Not Just X's and O's, but Commas and Colons

ST. LOUIS

Whether the Oklahoma Sooners win or lose Sunday in this women's Final Four, they will have to hand in their papers to Sherri Coale.

The Sooners are required to write a brief essay after every game describing what they saw, learned and did in the game. Coale, who says it teaches analysis and helps her get what's in her players' heads, scans their work with the critical eye and itching hand of a former high school English teacher, frowning at dangling participles and disorderly prepositional phrases.

"I have to read them with a pen or a pencil far away from me," Coale said. "It's hard to fight that grammatical urge."

One of the things that makes the women's Final Four annually worth watching is that it tends to feature coaches who are real educators, who teach that basketball is an ethic, and who don't seem to mind so much that they won't be rewarded with $35 million contracts, because they never expected to get rich at their professions in the first place. As Coale's favorite author, Pat Conroy says of teaching, it's "God's work, not God's pay." Perhaps the most authentic teacher in this Final Four is Coale, who for seven years taught Shakespeare and Chaucer to public school teenagers before she became a coaching phenom.

Coale has become one of the iconic presences in the women's game, all tumbling blond hair tottering atop three-inch heels, but that's mostly a pose, her way of glamorizing and classing-up an Oklahoma program that, before she came, was so dreary that average attendance was just 65 and the school briefly killed the sport in 1990.

"Sherri has become one of the faces of college basketball on the women's side," said her friend, U-Conn. Coach Geno Auriemma, who added kiddingly, "and she's just a multitalented individual, to be able to scout and recruit, and spend all that time on her hair. That's not easy, and I'm sure people don't understand how hard she has to work at that."

Actually, underneath the tints and the heels, Coale is a self-deprecating small-town Oklahoman who still drops the occasional "daggone" and who mocks her newfound rep as a coaching darling. "I've been drinking that Smart Water, and I feel pretty good," she said. But Auriemma's not entirely kidding about her talents. She was a tour de force growing up in tiny Healdton, valedictorian of her class, a star in basketball and track, and a trio singer who performed at local weddings. According to the Daily Oklahoman, she was also a rabid competitor. She used to go helmet-to-helmet in tackle football with her brother Jack, and sparred with him on the basketball court so violently they exchanged blows. Once she hit him in the mouth with a telephone receiver.

By 1996, she was holding forth on great books in the public school classrooms at Norman High while coaching the girls' basketball team to a couple of state titles and raising two children. She awoke to the notion of collegiate coaching as a career encouraged by Auriemma. He met Coale when he was recruiting one of her players and, after watching her run a practice, told her she was better at the job than she knew.

"I thought Sherri ran a college-type program," he said. "Sometimes you go to high school practice, and it's like, you know, recess. I was struck by how organized and how thorough it was."

When Coale audaciously applied for the open head coaching vacancy at the university, Auriemma backed her with a recommendation.

Coale promised to transform Oklahoma into "a national power," and by 2002 she made good on her word, when the Sooners made it to the championship game before losing to U-Conn. Now the Sooners are in their second Final Four in eight seasons, thanks in part to Coale's biggest recruiting coup: the blockbuster Paris twins, Courtney and Ashley, who incidentally have also helped Coale maintain an impressive academic streak. In 22 of the last 24 semesters, the Sooners have a cumulative grade-point average of 3.0 or better.

Coale's presence in her second Final Four signifies that she's here to stay, which is good news for the game, because she's an original, an ebullient and hyper-articulate personality, who lapses into philosophic asides about how every game is a lesson "if you look at it through the right lens, in how to be happy and successful in the world, and be a functional piece of this great action."

Although the coach has overtaken the English teacher, a love of words obviously lingers. She hung an Appollinaire quote in her children's nursery, and she's a constant reader -- books on adolescence, and continual revisitings of her favorite, Conroy's "My Losing Season," which she would like to teach in a class -- and she's also an aspiring writer. Over the last couple of seasons she has written a periodic blog on the Sooners' Web site that has acquired a cult following among women's basketball readers for its combination of flair and candor.

In one entry, Coale wrote about pulling to the side of the road to stare at a rainbow, with her children in the car. Oklahoma had broken a 100-year record for consecutive days of rain, and she wrote about "ponds spilling their red guts across farmland and rivers we used to be able to walk across rolling like the white capping ocean." The rainbow "grabbed our breath like a foot-first backwards fall."

After reading the stylings of Sherri Coale, you wonder if she might become almost as good a writer as a coach, if she put her mind to it. But for the moment, coaching takes precedence, and when discussion turns to Oklahoma's projected also-ran status in this Final Four, all that sensitive literacy disappears, replaced by pugnacity. You get a glimpse of the girl who hit her brother with a telephone when reporters tell her that the Sooners' matchup against Louisville in the first semifinal is considered a game of runner-ups, while the second pairing of top-ranked U-Conn. and Stanford is viewed as the more important game. Her grin widened into a sneer, "Thanks for the heads-up," she said curtly. "We're going to go ahead and play at 6, if that's all right with everybody."

She will expect your papers on her desk in the morning.