SPOKANE, Wash. - They put Alana Beard on her. They put Rometra Craig on her. They put Georgia Schweitzer on her.
Sometimes, they put all three of them on her.
Didn't matter.
Not when Duke led 32-20 in the first half and Jackie Stiles had only nine points. Not when Duke led for the last time, 65-64, with 6:11 remaining and Stiles had amassed 29 points. And certainly not when it was all over-when Duke found its season suddenly over after an 81-71 loss to Southwest Missouri State.
Of those 81 points, Stiles ended up with 41. The stat-line told the entire story of the game.
Stiles took more than one-third of her team's entire shots with 15-for 22 shooting, 10-for-13 from the free-throw line.
"Stiles, we had no answer for her," said Duke coach Gail Goestenkors, who compared the Bears' senior to Allen Iverson. "We tried many different defenses on her and we just couldn't keep the ball out of her hands."
Only minutes after beating Arkansas in the second round, Goestenkors' first two words were Jackie Stiles. And when she was asked who would get the mammoth assignment to defend Stiles, Goestenkors candidly noted that it would be Beard, Duke's star freshman guard.
She had done it before against LSU's Marie Ferdinand. Penn State's Kelly Mazzante. Georgia Tech's Niesha Butler. With Beard, the big names did not matter, nor did their big stats.
And everyone thought she would do it again. But none of the above average 30.2 points per game.
"She's a great player," said Beard, who put up 27 points to lead Duke in scoring Saturday night. "Just great. Everything everyone said about her was true."
When Beard fouled out with 59 seconds to go, her adversary made the second free-throw for her 39th point, leaving the intense and emotional freshman on the sidelines with her team fading fast.
But while Beard began and ended the game guarding Stiles, it was Craig who took over the duties with 13:50 to go in the first half.
Craig, whose perimeter defense is her trademark feature, did not have much luck with Stiles either.
"I know she's a great player, she can score from pretty much anywhere on the court," Craig said. You can't let her step outside because she's a three-point threat."
Craig seemed to have stopped Stiles from the three-point line, however, as she shot only an unimpressive 1-for-3 outside the arc.
But inside, it was a different story.
"She's just a great player," senior point guard Schweitzer said. "We knew we weren't going to stop her. We just needed to do the job on the rest of the team. She's just a great player."
That's the key-the rest of the team. Or Tara Mitchem, the senior who scored 40 points in Southwest Missouri State's win in the first round over Toledo.
Stiles is as consistent a player as can be hoped for. For instance, in the Bears' first game against Oklahoma, an 89-82 loss, the senior scored 31 points. Fifteen days later, when the Sooners lost to Southwest Missouri State, Stiles had 25 points.
When the Bears lost to Northern Iowa, Stiles scored 39; she had 38 against Texas Tech. It is a given that Stiles will be the primary offensive threat for the Bears, but they are quite vulnerable as long as she remains a one-woman show.
Mitchem scored 17 points against the Blue Devils, however, providing more than just Stiles' one dimension to the Bears' offense. It was her contribution that gave the Bears the margin of victory.
"[Beard, Craig and Schweitzer] all made it very tough for me, but it wasn't me against them. It was y team against Duke," Stiles said. "My teammates did a great job of setting screens for me.... It was a total team effort."
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