It didn't take the waitress long to figure out why Springfield (Mo.) News-Leader columnist Steve Koehler was in Spokane, Wash.

Recognition was instant when she learned he was covering the Southwest Missouri State women in the NCAA Tournament.

"You're the team with that Jackie girl," the waitress said.

From Spokane to Piscataway, N.J., that Jackie girl has made headlines and catapulted to the top of sports highlight shows.

Basketball fans in Kansas have known about Jackie Stiles' greatness since she started setting records at Claflin High nearly a decade ago. And the fans in Springfield have witnessed it firsthand for the past four seasons, as she has rewritten the NCAA record book.

Why has it taken so long for the rest of the country to catch on?

The answer is simple. Seeing is believing, and the rest of the country wasn't seeing the 5-foot-8 senior guard.

Stiles' appearances on national television have been few and far between. And most of Southwest Missouri State's games are in the Midwest, far away from the media hub that is the East Coast.

"It may not be a small school, but it's off the national radar," said Tony Kornheiser, a columnist for the Washington Post who also has a national sports talk show on ESPN Radio (KQAM, 1480-AM in Wichita).

"Now she pops up from out of nowhere. It's like going down a diamond mine and coming up with the Hope diamond."

It's a fact of the sports world that women's basketball doesn't get the exposure men's basketball gets.

"Let's be fair here," Kornheiser said. "It's women's college basketball. If you put the women's college final head-to-head with the men's college final, what do you think the ratio be? Twenty to 1?"

Women's games that do make it on television usually feature programs from the power conferences, such as Tennessee and Connecticut. Those schools have combined to win five of the past six national championships.

The Missouri Valley Conference pitched Southwest Missouri State games to ESPN. Doug Elgin, the conference commissioner, said the MVC offered to pay the production costs _ $26,000 _ but the cable network didn't have programming slots available.

"I can remember trying to convince people in the past, national television people, you really don't know what you're missing," Elgin said. "It's interesting now that they've awakened to it."

Stiles has made sure of that.

The Bears were on television twice while in Spokane, and the closing minutes of their second-round game against Rutgers in Piscataway was shown on ESPN.

It didn't take long for Stiles to become a TV star.

Rutgers, one of the top defensive teams in the nation, held her in check for much of the game before Stiles scored 17 of her 32 points in the final 6:57 of the Bears' 60-53 victory.

In the next round, Stiles scored 41 points _ the fourth-highest total in tournament history -- against Duke, the No. 1 seed in the West Region. And against Washington, Stiles scored 32 points despite fouling out with 4:30 remaining in a game that sent the Bears to this weekend's Final Four in St. Louis.

"She answered a lot of questions that night (against Rutgers)," said Mel Greenberg, who has covered women's basketball for the Philadelphia Inquirer for more than 25 years.

"Then she answered more questions against Duke, and you have ESPN doing all these games ..."

What questions did Stiles have to answer?

She has led the nation in scoring the past two seasons. She has scored more points than any woman in NCAA history. She scored 56 points in a game against Evansville last season, the fourth-best performance in NCAA history.

The problem is, in the eyes of many, a majority of that scoring was done against lesser-quality teams.

"You couldn't get a true measure of Jackie," Greenberg said.

Greenberg compares Stiles' rise in stature to what Sheryl Swoopes experienced in 1993. Swoopes, a star at Texas Tech, was relatively unknown nationally until she scored a record 177 points in the tournament. The Red Raiders won the championship that year.

Kornheiser, who doesn't hide that he's not a women's basketball fan, compares Stiles' appeal to what he calls "the Tiger effect."

A lot of people watch golf because they want to see Woods. And if he isn't playing, they're not watching.

"She almost has a rock-star quality to her," Elgin said.

It's not that Stiles hadn't been in the national limelight before the tournament began.

Southwest Missouri had around 80 media requests as she was chasing the career scoring record.

But it was never the media crunch the people in Springfield expected, said Koehler, the News-Leader columnist.

When other members of the media finally do see Stiles, though, Koehler enjoys watching their reactions.

Reporters in Spokane quit writing on deadline so they didn't miss her next shot, he said.

"They weren't cheering for her," he said, "but they were amazed at what they were seeing."

Greenberg said stardom may yet lurk for the phenom from Kansas.

"The great thing about Jackie, we may just be learning about her now, but she's going to be around for many summers to come as long as there is a WNBA," he said.