Most likely to succeed: Washington's Kelsey Plum nears NCAA scoring record

SEATTLE — The phone rang at the Plum household in Poway, Calif., on a late July day in 2012. Katie Plum picked it up, and the caller identified herself as Jackie Stiles.

“I don’t know if you know who I am,” Stiles said before Plum interjected.

“I know exactly who you are,” Plum said.

At the time, every adult member of the Plum family had played Division I college sports, and Katie Plum had talked to plenty of recruiters who pursued her two oldest daughters as well as her youngest, Kelsey. Recruiting didn’t do much for the girls’ parents, Katie and Jim Plum. Katie used recruiting letters as fire starters on the family’s frequent camping trips.

But this recruiting call was different. It was coming from a person whom the family, after filling out their men’s and women’s NCAA brackets in 2001, watched carry Southwest Missouri State to the Women’s Final Four. A person who set the NCAA women’s scoring record that still stands. A person who earned all-America honors after becoming the first woman to net a 1,000-point college season. A person who was making her first recruiting call of her first coaching job, an assistant position at Loyola Marymount.

“We watched that whole run,” Katie Plum said this week. “I did tell Kelsey that. I said, Kels, you don’t have to talk to everybody, but you gotta talk to Jackie Stiles.”

Katie Plum said her family found inspiration in Stiles’ modest stature for a basketball player (5-8) was captivated by Stiles’ well-chronicled work ethic of coming early and staying late for practice and tacking on a one-hour Stairmaster session for good measure.

Stiles, meanwhile, recalls her first live scouting assignment and being captivated by Kelsey Plum’s play. “I was mesmerized by her game,” Stiles told USA TODAY Sports. “I knew she was going to be special, and I knew LMU was a big-time long shot, but I didn’t care. I told my head coach, I’ve gotta call her.”

Then and now, Stiles intentionally avoids identifying herself as women’s college basketball’s all-time leading scorer when talking to prospects. But she saw much of her own game in Plum’s game, she made an exception. “I said, I know you probably don’t know who I am,” Stiles said, “but I’m the all-time leading scorer, and I would love to help you break my record.”

Sometime in the next 10 days, if Plum maintains her current average, the University of Washington senior will become the leading scorer in the history of women’s college basketball, surpassing Stiles’ record of 3,393. Plum is 79 points behind Stiles’ mark entering Thursday night, her penultimate regular-season home game for the Huskies and one that is being branded “Kelsey Plum Night.”

Depending on how far the 12th-ranked Huskies go in the Pac-12 and NCAA tournaments, Plum also could threaten or break Stiles’ single-season NCAA record of 1,062 points (Plum is at 897).

“She was awesome,” Kelsey Plum said, thinking back to her phone chat with Stiles. “I’m pretty sure she liked the way that I was like her. We’re pretty much the same size, we pretty much shot everywhere on the court and just play with a fearless, next-possession mentality.”

Yet in many ways the player Stiles saw in the summer of 2012 is different than the one who is nearing the end of what has become one of the most decorated careers in the sport’s history.

The drive

Plum’s first season as a Washington player was also the first season for head coach Mike Neighbors, who had been promoted from his assistant role following the departure of Kevin McGuff for Ohio State in April 2013.

Neighbors remembers Plum coming directly to the gym from the airport upon her arrival in September of that year. And it wasn’t a first-day thing. She worked out in the mornings. She put extra film on the iPad. She shot at lunchtime. “Every time I heard a ball bouncing, I assumed it was her,” Neighbors said.

It was and is a habit for Plum, one that dates back more than a decade. Katie Plum remembers walking into Kelsey’s room one day and seeing on her desk a hand-drawn chart on notebook paper that documented how many free throws she had shot and made each day. “To see that from a 9- or 10-year-old? Totally self-driven,” Katie Plum said. “I still think to this day, ‘That’s Kelsey.’ ”

Kelsey Plum says she gets her initiative from her mom, who drove a cab as a 16-year-old in suburban Cleveland (her grandfather Arthur McBride owned cab companies in the area as well as, until 1953, the Cleveland Browns, whose offseason player employment provided by their owner inspired the term “taxi squad.”)

“I learned from an early age if you want something, go make it happen,” Kelsey Plum said. “It’s not anyone else’s job.”

She still draws on a lesson her parents taught her in fourth grade, when Plum, who was old for her class but young for fifth, sought to switch rooms to a class made up of a combination of fourth- and fifth-graders. She wanted her parents, like her friends’ parents sometimes did, to talk to the principal and take care of it. Katie and Jim Plum had a different approach.

“Jim was a big believer that the kids really needed to learn to advocate for themselves,” Katie Plum said. “He just said, ‘All right Kels, here's what I want you to do: You've got to go to the principal's office and the secretary's going to say, Well, what's it about? And what you need to say is, It's personal. And when you say that, she can't ask you any more about it but she has to get you face time with the principal. And then you go into the principal's office and you tell her all the things you just told me about why this placement is not a good spot for you. And if that doesn't work, then I'll go see her.”

Kelsey did exactly as her parents instructed and got it switched. “I really think that empowered her to advocate for herself,” Katie Plum said. “She was really good at it after that.”

A hard two years

By the time Plum was in seventh grade, she was translating that advocacy to the basketball court. She played pickup with her father and his friends in open gyms near their home and figured out how, as a 4-8, 120-pound early adolescent, to earn her spot.

“I think the first thing I learned was, I gotta be able to shoot if I'm going to stay on the court,” she said. “And then also I gotta make shots, because if you lose at pickup, you're off and you have to wait like two hours to get back on.

“I just wanted to be able to be multidimensional in my game, and just because I'm small and might not look the part doesn't mean I can't play it.”

Once at Washington, Plum continued to play it well. In a coaching staff meeting before her first season, Neighbors and his assistants were discussing the idea of team captains and the qualities they thought such players should possess. They listed 28 traits on a board and found themselves placing Plum’s name beside 24 of them. Most players fit a dozen or so.

“And so the conversation became, how can we name captains and not include Kelsey in this?” Neighbors said. “These are the qualities we have seen evidence of, and when she blew that chart away I said, this is not going to be a popular decision.”

Neighbors later sat down with Plum to present the staff’s thoughts and express his preference for her, as a freshman, to take on the role of being one of the team captains. He told her it would be hard, but that he felt it would pay off during Plum’s upperclass seasons and was an important move for the team to get where it wanted to go in the future. He also said the staff was convinced she was capable of handling it.

“I want you to think about it because you're the one who's going to have to live it,” Neighbors recalled telling her. “I will have your back, I will support you, but you're the one who's going to have to live with it every day and it's not going to be easy.”

Plum accepted the role but had another way to describe it.

“That was social suicide,” she said. “I didn’t want it, but I understood why he was doing it, because you need to change the culture. I made a lot of mistakes being thrown into a leadership role that young. I mean, I didn’t even know where class is and I’m trying to tell people what to do.”

Plum considers her freshman and sophomore years at Washington the hardest two years of her life.

“By far,” she said. “You lose friends. I'd play a game and walk home in the rain (alone). That's the way it was. You're not liked. And it sucks. And you feel alone, and I'm in a new city, my family's not here, I don't know anybody but my team, and right now my team doesn't like me and I don't even like me.”

But as hard as it was, she knew there was thought and strategy behind it. Washington needed to improve, and it needed Plum in a leading role in order to do so.

“I think the thing that saved me,” Plum said, “was, regardless of what happens, I’m going to get better as a player.”

That wasn’t all. As Plum got better as a teammate, Washington got better as a team.

No letup

No Huskies player is a better authority on the evolution of Plum than center Chantel Osahor, a classmate and cohabitant of the Washington women's basketball record book. Osahor is Washington’s all-time leading rebounder, and her per-game average this season is 2½ more than the No. 2 rebounder in Division I.

Neighbors and Plum attest that Osahor knows where Plum is going before she gets there, and Osahor has used that knowledge to become Washington’s best passer in addition to being college basketball’s best rebounder and one of its best defensive players. She’s also somewhat of a Plum historian.

“There was a lot put on her her freshman year, and it was really hard to work through for her and for everybody,” Osahor said. “Now I say she's my person. We're really, really close. She's one of the few people that I trust with my life.”

Trust and comfort with roles were two of the main reasons the Huskies reached the 2016 Final Four in their second NCAA appearance since 2007. “To see what happened last year, it was so miraculous on so many levels,” Katie Plum said. “And then to see this year again the kind of chemistry they have, I don’t think it could be any better than it is.”

Still, Kelsey Plum spent the offseason determined to get better. She strove to get in the best shape of her life, adjusting her diet and exercise regimen, because she believes that many shots players miss come from being tired. She worked with assistant coach Morgan Valley to make 500 shots per day in a variety of scenarios: catch and shoot, off the dribble, off screens and off sprints in transition.

In the summer of 2015 she had been pulled into a pickup game with current and former Huskies and NBA players such as Isaiah Thomas, Nate Robinson and Tony Wroten when she happened by Alaska Airlines Arena and they need one more player to play five-on-five. “I’m laughing like, Are you kidding me?” Plum said. “My first thought is, Who am I guarding?”

Last summer she was a pickup regular with the boys team at Nathan Hale High School, which has spent most of the 2016-17 at No. 1 in the USA TODAY Super 25 boys basketball rankings. Nathan Hale coach Brandon Roy would tell her when and where the team was having a run, and Roy had a special rule for Plum: Regardless if her team won or lost, she got to play in every pickup game.

“It was awesome,” Plum said. “You just have to be creative if you want to score when you play against guys. You have to be way more decisive, you have to be quicker, but I think they really helped me.”

The proof is in her statistics other than the one that will cement her name in college women’s basketball history. Plum was determined to be a more efficient player as a senior, and she has accomplished that. She has been more productive while her usage rate — the percentage of team plays involving a particular player — has declined by 9%.

“You could argue that she’s one of the most improved players from last year to this year around,” Neighbors said. “That’s just how she’s continued to work.”

She’s never stopped working, and she’s never stopped scoring.

“So much grace has been given to me in this process, and if this record were to be broken, it's not an individual record,” Plum said. “It takes a village to do something like this. As much credit as people think I should take, there's a lot more moving parts — my freshman year, my sophomore year, my teammates, my coaches, my family, there's a lot more things that go into it.”

Ultimately, she has proved Stiles prescient in her vision that Plum could break her records. But to Stiles, what she saw in that gym on that July day in 2012 was obvious. Stiles, now an assistant coach at her alma mater Missouri State, said she saw Plum doing things that she never had seen a high school player do. She had a scorer’s mentality to a rare extent. She had a midrange jumper that Stiles called “kind of a lost art.” She was a crafty ballhandler. And Plum’s shot release was so quick, Stiles said, that Plum wouldn’t have to make any adjustment to the speed of the college game.

Now she has another prediction for Plum, one only she has the authority to make.

“It's shocking when people introduce me and say, ‘That's the all-time leading scorer in women's basketball,’ ” Stiles said. “But she'll have that when she walks in a room. And no matter what if you're in an athletic audience or if you're not, people stop and pay attention.”