"Scott! Look up!" yells Mary Burke from the other end of the basketball court.
She is free from the player guarding her and can score an easy basket if Scott could just get her the ball.
The gym at Bryant College is full. Three courts, three games, no fans, but plenty of noise. The bounce of three balls echoes above the intermittent squeak of sneakers on wood. Players yell instructions and encouragement to their teammates.
It's the playoffs of the college's intramural league.
Burke is conspicuous. She's one of only two women playing, she's one of the tallest players on the court at 6 feet tall and she's shouting.
Scott Gendron throws a perfect overhand pass down the length of the court to Burke, who turns to the basket and rolls in an easy layup.
"Would she be playing in the WNBA or ABL if the leagues were around when she got out of college?" asked Gendron, 30, who has been playing recreational basketball with Burke for three years. "Yeah, I believe so."
Gendron was referring to the Women's National Basketball Association and the American Basketball League, two professional women's leagues that are in their second seasons.
Burke's team lost the game. "By six or eight points. I don't know," she said.
Signs of disappointment on Burke's face are difficult to find. Intramural basketball is rather small in the scheme of things. Plus, there's bound to be a pickup game later in the week.
Burke, 34, has been the women's basketball coach at Bryant for the last seven years. After an All-State career at Toll Gate High School, Burke played basketball for four years at Providence College. By the time she graduated in 1987 she was a District I All-American, a two-time Big East All-Conference selection and was fourth on the school's all-time scoring list.
In 1998, it's the resume of a professional women's basketball player. In 1987, it was a pretty good way to end a career.
Christina Batastini's season ended last Saturday and she isn't sure what to do with herself. Neither are her Stanford teammates. The Cardinal, the No. 1 seed in the West Regional of the National Collegiate Athletic Association Tournament, was upset by 16th-seeded Harvard in the first round of the tournament. It was an uncharacteristically early departure for the Cardinal, who made it to the Final Four last year.
"Our season has never been over this early," said Batastini, a sophomore. "The last two days, none of us know what to do with ourselves. We call each other and it's like, `Okay, when do we practice?' This is the first time anyone on our team has gone on spring break."
Batastini's coach, Tara Vanderveer, coach of the gold-medal winning 1996 U.S. Olympic Women's Basketball Team, called a meeting two days after the loss. After an hour and a half of discussing how their performance wasn't "Stanford Basketball," the team had to watch Harvard lose to Arkansas.
Batastini hasn't been having the same type of success she had as an All-Stater at Classical High School. She isn't leading the Cardinal in anything, she hasn't been named All-Anything, yet. But, she said, everything is relative.
"Stanford is the best place I can be to further my basketball career," she said. "You play at Stanford and you're afforded a level of respect. Over the next two years I hope to play more and be able to get seen. Even now, pro scouts have been at practice a number of times to see other players. Even if you're not playing much, they see you at practice."
Burke and Batastini have played together in pickup games at a gym in Cranston over the last two summers -- Batastini honing her skills for the coming college season; Burke participating in the usual workout, sometimes measuring to see if she could keep up with today's Division I player.
Though they are separated by only 15 years, as female athletes they are generations apart.
BURKE WAS alone with her parents on the recruiting trail. While women had been competing on the college level since 1972, the recruiting process still wasn't nearly as sophisticated when Burke graduated from Toll Gate in 1983 as it is now. There weren't any traveling Amateur Athletic Union teams or prestigious national youth tournaments. High school coaches weren't part of the mix.
"My parents sent out letters with some newspaper clippings and I went to some camps," Burke said. "That's what we had to do. Back then, coaches weren't going to come to see a little Rhode Islander."
After Burke landed at PC, her experience served as the example for other players.
"Everyone talked to my parents after that; there wasn't any other source of information," she said.
When Batastini was at a camp for talented players in eighth grade, an AAU coach from Connecticut pulled her aside one day and told her what she needed to do.
"He broke it all down. He told me to go find the coaches because they won't seek you. No one is going to come to the Classical High School gym," she said.
So Batastini joined the AAU team from Connecticut because it offered her more opportunities to travel, opportunities to be exposed to more coaches.
By the time the summer before her senior year of high school rolled around, the phone at the Batastini house was ringing off the hook.
"I'd be halfway out the door to go to the movies with my friends and a coach would call. How was I going to get them off the phone?" Batastini said.
As a result of AAU teams, women's basketball players have better skills and the game is more developed now than it was when Burke played.
"There are different set plays now that are common that you never saw at our level," she said. "Also, if you're 6 feet tall now, you're a guard. I'm 6 feet tall and I was a power forward."
HISTORY AND statistics indicate that Burke and all other women college athletes in the mid-80s should have felt like a second-class citizens. She didn't.
"Obviously, we weren't the men's team. They were the top priority. But in the realm of women's athletics, we had an identity, we were the creme de la creme," she said. "It was a situation we understood -- we didn't expect to be treated the same as the men. . . . We weren't slighted in any way."
Sometimes, she said, when the men flew to games, the women would drive. If the men got 10 pairs of sneakers a year, the women got 2 or 3. Today, the men and women have equal transportation and equipment.
"We weren't 6-foot-10 and dunking the ball and filling up 16,000-seat arenas," Burke said. "The fact is, at PC we were well-respected and were provided a great deal. Were we treated like the men? No. But we weren't the men's team."
The Stanford women's team isn't the men's team either, but Batastini and her teammates have things Burke didn't have -- sold-out crowds, nationally televised games and a sneaker contract.
Before Batastini got to Stanford, the biggest crowd she played in front of was roughly 2,000 people. Then she played at Maples Pavillion, where the Cardinal had won 59 straight games before their loss to Harvard.
"It was a capacity crowd, 7,500 people, everyone was screaming, the place was rocking. After warm-ups, I was in a daze. I just couldn't comprehend it," she said.
When Stanford made it to the Final Four last year, the team was outfitted from top to bottom with Nike gear.
"The entire school is with Nike this year," Batastini said. "You get as many sneakers as you want. If they don't fit, they'll get you a different style."
As far as competing with the men, Batastini said, Stanford women may have an edge.
"I wouldn't say we're rivals, but . . . " Batastini paused. "We give the guys grief because they don't practice as much as we do and theirs are way easier. This year they finally decided to increase the men's conditioning to our level."
While athletes on scholarship were expected to concentrate only on one sport, Burke wasn't required to do any conditioning -- preseason or otherwise.
"We worked out, but not at that level. It was on our own mostly," she said. "It shows the level women's basketball has reached when they have the same workouts as the men."
"When it was over, it was really hard," Burke said."Basketball was my life, it was everything. It was hard to adjust when it was over."
When Burke graduated from PC in 1987, the only opportunity she had to continue playing was to join a European league. It wasn't an option.
"After four years of college, I was a little burned out and I had an opportunity to be an assistant coach here at Bryant," Burke said.
Burke's friends are like many women who have played college athletics -- they establish a career, get married and start a family. Sports are no longer a priority.
Burke, however, still has a competitive drive to feed.
"I've been competitive for so long, it's hard to stop," she said.
Because few women continue to play past college, Burke competes almost exclusively with men.
"I'd rather play with men," she said. "Women who are still playing, don't play all the time and physically, they're not there. Men find the time and the opportunities.
"Eventually, there will be more leagues so more women can stay competitive. Like the game itself, it took time -- it's just not there yet," she said.
For Batastini, there is a life in basketball after Stanford.
"If everything goes my way, I'd like to play professionally when I get out of college for about five or six years maybe. I don't know," she said. "I'd like to do as much as I can, playing-wise. If it doesn't work out, I'll probably coach. I know I'll always be in contact with basketball."
AS MUCH progress as women have made in athletics -- from Burke to Batastini -- compared with men, there is still a long way to go.
"Have we made progress over the years? Yes and no," said Donna Lopiano, executive director of the Women's Sports Foundation, an advocate group, based in New York, for women in sports. "It's a glass half-full, half-empty situation. There is a study out that shows spending in women's sports has increased significantly over the last five years. But spending for men's sports has almost doubled that increase. So no, we're not close to achieving gender equity."
According to the last gender equity report card issued by the foundation, which was based on the 1995-96 school year, men's college teams received 73 percent ($404.9 million) of operating expenditures for lodging, meals, travel, officials, uniforms and equipment for home and away games. Women got 27 percent ($149.9 million).
Lopiano said the gold-medal winning performances of the 1996 U.S. Olympic Women's Basketball team and the 1998 U.S. Olympic Women's Hockey Team have had a positive effect on gender equity in athletics.
"It's a vindication of Title IX. You see, this is what happens when you give women a good weight room and good coaching," Lopiano said.
Burke said that while college players now have more advantages and opportunities than she did, she doesn't have any regrets.
"Though there were opportunities that weren't available to me then, I'm completely satisfied and very happy with the direction my life has taken knowing I had a part in the way women's basketball has grown," she said. "Someone paved the way for me. I hope I paved the way for someone else."
Batastini knows her situation at Stanford isn't the standard across the country. She knows she's lucky.
"In my own life, there has been a great shift in opportunities for women athletes. Even now it's changing to an unbelievable degree," she said. "In my case, I didn't have to battle to be allowed to play. In the future, there won't be a question, female athletes will be an accepted part of society."
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