fragile years of the women's pro game, she is a potential league maker or breaker.

Kate Starbird, the newest light in the American Basketball League, makes her professional debut tomorrow night when the Seattle Reign opens its season in San Jose.

"She is a wonderful player," said Tara VanDerveer, the U.S. Olympic coach and Starbird's collegiate coach at Stanford, "but to me her outstanding characteristic is an inner peace."

Starbird signed a three-year contract with the Reign that with endorsements will pay her more than $250,000 per year, thought to be the biggest package in the women's game. But her world isn't about money.

She owns the same dowdy cream-colored '84 Camaro she drove in college, when it would start. She wears the same clothes she wore then, "because they still fit."

"I might need to buy a coat," she said the other night over dinner, "because this is Seattle."

When she signed her contract, she was the best player at the best time, given the leverage of two competing leagues - the ABL and the Women's NBA - when most of those who preceded her didn't even have one.

"I simply haven't paid my dues," she said. "I was just born at the right time. That's all."

But that isn't all. Starbird, 22, is uncommonly talented, an All-American at Lakes High in Tacoma where she scored more points than any boy or girl in state history until her mark was surpassed by Jennifer Stinson of Class B Davenport in 1995.

Twice an All-American at Stanford, indeed, an academic All-American with a 3.3 GPA in computer science. She was a National Merit Scholar.

Starbird shares a rental house on Queen Anne with her older sister, Meg. She said she will save her salary because she'd like someday to buy a house in Seattle.

But, otherwise, she might as well be 15 again, back at the gym at Fort Lewis, absorbed and challenged by the game she loves.

VanDerveer said she didn't see Starbird play in high school, but had to rely on some rudimentary video tape in recruiting her.

"What I did see," she said, "was someone who knew how to score. She could beat players off the dribble. We had players who could stand and shoot, but here was a player who could put the ball on the floor, especially in the full court, and finish."

Starbird has always been athletic. She was born three years after the passage of Title IX, the federal law requiring equal opportunity in athletics for women.

She was born in West Point, N.Y., where her father was an officer at the U.S. Military Academy, where his father and his wife's father had been officers. Her grandfathers competed against one another in the modern pentathlon during the 1936 Olympics in Berlin.

Grandfather Charles Leonard won a silver medal, the first person in Olympic history with a perfect score in pistol shooting. Grandfather Alfred Starbird finished seventh.

"Genetics have treated me well," said Starbird, whose father, Edward, is a retired Army colonel and mother, Peggy, is writing her second book in an area Kate and Meg call "religious research."

The Starbirds - Kate has an older brother and sister and two younger brothers - did the military move across country. They lived in New York, Virginia, Kentucky, Tennessee and finally Tacoma, her father's last assignment before retirement.

"We've always had a basic rule in the family," said Ed Starbird, "that we didn't have money for a new house, or new car or fancy clothes. But if you actually wanted to do something, we'd find the resources to make it work."

The Starbirds bought athletic shoes. Kate played soccer and softball. Then she became enamored with the skateboard, the wakeboard, and a 20-inch BMX bike for tricks on a half pipe her father built in the back yard. She was coordinated and fearless.

The real commitment came when she moved into her basketball phase. After school, Starbird spent up to four hours a day at the Fort Lewis gym. On weekends, she would be there all day.

"I'd take my lunch," she said.

She got personal with the basket and its slightly bent rim. She jumped at it every day for two years, first to touch the rim, then to try to dunk. She shot until her elbow ached with tendinitis. She dribbled up and down the edge of the gym until the janitor feared she might make a rut.

"My fingers split on the ends," she said.

She would cast glances at the middle of the gym where the soldiers - mostly male - were playing a full-court game. She wanted to play, but dared not ask. They remained distant.

"The one thing about Kate," said her father, "is her ability to quickly analyze and execute. While some kids kissed off school to focus on athletics, she could do them all well. She gets things done."

She watched how the teams were selected. Get there early and they might be a man - a player - short. They'd let her play because they had no choice. She was a body, wasn't she? Arms, legs, 140 pounds stretched over 6 feet. But a girl body.

"When I finally got to play," she said, "nobody wanted to guard me. I had to make them guard me. I had to score."

After one game, a soldier yelled at her, "there's no excuse for you being here, no excuse at all."

She walked head down across the parade grounds. The only excuse she could figure he had for being so mean was that she'd thrown that ugly jump shot over him and scored.

The shot, which connected 43 percent of the time from beyond the three-point arc last year at Stanford, was developed out of necessity. She was playing against those taller, stronger and older than she.

"It just took every bit of energy I could find to get it to the basket," she said. "I used kind of a slingshot approach."

What developed beyond an unsightly but effective shot, was a sense of confidence and commitment, a sense of well-being, and a game that would dazzle high-school girls and college women.

"We were not going to teach people coming in what she was doing," said VanDerveer. "Her game was survival on the playground. She knew if she passed it, she'd never get it back. She had a guy's game."

VanDerveer believes Fort Lewis made Starbird in the sense that had she relied simply on learning the game in high school she would have never learned to drive and cut and score.

"If she had played in a system, she'd have been put with the taller kids. She wouldn't have developed an open-court game. She wouldn't have developed an understanding of the game," VanDerveer said. "When she recognizes a backdoor opportunity, she goes."

Everyone seems to see the same thing in Starbird - intelligence, diligence, integrity, humility and gumption.

She will start at shooting guard for the Reign, and not because she makes the most money. She has been impressive in exhibition games, adapting to the more physical pro game. She lifts weights and downs a protein supplement, but she is still 6 feet 2, 150 pounds.

"She quickly figured out what she needed to do in a more physical game," Reign Coach Jacquie Hullah said. "She gets out and runs before people bump her. She uses her speed as a response.

"I'm amazed how aggressive she is with the basketball. She wants to attack."

Fort Lewis or bust.

"I thought there would be little that would impress me after the Olympics," VanDerveer said, "but I came back to Stanford and against USC, Kate played 40 minutes, scored 40 points, hit 15 of 20 shots, she was unbelievable. She just took over the game; I didn't know she could do that."

Can she do that playing for Seattle?

"If they walk it up the floor," VanDerveer said, "people might watch her play and say, `Kate who?' But if Seattle plays an up-tempo game, then they will say, `Kate wow!'

"The officiating will also affect her. If they let the game become a wrestling match, if the other team can drape players over her, well, it will be a shame because there is no one quite like her in the open court."

Playing next to her for Seattle, at the point, is Kate Paye, one of four Stanford players on the team. Paye played two years in college with Starbird, and recruited her not only to Stanford but to Seattle.

"Bird is honest, no nonsense, cut to the chase," Paye said. "When she came down on her recruiting visit we took her to a football game and she said she was bored. We were sure she didn't like Stanford and would go somewhere else."

Starbird was never going anywhere else. Two of her siblings are Huskies, but she wanted the Stanford education and that was that. Her dad made her visit Duke and Vanderbilt, but she was going to Stanford.

The next decision was the ABL or the WNBA. Seattle was home, Seattle was big in the computer world, the ABL played more and better basketball, and the money was at least as good.

The decision was easy.

Now she wants to prove that she is worth the money. She knows the two best players in the league, Teresa Edwards and Katrina McClain, don't make as much. She wants to pay her dues.

She also wants to be role model for young girls. There were no women playing pro basketball she could look up to as she toiled in the gym at Fort Lewis.

This spring she saw a girls high-school tournament on television. Some of the players were wearing knee pads the color and style she wears.

Starbird is paid by Nike to wear its shoes and endorses knee pads. She will do promotional work for Microsoft and has signed a contract with Electronic Arts to appear in a new series of interactive sports video games.

She's hot stuff, and yet in base salary - $150,000 - will make $100,000 less than the loneliest NBA bench warmer.

"Do I feel a responsibility to promote the game and the sport? Sure I do," she said. "This is a terrific time to be a woman athlete. I never imagined it would be this way. But I'm here to take advantage of the situation the best I can."

Her dad always told her education was more important than sports, that basketball might be fun, but it wouldn't buy lunch.

Kate pays for the lunches these days. Even if she wears the same old clothes and drives the same old car.