By the time she reached high school in Claflin, Kan., just about every one of the town's 700 or so residents knew that the high school's gym lights were on late at night so Jackie could go through her regimen. Not just to shoot, but to make a total of 1,000 shots from five spots on the floor.

"I always knew there was someone out there better than me, so I had to work harder," she said.

It paid off. Today Stiles is a freshman at Southwest Missouri State and the Missouri Valley Conference's leading scorer at 19.3 points a game. She is one reason the Lady Bears are 12-1 and ranked 17th in the coaches' poll and 16th in the writers' poll. It is a tribute to both player and program that this 5-foot-8-inch, ponytailed, Roy Hobbs-sized talent decided to take her game six-and-a-half hours across the state line to a women's basketball Brigadoon.

It's a place both magical and forgotten because, as coach Cheryl Burnett said, "People hear that multidirectional name and wonder if we are even Division I."

Make no mistake, Lady Bears basketball is big time -- in both product and appreciation. In 11 seasons, Burnett has amassed a 214-96 record and taken six teams to the NCAA tournament, including an appearance in the 1991-92 Final Four.

Even more remarkable is the support the program has garnered in this working-class city of 144,000. The Lady Bears average 7,813 fans per home game, which is more than the school's men's team, coached by the former Indiana University star Steve Alford, and is third in the nation for women's basketball behind Tennessee and Connecticut.

It is not just the numbers that make the 8,846-seat Hammons Student Center on the 19,140-student campus an intimidating place for visiting teams, but also the crowd's enthusiasm for all things Lady Bear.

Their fans don the school's maroon and white colors, stand for most of the game and count down the shot clock for their team. It is a mostly adult crowd -- folks like John and Debra Tobin, who have two teen-age boys, no connection to the university and drive over each game from nearby Willard, Mo.

"We started coming nine years ago when they almost had to give the tickets away and fell in love with how hard these girls work," said John Tobin, a distributor for Wonder Bread. "The thing just built. We've been season ticket holders ever since."

The Tobins, like all Lady Bear fans, greet a 30-second clock-killing defensive stand with thunderous ovations, cheer the band and drill team's rendition of an Alice Cooper song and hoot and holler throughout the game.

"It's the best place I've ever played," said Kiersten Miller, an All-America guard for Drake, after scoring 22 points and handing Southwest Missouri its only loss of the season, by 69-61, last Saturday. "The atmosphere brings so much out of you."

In Stiles, the Lady Bears have an extraordinarily talented player. Every major program in the nation trekked to Claflin, which is 130 miles northwest of Wichita, to woo her.

Jackie's parents, Pat and Pam Stiles, allowed 16 home visits, which all followed the same routine. Pam served a home-cooked dinner, followed by chats as late as 2 a.m. in the living room, and with Jackie eventually asking the most famous coaches in the women's game's to sign an autograph book.

Connecticut's Geno Auriemma, Tennessee's Pat Summitt and Illinois' Theresa Grentz all signed in. They were impressed not only with Stiles' basketball skills and work ethic, but also with how she cherished the game. "It isn't that she's just a great player for our conference, but she's a great person for the whole game," said Drake coach Lisa Bluder, who was invited to the Stiles home.

All this was frustrating for Cheryl Burnett. It was the Lady Bears, after all, who had discovered Stiles as a seventh grader. The Southwest Missouri assistant coach Lynnette Robinson was scouting a high school tournament when she came across a grade school division game in a nearly empty gym.

Impressed by the guard streaking up and down the court, Robinson tugged on the man sitting next to her and asked who she was. "It's my daughter," replied Pat Stiles.

The coach handed him a Southwest Missouri basketball camp brochure, and the long courtship was on. Even in the heady recruiting period, Stiles' heart was in southwestern Missouri.

The yearly summer camps introduced her to the Lady Bears' labor-intensive pressure defense. The crowds in the Hammons Student Center looked like the kind of people who filled up her high school gym. On the Final Four team, Burnett had another small-town athlete, Melody Howard, now with the American Basketball League's Colorado Xplosion, who had a tremendous work ethic.

"It was a hard-working program with the kind of people I'm comfortable with," said Stiles, who ultimately chose the Lady Bears over Connecticut and Illinois. "It was close enough that my mom and dad can see me play."

Still, there have been some transition problems for Stiles, but they are the kind her coach and her mother can live with. She has led the Lady Bears to victories over No. 8 Illinois and the traditional power Arkansas, but Burnett believes Stiles is still adjusting to the college game. And she has ordered Stiles to cut back her private workouts.

"I got a kid who I can't keep out of the gym instead of one I can't get in the gym," Burnett said with a smile. "I'm afraid she's going to burn herself out."

Her mother is proud of the 3.7 grade point average that her daughter earned in the first semester, but concerned that she has lost four sets of car keys. And Jackie?

She is bewildered why, against Drake, she lost confidence in her shot while scoring 19 points. "It's kind of silly to give up on it considering how many of them I shoot," she said.

What is Stiles going to do about it?

"I know I'm not supposed to, but I'll go back to the gym," she said. "Maybe I'll just do half a workout."