In the heart of Pennsylvania in a quiet town called Clearfield, a coach began teaching his daughter the arts of baseball and basketball.
Sheana Mosch picked up both sports with ease, starring in them by age 10. She played eight seasons of baseball and a year of high school softball, but her greatest exploits always came on the basketball court. With the guidance of her father and future high school coach, George Mosch, Sheana learned about the two men who would become her idols. She acquired just about everything she ever needed for basketball success from Babe Ruth and Pete Maravich, two of America's most flamboyant sports heroes.
From baseball's Sultan of Swat she took her jersey number; from Pistol Pete she picked up everything else.
Although Maravich passed away during Sheana's youth and his exploits survived only in newspaper clippings and vintage videotapes, his legend remained fresh in the Mosch household. When her father first showed Sheana an old tape of Maravich playing basketball, college basketball's all-time scoring leader and all-time star of the outrageous made an immediate impact on a girl who would use his game as a model for hers.
"I think growing up, my favorite skill to improve on was ball-handling," Sheana said. "I love dribbling the ball and just playing around with it. When my dad showed me a tape of Pete Maravich, I loved it because he did things with the ball that I had never seen anyone do before. He was so much ahead of his time, it was incredible. I wanted to emulate him, do the things that he did."
By the time Sheana reached eighth grade, she was spinning the ball around on her finger and practicing the rest of the moves that made Maravich, basketball's ultimate showman, a star.
By the time Sheana reached Duke, she was spinning around defenders and mirroring her idol in every way, with the exception of his on-court flair, which was never adopted by the girl who might be as quiet and low-key as her hometown, population 6,000.
Despite averaging more than 44 points per game his final three seasons in college and setting multiple scoring records, Maravich received more notoriety with between-the-leg dribbles and behind-the-back passes during an era when they were as yet unheard of and viewed as entirely arrogant. Unlike Maravich, Sheana's ability to do just about anything with the ball-her coach compares her to the greatest ball-handlers the Duke program has ever boasted-only emerges in warmups. During games, she opts for the safer, less-flashy pass in order to limit her turnover total, a conservative element of her game that has left many fans in the dark when it comes to her latent talent.
"She works on the little things, which [Maravich did]. A lot of people just want to come and work on their shot, but she worked on her ball-handling, she worked on her passing, she worked on all aspects of her game," Duke coach Gail Goestenkors said. "I know she can do all of the tricks, all of the drills that Pete Maravich could do, but other people don't know it unless they see her working on her game."
Until last Monday, however, much of the basketball world knew little of the other side of the game Sheana's coaches have seen-her ability to score at will.
For several weeks in practice, Goestenkors and the Duke coaching staff puzzled over a riddle for which no answer seemed apparent. Each day they watched as Sheana played phenomenally, aggressively cutting to the basket and creating short-range jump shots for herself. Then each game, they watched as the same person played passively, choosing to wait on the wing while freshman sensation Alana Beard did all the driving and attacking for the Blue Devils.
Goestenkors gathered the team and asked each of them to say who they felt was the team's best finisher; each of them in turn replied Sheana Mosch.
"Her ability to penetrate and lose her defender, it's the best on the team," freshman point guard Vicki Krapohl said.
"No one can stop her when she decides she's going to the basket," ACC player of the year Georgia Schweitzer added.
Despite her teammates' high opinions of her, Sheana still deferred to Beard and Schweitzer. The veteran coach met a couple times with Sheana, imploring the sophomore to play more assertively, giving her the green light to shoot when she pleased. Still, there was no response, only glimpses of what could be.
"She's afraid of shooting too much, and I told her I would let her know if she shot too much," Goestenkors said. "Those are words players love to hear, they they have the green light and they need to shoot more, but she still just wasn't as aggressive."
Then Beard went down with an injury, and the Sheana Mosch of practice began to let fans in on Duke's little secret.
With Beard on the bench, Sheana had by far her best game of the season in a thrilling victory over Virginia in Charlottesville, matching her previous career high with 25 points on an endless stream of slashes to the hoop. After a 12-for-15 shooting performance, however, Sheana uttered the words that her coaching staff would not have wanted to hear, and it remained unclear whether her breakout night against the Cavaliers would become a forgotten footnote or a fabulous forecast.
"I'm happy with the part I'm playing on the team, whether it's scoring or not scoring at all," Sheana said the day before the North Carolina game, Duke's second without the services of Beard. "I don't feel any kind of extra pressure to score and to make up for the points that Alana gave us. I don't think that's something I could do. I don't think that's one aspect I can just take over."
Five days later, Sheana's prediction seems like the only thing she has done that has been off the mark. In a three-game span, everyone, including Sheana, discovered that in the tranquil and modest two-guard lay the potential for a conference all-star.
With apparent ease, Sheana took command of the scoring load by single-handedly more than accounting for Beard's team-leading 17 points per game. Against the conference's elite opposition, Sheana matched or improved upon her career high in all three games of Beard's absence, shattering her previous season average of 7.4 points per game with a one-week total of 84 points that culminated yesterday afternoon. Against Clemson, Sheana dropped in 30 on a perfect shooting night-12-for-12-that raised the bar for Duke's all-time best performance from the field.
After half a season of quiet contributions, Sheana's 34 field goals in three games prove there is no secret formula, no magical combination she needs to decipher once Beard returns. As former Duke great Kira Orr explained, only Sheana can determine what will happen after her teammate rejoins the starting lineup.
"She just needs to keep doing the things she has been doing the last three games-being aggressive, taking the ball to the basket, drawing fouls," said Orr, Duke's all-time assist leader who became a close friend of Sheana's after working out with her for a month this summer. "Before she was... waiting for Alana to do those things. She needs to realize they can both be out there doing those things and it will only make the team that much more deadly."
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