SPRINGFIELD -- The athletic pursuits of Jackie Stiles have been interrupted by a broken bone in her shooting wrist as a high school sophomore... and a big black cow.

The broken bone annoyed her more than anything else. She shot left-handed for a while, notched a couple of 20-point games, defied her doctor and ripped off the soft cast a few weeks earlier than prescribed. Pain? Absolutely, but not as much as she felt being less than ideal on a basketball floor.

The cow, though, was really scary.

A typically overscheduled day pushed Stiles' daily workout for the Claflin, Kan., High cross country team into the evening. Her dad, Pat, drove behind her guiding the way with headlights when something stepped into the path.

"Scared me to death," Stiles said. "At first, it's pitch dark, there are no street lights. I'm out on a country road, and all I saw was this huge thing with eyes looking right at me."

That cow's about all that's given Stiles pause. Junk defenses? No. Top competition? Sorry. On Southwest Missouri State's basketball floor and just about every other one she's graced, Stiles has proved unstoppable.

Later this month, she likely will own the NCAA scoring record when career point No. 3,123 falls through the net. Nobody who's played women's basketball since the NCAA assumed control of the sport in 1981-82 will have scored more.

Stiles sits on 2,984 points entering today's home game against Evansville. That's No. 6 on the NCAA career list, and with every game, she rises another level. Soon Stiles will pass a couple of the game's patron saints, Cheryl Miller and Chamique Holdsclaw.

The goal here is to get 15th-ranked SMS a Missouri Valley tournament title on the home floor, two NCAA Tournament games in Springfield and go from there.

And when this season ends for Stiles, she has the WNBA and marriage to fiancee Matt Barrett ahead of her.

Behind her is 22 years of a life shaped by sporting ambition, a nearly perfect college career, a loving family and small-town virtues. They've all brought Stiles to the edge of college hoops history and on the threshold of an exciting future.

Just keep the cows away.

Ready for action

Southern Illinois, tied for last in the Missouri Valley Conference, played a gritty first half Friday and trailed SMS by four at the break. Stiles scored a quiet 15, if there can be such a thing.

"Come onnnnnn, Jackie," moaned the women in the front rows.

Then, less than 6 minutes into the second half, another full house in the Hammons Student Center was treated to the Jackie Stiles Experience.

Three-pointer. Three-pointer. Three-pointer. Three-pointer. Two transition baskets and four free throws. Before the first time out of the second half, before she missed a shot, Stiles had 20 more points. She tossed in two assists for good measure.

Final tally: 43 points, four assists, no turnovers. She made seven of nine three-pointers to push her back over 50 percent for the season from beyond the arc and made all 12 free-throw attempts. She raised her scoring average to 31.1.

Does it rank with her best performances? Probably not. Let's call it one of her best 6-minute stretches. For overall effort, it would be hard to top the 52 she hung on Baylor as a sophomore or the 56 she scored against Evansville in last year's Missouri Valley tournament. Earlier this season, Stiles scored 49 against nemesis Northern Iowa.

It doesn't all happen behind the three-point arc. More than ever, Stiles is getting shots off the dribble this season. She loves going across the middle, squaring up around the free-throw line and sticking a fade-away.

For such a scoring wizard, Stiles is remarkably unselfish. The offense flows through her and she is undoubtedly the first option. But rare is the SMS half-court possession that doesn't involve crisp ball movement.

With 7 minutes left in the first half Friday, coach Cheryl Burnett whistled Stiles to the bench. Her instruction? Shoot. On the next possession, Stiles buried a three.

Scoring was never an issue with Stiles. Getting better defensively was.

"When I came here, I had no idea what it took to play defense at this level," Stiles said.

Burnett showed her in a hurry. Playing time at SMS results from defensive effort. Kansas Class 1A competition just didn't present much challenge to Stiles.

"I was awful," Stiles said.

Well, not awful, but not developed. Now, Stiles is a relentless defender. Friday, she held Southern Illinois' leading scorer, Molly McDowell, to four points on one-of-eight shooting.

Stiles owns the well-rounded game that should make her conference player of the year for the third time and first team All-America for the first time. It translates well to the next level.

It's been suggested that her 5-foot-8 frame could put her at a disadvantage against other shooting guards in the WNBA. Detroit Shock coach Greg Williams doesn't agree.

"It works both ways," Williams said. "I think a bigger two guard is going to have trouble guarding her."

So there is a WNBA future for Stiles?

"Definitely," Williams said. "We're all looking for shooters in this league, and who shoots better than she does? She creates off the dribble and she's gotten much better defensively."

There's something else, Williams said. Stiles is one of few players he's seen that generates a sense of what's-she-going-to-do-this-time excitement.

"Anybody who watches her, even on the road, gets a thrill when she touches the ball," said Williams, who expects Stiles to be a first-round draft choice.

Where it started

Claflin, population 630, appears for a few moments on Highway 156 between Interstate 70 and Great Bend. There is no stoplight, and Main Street is essentially a furniture store (Miller's, "One of Central Kansas' largest furniture stores").

Claflin provided the perfect setting for Stiles. The family moved there from Kansas City, Kan., where Pam Stiles studied nursing at KU Medical Center. Jackie had just started dribbling a basketball and always wanted to tag along with dad on daily jogs and trips to the high school gym where Pat coached the boys' varsity team.

Pat Stiles played basketball and football at St. Mary of the Plains in Dodge City. But even he didn't attach himself to sports as a child like Jackie did.

"I'd show her a ball-handling drill that I'd use with my team, and she'd disappear," he said. "I wouldn't see her again until she perfected it."

Jackie was about 8 when this obsession started. By then, Pat had sneaked his underage daughter into a couple of co-ed basketball camps, adding a couple of years to the registration form. Coaches questioned her age -- not because she looked younger but because she played better than everybody else.

Basketball didn't hold her attention exclusively -- Stiles would go on to win 14 gold medals at the state high school track meet, run cross country and play tennis -- but the hoops hunger proved easiest to feed.

The family made trips to the Big Eight women's tournament in Salina, about 50 miles away, and one year Jackie and her brother, P.J., were pulled out of the stands to participate in a ball-handling exhibition.

On another visit to Salina, Stiles was mesmerized by the Harlem Globetrotters, who featured Lynette Woodard.

"I had to have a Globetrotters' jersey," Stiles said. "And I never took it off."

Basketball as a way of life occurred to Stiles when she was 12. She was playing in her first AAU tournament at Emporia, and a woman watching asked Pat Stiles if he knew the name of the player whose skills seemed far more advanced than anybody's on the floor.

The woman was Lynn Robinson, an assistant coach at Southwest Missouri State. Robinson wrote a letter to Jackie, inviting her to an SMS camp.

"I had no idea how good I had to be to earn a scholarship," Stiles said. "My goal was to be good enough so that I could walk on at a school like Kansas. But at the camp, everybody was telling me that a Division I scholarship was possible if I kept working. That was a turning point for me."

Keep working? As if Stiles needed an invitation. But now her dream had a focus, and her work ethic paid off in unimaginable ways.

Never stop shooting

Stiles has shot a ball toward a basket a couple of million of times in her life. Seriously. She was a shooting hound before breaking her wrist as a Claflin sophomore. Determined not to let anything stand in the way of a scholarship, Stiles started her 1,000-shots-a-day routine when she healed.

But the Stiles legend started in the Kansas 1A tournament in her freshman season, when she scored 53 in one game and 114 for the three-game event, setting state records.

Something happened after those games that amazes Stiles to this day. Kids sought autographs. Stiles was 15.

"I was shocked," Stiles said. "I grew up asking for autographs."

Celebrity swelled with every point she scored for Claflin, which totaled 3,603, 10th all-time among the nation's high school girls. When the Claflin's girls' and boys' team played doubleheaders, Stiles usually couldn't watch the boys -- because she was sitting in the lobby signing autographs.

Her games became happenings. You had to show up two hours before the game to get a seat.

Then came the fan mail. Letters, mostly from young girls, poured into the high school and the Stiles' home. Mail stacked up so high, Jackie finally had to resort to a newsletter response, complete with an autograph picture. The family had cut a deal with the senior yearbook photographer who printed up hundreds of extra photos.

Even when Stiles went out, to games or to other events, she'd hear whispers. "That's Jackie Stiles."

"And I'd think, `Who cares?' " Stiles said.

Stiles was -- and is -- humbled by the celebrity status.

"I enjoy being in the position where I can sign autographs because I know it's not going to last very long," Stiles said. "You look back on it and understand that it wasn't just people in my town, but all around Kansas. They were so supportive of my career."

So why not reward the state with a college career played there? Simply, Southwest Missouri State got there first. That letter she received as a 12-year-old and visits to the SMS camp every summer until her senior year left an impression that Kansas -- her favorite school growing up -- and Kansas State, which came on strong in the end, did not.

Not that selecting a college was easy. It probably was the most difficult decision of her life. As decision day approached, Stiles lost sleep, lost her appetite and was concerned about losing friends by picking the wrong school.

"I was worried about where everybody else wanted me to go," Stiles said.

The recruiting process, was in many ways, a sociology study of small-town America. The Stiles family entertained 19 coaches in 20 days. Most were treated to a home-cooked meal before making their pitch.

A different coach every day, but the same car. "There must be only one rental car at the Great Bend airport," Pat Stiles said.

One assistant coach got lost, pulled off the road and flagged a farmer off a tractor to ask directions.

The coaches were invited to sign a guest book. A single one at first, but then each of the Stiles kids wanted in, and so did the neighbors. So folks like Connecticut coach Geno Auriemma signed six books.

"Then they all started looking at what the other coaches were signing and they'd try to outdo each other," Jackie said.

The pressure built. A call to the psychic hotline didn't help. Turned out the sage had heard of Connecticut, so that was her suggestion.

Southwest Missouri State had won her heart earliest and it paid off. The townsfolk weren't ecstatic. They weren't exactly familiar with the directional school 61/2 hours away via five or six different highways and state roads.

"I still get people who don't think it's a major college because of the name," Stiles said. "Can you believe that?"

But the home-game sellouts, Burnett's early emphasis on defense and a willingness to build an offense around her convinced Stiles she made the right choice.

Burnett doesn't want to think where SMS would have ranked in Stiles' heart had the Bears not been there at the beginning.

"We wouldn't have had a chance with her," Burnett said. "I really believe that."

The right ending

Jackie's latest superstition: Her guy, Matt, has to call her house just before she leaves for a game.

Stiles has taken superstitions to new levels. She never actually loses one, it simply gets replaced. Meals, gum, makeup, warm-up habits, everything must be the same. Until a loss. Then it gets replaced.

But not Matt, who teaches in Springfield. He's there for the long haul.

And he's used to waiting.

The Southern Illinois game is over; Stiles didn't play the final 4 minutes, but she's in demand and can't get off the floor. A conversation with the opposing coach takes a few minutes. Somebody hands Stiles a coloring project from an elementary-school student. Autographs, handshakes. A reporter wants a post-game interview.

Burnett wants normalcy, or as much as she can expect these days. Her player is approaching a historic milestone, and Stiles is a polite and accommodating person who understands her role as a hero to kids and ambassador of the school.

But Stiles also knows that the last time she approached a scoring record, the Missouri Valley mark, she became distracted and played poorly for a stretch.

"I'm learned from it," Stiles said. "I'm not going to let that happen this time."

Junior center Ann Cavey said: "We all believe in her. When she gets rolling, it's like, `Go for it, Jack.' To me, it's been a wonderful experience playing with her."

The points aren't as important as postseason success, which, for all Stiles' glory, has largely eluded her. Her Claflin teams didn't win a state title. SMS won the Valley regular season two years but it hasn't won the tournament since 1996. Stiles has played in the NCAA Tournament all three seasons, but got as far as the second round only once.

"It's my senior year, the most important year of my career," Stiles said. "There are some things our team has to accomplish, and there's a sense of urgency. I want the ending to be perfect."