Out on the grassy plains of central Kansas in a small rural cemetery is the tiny grave. And within the casket, tucked in the satin lining with I-love-you drawings and favorite toys, is a gold medal that once belonged to Jackie Stiles.

Jackie loved Carlie.

The 12-year-old doted on her new baby sister the minute she arrived in Claflin, Kan. Between track and basketball workouts, Jackie fed the baby, bathed her, played with her, dressed her up.

She took charge of Carlie’s daily therapy. The baby was born with congenital encephalopathy — the portion of the brain controlling her motor skills did not develop.

Pam Stiles missed a lot of her oldest daughter Jackie’s first year in competitive basketball for Claflin Middle School because Carlie kept getting sick. She was in the hospital nine weeks during her nine months.

So when a nice day came along in February, the family piled into the car with grandma and grandpa and went to watch Jackie’s final seventh-grade season game.

Jackie remembers she dressed Carlie in overalls “... just like the big kids wore them — one strap on and one strap off …”

But on the drive home, Carlie gave a long sigh, then stopped breathing. Pam revived her until they got help, but Carlie died a week later.

Before she was buried, the Stileses invited their children to place a memento in Carlie’s casket — a drawing, a favorite toy, a Mickey Mouse doll.

Jackie gave the thing she prized most — her gold national championship track medal.

“I tried to talk her out of it,” Pam Stiles admits. “... It’s a pretty amazing thing, winning a national meet ... .”

Jackie rarely made a decision without agonizing over it, but this was easy.

“I just knew,” she says now. “It was the best thing I’d ever accomplished and the best thing I had.”

And it belonged with Carlie.

In time, Jackie found a way through her sorrow. She started thinking about the physical struggle that Carlie had from birth. The chance she never got. And Jackie realized she had been born lucky — she was healthy.

Jackie had always wanted to be a good athlete. The best she could be. But that year she realized her most valuable gift was not the level of her skill, but the very chance to play.

“Seeing what she went through ... and here I am, healthy,” Jackie reflected. “I set out to accomplish great things for her just because she didn’t get the opportunity.”

That’s when Jackie Stiles told her mother finally, “I have this ability, and I need to do something special with it.”

Jackie and the numbers

Twenty-one.

That’s how many points 18-year-old freshman recruit Jackie Stiles scored Nov. 17, 1997, her first official game after donning the maroon-and-white uniform of the SMS Lady Bears. It was a win over Grambling, 87-51. About 6,779 fans came to watch.

Fifty-six.

That’s what Jackie scored March 10, 2000, during an 88-75 victory over Evansville in the semifinals of the Missouri Valley Conference tournament. It set a school and tournament record and was the fourth-best single-game performance in NCAA Division I history.

Three thousand seventy nine. And counting.

That’s what Jackie Stiles has scored in her nearly four seasons at Southwest Missouri State. She is 44 points away from the NCAA career scoring record. It could be hers today in Wichita. Or it could be Thursday at home against Creighton.

Jackie Stiles has kept her promise.

Claflin once basked in the glory of a three-time state championship football team and being the hometown of former Alaska Gov. and Secretary of the Interior Walter J. Hickel. Basketball, everyone says, was a sideline.

Until Jackie.

The girl from Claflin High School with the 46.4-point game average was the all-time leading Kansas high school scorer — boys or girls — and 10th nationally among girls with 3,603 career points.

She was considered by some to be the top point guard in the country.

In one game — now legend — she scored 71 points to shatter the Kansas record for most points scored in one game.

“Jackie” became the main attraction across central Kansas.

Off the court she was a 14-time state track champion.

On the court she drew so many spectators that fans showed up at 9 a.m. with lounge chairs to wait until gym doors opened at 4:30 p.m.

When Jackie played, concession stands ran dry by halftime. Once, a fire marshal had to close the gym doors and move the overflow crowd to an auditorium, where school officials hastily rigged a video screen.

Says hometown son Mike Connell, so many people in Claflin turned out to watch Jackie, “You coulda robbed the town.”

By the time she joined the SMS Lady Bears in 1997, Jackie Stiles was the most-heralded SMS recruit in school history: three national first-team all-America picks. Played internationally for the 1996 USA Junior National Team and the USA Junior World Championship team in 1997.

She was nervous. But a new coach taught her confidence. New fans turned out to watch her play.

Off the court, she settled in with a new roommate who would become her closest friend, “... like a sister ...,” Jackie says.

Jackie’s roommate is No. 33, Deer, a forward. Her name is Carly.

Jackie and the moment

At SMS, Jackie became the main attraction. Watching a Lady Bears game means watching Jackie.

On Jan. 4, a near-sellout crowd of 8,261 fans jams Hammons Student Center.

Before the tipoff, the two teams gather on the court for the “Star-Spangled Banner.” The fans are silent, the players are still, pausing in the moment.

“... And the rockets’ red glare, the bombs bursting in air ...”

The only thing in motion on the floor is the 5-foot-8-inch No. 10, rocking on the balls of her feet, side to side. Friends joke that, even off the court, Jackie is always in motion — she “runs” in her sleep.

“... Oh say, does that star-spangled banner yet wave ...”

The eyes: lowered, fixed on a point somewhere just beyond the moment, where Jackie Stiles always seems to be. She concentrates on two things: She thanks God for the chance to play, and she is working the game.

“... O’er the land of the free, and the home of the brave.”

The anthem ends. The players break. The tipoff. The moment.

Jackie Stiles is a life in play.

She is all bouncing ponytail and footwork and hustle. She has executed these moves thousands of times under a thousand star-spangled banners.

She’s done it thousands more times alone in a deserted gym late at night until she hit her 1,000 shots — a routine she developed in high school to strengthen a broken wrist.

On this night, she doesn’t disappoint herself or Springfield fans..

With 18 minutes, 29 seconds to go in the second half, she soars in for a layup on a pass from her roommate, Carly. The basket gives her the Missouri Valley Conference career scoring record, topping the 2,636 mark set in 1983-86 by Drake’s Wanda Ford.

The crowd? Unleashed bliss. Jackie knows by its cheers that the conference scoring countdown is finally over. They’re delighting in the moment.

But a life in play stays in play.

The NCAA career scoring record looms now. There is pressure among Springfield fans to break this one at home, a fitting end to her regular-season play with the Lady Bears.

As usual, Jackie keeps her head down and says she’s not focusing on records or career points.

She is focusing on that moment.

The moment in time when play resumes. She usually is.

Jackie and 616 Kansans

It’s 7 a.m. Thursday, and the regulars at Wildcat Pump and Supply are drinking black coffee from plastic-foam cups and playing two-card pitch around a metal table.

Every morning except Sundays, they pull up in Tacomas and Rams, pour their coffee and play for dimes. Saturday is payday, and so far the winner is up by $4.

“It’s not much of a gamble when you play with these guys,” Doug Hubbard teases.

Further back in the drafty shop, taped to a refrigerator door, is a story with a photograph of Jackie Stiles that someone clipped out of USA Today. Taped above that is a regular feature from the Great Bend (Kan.) Tribune, “Stiles File,” updating her stats.

Elsewhere in Claflin, cars and cash registers still wear the bumper stickers from her reign at the high school four years ago: “... Home of Jackie Stiles, state girls basketball scoring record holder ...”

This is Jackieland.

It’s 8 a.m. Friday. At Cates Service and Supply, a bustling automotive store and Conoco station, manager Myra Prosser listens to Lady Bears games on the Internet, prints off the stats and pins them to the bulletin board by the door.

One of the regulars who drops by for coffee every morning before work shouts over the guys milling at the counter, “How’d she do last night?” A few heads turn.

Prosser shouts back, “33 points.”

Nods of approval.

Jackie grew up in this predominantly German-Catholic town of 616, a mix of farmers, oil “pumpers,” teachers and mechanics. She played one-on-one with their sons at the city basketball courts, baby-sat their children and pitched their softball games for summer leagues.

Claflin doesn’t put on airs. There are no stoplights; just slow it down to 40 mph as you pass by on Kansas 4. Its tallest landmarks are the grain elevator and the water tower. Neither is scarred with graffiti. The Catholic church shares a priest with a neighboring town. The Claflin Boosters are self-described geriatric guerrillas who function as a chamber of commerce.

But Claflin has what it needs. There’s one grocery store, two gas stations, a new diner in an old metal building that’s open 6 a.m.-8 p.m., a bar that serves liquor until midnight — 2 a.m. on Saturdays — and a public library. It also has Miller’s of Claflin, a 98-year-old family-owned home furnishings empire — 10 showrooms, more than 100,000 square feet: “Kansas’ Largest Small-Town Furniture Store.”

Adults in Claflin have modest tastes and modest habits. Coffee is the social drink of choice. They go to work. After work they run their kids to football games, basketball games, track meets. On Sundays most of them go to church.

They like their sports televised, their beer cold and their sausage — homemade.

“Everybody makes sausage around here,” says Troy Bailey, who owns Bailey’s Food Bin. “I sell a lot of pork. Three and four families will get together and make sausage. I have 400 pounds of pork butts sitting in my cooler right now.”

Claflin kids love sports. That’s about all there is for them to do here, so they do a variety, and they do it year-round. School teams. Amateur Athletic Union leagues. Parents figure: Rope ’em early with sports before they can drive themselves to the Pizza Hut 15 miles down the highway, and they’ll stay out of trouble.

Jackie’s training started at age 2, running after her father around a school track. By age 5, Jackie began shadowing Pat Stiles at the high school gym in Claflin where he got a job teaching science and coaching boys’ basketball.

“Show me something,” she’d say. So he’d show her a jump stop.

“She’d go off on her own and pretty soon she’d come back and say, ‘Watch,’ and she’d have it mastered,” he recalls. “Then she’d say ‘Show me something else.’” And on it went.

She played so well by age 6 that she got into a co-ed summer basketball camp for 7-and 8-year-olds after her father lied about her age.

“Jackie grew up behind our main store,” says Brad Miller, at Miller’s of Claflin. “And every day she’d be dribbling that basketball down the sidewalk ... and you’d hear this thump, thump, thump, down she’d go to the city park. She went not to play with the girls, but to play with the guys. Guys gave her more of a challenge.”

“She kicked my butt,” admits Jeff Beck, a Jackie contemporary who stayed in Claflin.

Jackie made more inroads and more summer basketball camps. She joined an AAU team that competed around the region.

At age 12 she found her true north.

Her baby sister Carlie’s death gave her a purpose. Her basketball skills gave her a vehicle. And SMS coach Lynette Robinson gave her a nudge in the right direction.

Jackie was playing an AAU basketball game in Emporia when Robinson saw her from the stands and told her afterwards, keep it up and someday you could get a scholarship to play Division I basketball.

It would be a crossroads moment in both their lives.

There was another one.

Pat Stiles was more coach than confidante in Jackie’s life, but one day he shared a philosophy with her aimed at character, not game.

“When you walk out on the court, know you’re the best but don’t shout it out.”

He recognized everything he liked about small-town values and sportsmanship in that phrase. It spoke of quiet humility and self-assurance.

Jackie saw something else in it, too.

Dad.

Jackie and the gym

Where’s Jackie? That’s easy: in the gym.

She grew to spend every spare minute there. She practiced with her team. She shot baskets by herself.

When she baby-sat for neighbor kids, she’d haul them down to the courts and have them rebound for her. Then she’d refuse to take the $1-an-hour fee, saying, “I was going to the gym anyway ...”

She played on the outdoor courts at the city park in freezing weather until her fingers ached.

“It wasn’t that my dad pushed me or anything; I loved to do it,” she says. “So when he showed me the fundamentals, I just soaked everything up. It wasn’t like he had to force me to do anything. I wanted to do it.

“And all the time he was telling me, ‘Jackie, gosh — go do something else.’”

So she played percussion in the school band. She had a brief and unfulfilling stint as a seventh-grade cheerleader. She tried volleyball, but the team stank and she hated to lose.

She excelled in tennis and track, laying groundwork for becoming the Kansas all-time track event gold-medal winner with 14 career golds.

But Jackie saw those sports only as tools to build her basketball game.

A typical high school day: “I’d get up before school, lift weights at 4 a.m., go to school all day. Then I’d have tennis practice from 3:30 to 5:30, then go and do a cross-country workout from 5:30 to 6:30. Then I’d go home to eat.”

She wasn’t finished yet. After dinner she’d borrow her dad’s keys to Claflin High and let herself into the gym.

She’d be there so late most nights that farmers in their front yards two miles away knew the distant glow from the gym’s rooftop skylights didn’t mean trouble.

It was just Jackie.

Says her Claflin coach Gregg Webb, “Most people have a life, and her life was on the basketball floor training for something.”

Her mother worried about that life.

“On Saturday nights she’d be at the gym, and all of her friends were going out to the movies and out to eat.

“She never did well with boyfriends. Her idea of a date was to hang out in the gym and have them rebound for her. And boys got kind of tired of that.”

Jackie’s late-night vigils in the Claflin gym paid off for the Wildcats and turned it into a scoring machine.

One season she broke her right wrist — her shooting hand — then averaged 26 points a game while shooting with her left.

“She was pretty fun to watch,” says 15-year-old football player Jeremy Johnson. “Even the other teams cheered for her.”

After Jackie broke the Kansas single-game scoring record with 71 points, the defeated Macksville High team turned around and asked for her autograph.

She and family friend Connie Holliday would sit at the dining room table some days for hours at a time answering fan mail.

A new school superintendent came to Claflin during her record-breaking senior year.

He’d heard about the girl who would let herself into the school late with her father’s keys and use the building as her personal gym. Frankly, some parents didn’t think much of special privileges.

Before he did anything, Larry Nelson considered the basketball gate receipts. Non-Jackie years: about $3,800. Jackie’s senior year: $8,283.

Jackie kept the keys.

Jackie and the recruiters

June 21, 1996, was the first day, according to NCAA rules, that college recruiters could make contact with high school seniors.

At five minutes after midnight, the telephone started ringing in the Stiles’ house.

A college recruiter was calling, trying to get a jump start in the race for Jackie Stiles.

They called at school. They called at home.

“UPS and Fed-Ex would be at the front door every day,” says Holliday, a family friend.

The come-ons and contracts from universities around the country filled three 25-gallon Rubbermaid lockers. As Jackie’s decision neared, the Stileses provided dinner and face time with 19 recruiters in 20 days. When neighbors in Claflin heard about it, they contributed casseroles.

Pam tried to keep the house spotless for 20 straight days around four kids and a husband, a live-in grandma, three basset hounds, a boxer named Joe (after grandpa Joe Stiles) and two cats.

Jackie dreaded making a final decision. “I didn’t want to disappoint people ... I’ve always tried to please everybody, tried to make everybody happy. ... I was trying to please other people instead of just thinking what was best for me.”

Decision week was so bad, she stayed home from school. She’d sleep to avoid thinking about it. She’d lose herself in workouts. She’d flip quarters. She indulged in comfort foods — tuna macaroni casserole with mayonnaise. Shepherd’s pie.

She called the psychic hotline for $3.95 a minute. The seer recommended the University of Connecticut, but told Jackie, “You have to go where your heart takes you.”

Pat Stiles didn’t hide his preference. He slid the U-Conn contract in front of her and suggested Jackie sign it and sleep on it.

“But I signed it, and the next day it didn’t feel right,” she says.

Jackie remembered the chance meeting years before with SMS’ Lynette Robinson; she had attended summer basketball camps in Springfield, and “it was just in my heart, SMS was. And now after 3 years I know it was the best place for me. Now I feel good about this.”

Jackie and the other Jackies

She is the Jackie we know on the court: focused, fierce, calculating, controlling. Superhuman, sometimes.

Except when she’s the other Jackie everyone else knows off the court: superstitious, shy, forgetful. Yes, human. Extremely.

Claflin retiree John Herter watched her grow up controlling games but forgetting her shoes. Losing her keys. Losing her way.

“She’s such a scatterbrain, she can’t get from Point A to Point B sometimes. Her life is basketball.”

Herter sighs and with a twisted grin adds, “She needs a keeper.”

Put her on a basketball court and there is brilliance in her split-second decisions. Just don’t ask her to decide where she wants to eat. She can’t, and she’ll wear you out flipping coins: “Let’s go best two out of three ... .”

She’s late for everything except basketball practice. She’s so forgetful that she’s left a trail of shoes in gymnasiums from Kansas to Missouri.

Though Jackie routinely spent late nights alone at the Claflin gym, she’s afraid of the dark. Still. She checks under the bed and in the closet before she goes to sleep. She checks under the car before she gets in.

She’s so superstitious that she worries about losing a game if she forgets her lucky socks.

Before each game she listens to the same songs, watches the same Larry Bird video and wears the same red ponytail holder, same underwear, same bra, same kneepads.

She always chews Big Red gum during games.

“If I do all these things and it’s good, I have to stay with it. If I eat oatmeal that day and we win, I have to do that. If I start playing bad, I change a few things.”

She scored her record-breaking 71 points in high school wearing borrowed tights under her uniform. “I can’t give these back,” she told teammate Lindsay Hickel. “I need another good game.”

Before the Evansville game this year she forgot to pack her “lucky socks.” Lady Bear Melody Campbell reassured her superstitious teammate with an extra pair: “I have a really good feeling about these socks ... .”

The Lady Bears won that day. Goodbye socks.

And then there are those lapses in confidence.

“I’ve always been apt to get down on myself really quickly,” Jackie says. “If I have a bad game, I’d beat myself up over it. I’d go to the gym.

“I take a lot of things hard, like if I have a bad shooting night, or if I miss a couple shots, I might start being hesitant, whereas people might say: ‘Golly, you’ve shot millions and millions of shots. Just shoot it.’

“Coach (Cheryl) Burnett has really helped develop my confidence and that demeanor.”

She doesn’t often play poorly. And she never plays selfishly. Her father’s lessons about sharing the ball and the spotlight left a lasting impression.

Says teammate Melody Campbell: “She’s definitely a selfless player... And she’s a leader by example. She will give of herself 110 percent.”

Lots of people. All Jackie.

Jackie and what’s next

They only let you play four seasons in college. Those are the rules.

Jackie is nearing that mark. At worst, she has four games left — three in the regular season and one in the MVC tournament. There will probably be more, depending on the NCAA selection committee.

That’s what Jackie, the perfect teammate, is thinking about these days — SMS in the Final Four.

An impossible dream? Perhaps. It’ll be tough, she knows. It’ll take a lot of work and a lot of luck.

But what about the Big Next? The Just Jackie Next?

Olympic gold. That’s been her dream since she was 12. In the Jackie Stiles order of things, it was: earn a scholarship, play Division I basketball, then the Olympics. The WNBA didn’t exist back then.

“I had a Teresa Edwards poster up in my room — she was an Olympian and I wanted to be an Olympian.”

And then? The pro game? Or Europe?

How about both?

Jackie hopes to be drafted by the Women’s National Basketball Association. What once seemed like a long shot now seems like a certainty.

“There have been scouts at the game, but I don’t really know what they’re saying ... and I don’t want to know until my college season is over.”

But she also hopes to play in Europe two seasons when the WNBA is off. She figures playing year-round will boost her chances of making the Olympic team in 2004.

“People say you missed out on some things being in the gym — all the time you’ve spent there. But it’s been worth it.”

And one late evening, wearing warm-ups from the New York Liberty or the Los Angeles Sparks, she’ll likely have her own key to a big-city gym somewhere.

She’ll shoot until she makes 1,000 shots, whether or not her fiancé or some other friend has long since nodded off in the stands.

For now, though, “I want to make this year the best possible. To put all my energy and effort into my senior year in college ...”

Because she made a promise to SMS and fans in Springfield, to Claflin and Pat Stiles. To herself. To Carlie.

She’ll keep it.

She already has.