"More"

JIM Murray, the syndicated sportswriter who works from Los Angeles, once penned a column that started out something like this: "There are certain things you never expect to see: a Frenchman slurping his soup, a truck driver wearing a tuxedo or an Ivy League basketball team [his target at the time, Yale, was about to play UCLA] in a West Coast basketball tournament."

Well, Murray could have added another item: an Ivy League women's basketball team holding a six-hour double-session practice on New Year's Eve. It happened in Hanover several weeks past and was followed by a comparable workout on New Year's Day. This is the approach that Chris Wielgus has taken with the women's team at Dartmouth this winter and it's working just fine, thank you.

Wielgus, who graduated from Springfield College two years ago, is the part-time coach of a team that had a 1-8 record last year but after one week of play this season had doubled the figure in the win column. While it proved a scramble a year ago just to get enough players on the floor for practice, Wielgus had to cut her roster this fall to stay within the 15-player limit. "I wrote each player on last year's team plus all the incoming freshmen," she says. "I told them we were starting an entirely new program that would be very different from what had existed." She was understating the case.

The approach, a stark contrast to what had gone before, rivals the pace that most men's teams regard as routine. Gone is the carefree attitude, replaced by a demand for total commitment that has been accepted greedily by her players. There are seven freshmen and five sophomores on the squad that pays for mistakes in practice with extra running and wraps up each workout with a 30-minute weight-training program introduced by the new women's trainer, Kathy Heck.

"It's a young team and every player has accepted the fact that it takes hard work to achieve," says Wielgus. "There's more to the game than just shooting the ball and they know it now." "More" includes a pressing defense and a fast-breaking offense that destroyed New England College by 23 points in the first game and came back to win its second by two before bowing for the first time at Trinity.

They're not ready for Immaculata, Delta State, or Princeton just yet, but the Dartmouth women have discovered what they probably knew deep down all along - that hard work can be fun.

Anne Thomas Donaghy '77 ranks as one of the top collegiate cross-country skiers.