Then & Now: Seven years ago, Jackie Stiles lit up the town

Of the NCAA-record 3,393 points Jackie Stiles scored in her four-year basketball career at Missouri State, only 73 came in Spokane.
Yet that long weekend in the Lilac City remains the highlight of her young life.
“Spokane gave me a ton of memories; maybe the best memories of my basketball career,” she said.
Missouri State – formerly Southwest Missouri State – was in town for the 2001 NCAA Women’s Basketball Regional, playing the role of Cinderella, powered by the scoring machine from tiny Claflin, Kan., who was averaging 30 points per game.
Stiles scored 41 points as the Bears upended top-seeded Duke 81-71 in the Sweet 16 game then had 32, despite foul trouble, in a 104-87 win over Washington in the regional championship.
“The single greatest moment was when we won that basketball game to get to the Final Four,” Stiles said. “Even though (Washington) was kind of like the home team, the crowd was so great. They appreciated what we’d done.”
Her life has undergone a dramatic transformation since those magical days.
Stiles scored 22 points in an 81-64 semifinal loss to Purdue, which, incidentally, gave her double-figure scoring in 127 of 129 career games, including the last 92. Then she was selected fourth in the WNBA draft and was rookie of the year for the Portland Fire.
And then her body fell apart.
Now, 13 surgeries later, Stiles is looking to get on with the rest of her life.
“My last game in the WNBA was Aug. 11, 2002,” she recalled. “There were four years where I was so hurt I wasn’t even healthy enough to play pickup.”
She started giving private lessons to work through the “grieving” process.
“The WNBA was a dream job for me, getting paid to play basketball,” she said. “I never considered basketball work. It was my true passion. … At first I could hardly watch it when I couldn’t play. I missed it. When it doesn’t end on your terms it’s tough.”
By the summer of 2006 she finally started feeling better and planned a comeback.
“It was pathetic,” she said. “I couldn’t make a layup (because of a bad ankle) and I couldn’t shoot past 16 feet (because of a bad shoulder).”
She battled through that and signed to play in Australia. She arrived on a Friday, played 6 minutes on a Saturday, smiling broadly through warmups, and woke up Sunday with pain in her chest from a broken rib. Then tendonitis in her knee started bothering her.
“Finally, I got to practice and had the best practice of my life,” Stiles said. “The next day I couldn’t walk, my left knee was so bad. …
“That was it.
“Finally, for the first time, I was at peace with it. I knew it was over. I’m like an old car, everything starts to break down. I just turned 29.”
Stiles is back in Wichita, Kan., a couple hundred miles from Claflin, a town of 600. She still gives private lessons and is a personal trainer. To fill the competitive void she started bicycling and began racing for a short time.
“With biking it’s not if you are going to crash, it’s when you’re going to crash,” she said. “I just didn’t want to be hurt again.”
Recently, she tried her hand at broadcasting, which is the direction she wants to go.
“Travel around, watch basketball and talk about it, that’s a pretty good job,” she said. “I was awful the first game, better the second game. My work ethic is why I got (to the WNBA). It took me 25 years to become good at basketball; I have 50 years to find something to be good at.”
There have been some positives from the disappointments.
“One lesson I learned is I needed balance in my life,” she said. “That single focus and drive made me a basketball player, but it was also my demise. Retiring at 27 from my first passion, I was so behind everyone else. I needed balance, family, friends, spiritually. I needed to spend time on life. I’m starting to find my niche.”
But college is what she misses. She follows her little sister, Roxy, a sophomore at Missouri State, and college basketball in general, with a special interest in the NCAA women’s regional in Spokane this weekend, wishing she were here.
“I had one healthy year in the pros but I would have traded in all of my contracts to play college basketball four more years,” she said. “It was amazing. Those memories will last a lifetime.”