When Julie Rousseau takes road trips with her team this winter, she won't be staying at the Ritz Carlton.
She won't need to get to LAX either, because Rousseau and Washington High School won't need an airplane to get to Crenshaw or Locke or the other schools on the schedule.
And when she gathers her team for the pregame huddle in December, she won't be looking up at 6-5 Lisa Leslie or 6-8 Zheng Haixia, or giving a former All-American like Tamecka Dixon instructions on how to break down the zone.
But this summer, this strange and glorious summer, that's exactly what Rousseau is doing. Through a convoluted set of coincidences and complications, Rousseau vaulted from the obscurity of the L.A. City league, and games in ramshackle gyms across Southern California, to national TV and the media spotlight. She's now the coach of the Los Angeles Sparks, one of the two cornerstone franchises of the media-savvy WNBA, and if the Sparks don't make the playoffs, a lot of folks in very expensive suits are going to calling her up and wondering why.
But in a way, it's just as remarkable that Rousseau is coaching at all as it is that she's in the WNBA. After a stellar career at Dorsey High in L.A., she got a full ride to UC Irvine. But she and her coach didn't get along, and after a year, she dropped out of basketball and out of school.
`I found my way back through coaching,' says Rousseau now, and she hooked up with Washington High School as an assistant on the varsity. The team won four straight city championships, led by Charisse Sampson (now of the New England Blizzard), but never made it to the state championship game. They came very close one season, but they had to beat Morningside High School to move on to the Oakland Coliseum Arena for the title game. Morningside had a pretty good center, who had a great second half to send Washington home -- and Lisa Leslie's team went on to become California champions.
`That game is still vivid in my memory,' says Rousseau, nine years down the road, but she's also storing away some more positive memories of Leslie as the Sparks make a playoff push.
Of course, the Sparks weren't supposed to be worried about the playoffs. The master plan called for New York and L.A. to meet in the finals, in media hoop heaven, and Rousseau was just along for the ride. She'd been hired as a Sparks' assistant by General Manager Rhonda Windham, who met Rousseau during summer league games, where both coached future pros and top collegians.
By now, Rousseau was in charge of the Washington High program, where she had taken a team that lost all five starters and had improved every year since. Washington was and is a force in the very tough L.A. City league (the champion, Crenshaw, finished second in the state), but it's still a long way from a downtown gym to the Fabulous Forum.
Rousseau made the jump by doing a great job as an assistant -- while watching Linda Sharp crash and burn a few seats down the bench. The huge Sparks (three players 6-5 or taller, plus 6-3 widebody Deadra Charles) couldn't find an outside shooter, and after an embarrassing loss to the Mighty Ruthie-less Sacramento Monarchs, Sharp was gone.
`I had no idea,' said Rousseau. `The next day I'm at the beauty shop after we landed, and Rhonda Windham called. Her very first words were "Hey interim head coach ..."
`I can't even tell you what that day was like.'
She remembers that night, though. The Sparks, energized by the coaching change, absolutely demolished the second-best team in the league. They roared by the Houston Comets 77-52, outrebounding them 63-38 and blocking eight shots, and left the Comets wondering what happened to the team they were expected to beat so easily.
But, as that ubiquitous commercial so realistically points out, life isn't a fairy tale. The Sparks then stumbled, losing their next three before rebounding with a win against the league's third-best team, Phoenix.
Like Sharp, Rousseau has struggled to find the answers. `I see improvement, a lot of improvement,' she says. `There are small things, like spacing, we're keying in on. As a whole, I know we're a great team.'
That might not sound that much different than what Rousseau tells the L.A. Times for the preseason prep article in November, because at a certain level, coaching is coaching. `We're trying to maximize everybody's talents,' Rousseau says several times, which is what every CYO coach in the country wants to do too.
And as for the pressure, Rousseau refuses to be ruffled by the leap to the big leagues. `It all comes with the territory,' she says. And besides, she knows it's just her summer job.
7/27/97
