Like a slowly gathering storm, the Gail Goestenkors switchboard gradually springs from a lone canned ring to a four-alarm communications fire.
It's not actually a switchboard, of course, but during the busiest part of the women's basketball season it comes complete with a a series of rings and flashes that would make even Ma Bell blush.
On those days, it simply fills the background with all the ambiance of a Manhattan traffic jam. Needless to say, Gail Goestenkors never has to wait for a phone call.
Yet in the middle of it all, Goestenkors will be doing just that, sitting and waiting for one phone call-from Lauren Rice, the newest member of the college basketball coaching fraternity.
Just 10 weeks after her basketball career had seemingly ended with Duke's Sweet 16 loss to Louisiana State, Rice decided to continue her basketball career as an assistant coach at South Alabama State.
And though it may be months away, Goestenkors knows that sometime in the early part of Rice's first season, that phone call will be coming.
She even knows exactly what she'll say.
"I'll tell her to be patient," says Goestenkors, who got her coaching break as an assistant under Purdue's legendary coach Lynne Dunn. "The one thing she has to remember is that the first year is always the toughest."
Although Rice was a team captain her senior season and well-respected as an on-court leader, her decision to coach was somewhat of a surprise.
Her father, Doug
So when she sat at the press table with a dull stare fixed nowhere in particular, it was simply assumed that when she spoke of the end of her Duke career, she spoke doubly of the end of her basketball career.
"It was great," she said at the time, "It was a great chapter in my life, but it's over."
But what Lauren Rice was about to discover was that just because the story ended, it didn't mean she had to stop writing.
"[My parents] have always allowed me to be independent; the direction I take is up to me," Rice says. "As for the business, I had a lot to learn anyway, everything was changing. Basketball was my passion."
So the soon-to-be assistant coach Rice met with the long-since assistant coach Goestenkors and the two began to discuss job openings. But it was a quirk of fate, not the best laid plains of coach and player that earned Rice an interview at South Alabama.
A Hoosier by birth, Rice submitted her resume to Indiana while it was in the midst of a coaching change. But the resume didn't wind up in the Bloomington filing office, it wound up in the hands of Keila Whittington, an assistant with the Hoosier program who was leaving to join new head coach Rick Pietri at South Alabama.
One week and one interview later, Rice was offered the third assistant position with the Jaguars.
"She's in a great situation," Goestenkors says about Rice, who joins former teammate Shaeta Brown in Duke's coaching family. "She gets to bring all her enthusiasm and dedication into a young program that is headed up."
Rice also brings an uncanny knowledge for the game on the floor, as she started at four different positions for the Blue Devils. But as much as she can bring to the Jaguars is as much as she has yet to learn on the job.
Although the South Alabama job should prove a stepping stone in Rice's career, the former Blue Devil has a lot to learn about the behind-the-scenes work of coaching, like the constant threat of injury-paper cuts.
"Nobody mentioned all the paperwork," Rice says with a laugh. "There a lot of things like that I have to learn, because I didn't go the graduate assistant route. I want to take however long I'm there and learn everything."
Already, she's found herself hosting recruits and working camps, and somewhere in the whirlwind of a month, she's lived between Mobile, Ala. and Durham, she found time to speak to Goestenkors, though only briefly.
"I congratulated her and told her she'll do well," Goestenkors says.
But she still knows that sometime during the busiest day of the season, there'll be a call from a familiar voice.
And that's one call Gail Goestenkors will take.
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