A conversation two years ago gave Lynette Woodard a clue she might be cut from the U.S. Olympic women’s basketball team.
The 32-year-old Woodard, a former Kansas standout, was, in fact, sliced from the team Thursday by coach Theresa Grentz of Rutgers.
“I’m not really shocked,” said Woodard, who returned to town Thursday from Colorado Springs, Colo. “I kind of expected it due to some things that happened in the past.”
Woodard played for Grentz in 1990 on the World Championships and Goodwill Games teams. During those tryouts, Woodard recalled, “She kind of subtly asked me if I wanted to leave. That’s when I was shocked. I told her I wasn’t going to quit. And she didn’t cut me. I played well. We went on to have a good summer. We won both golds.”
The U.S. Olympic roster was trimmed to 15 players Thursday when Woodard and former Auburn guard Ruthie Bolton were cut.
WOODARD SURVIVED the original cut from 56 to 18 players last week. The 12-player team is to be announced June 11 or 12. Originally, a second round of cuts wasn’t planned, but Woodard said she’d rather know early.
“My philosophy was let me know or let me go,” she said. “That was just one team. It was a big team, of course.”
Woodard, a member of the 1980 and ’84 Olympic squads, plans to return to Japan for her third professional season this fall. She said she thought she performed well at the trials.
“I’m not a quitter,” she said. “I knew she (Gretz) wasn’t very fond of me, and I’m not sure where that came from. I wanted to take a stand. I had a right to be there, regardless of whether you cut me or not.
“The big deal was that I was 32, but it really wasn’t a big deal. I started to believe I could play at a later age because of the foreign players. They do it all the time.”
Woodard said she received inspiration from Jackie Martin, a former KU player who died of leukemia earlier this year.
“JACKIE MARTIN just passed, and she was like my best friend,” Woodard said. “The past couple years, she was with me at all those trials. If she had been alive, we would have discussed it, and she would have said, `No Wood, don’t quit.’ With that personal thought, I went. I’m very pleased. It didn’t come down to my playing ability.”
Woodard said Grentz told her the team would keep two forwards instead of three.
“Then she compared this cutting to making the decison to have her second child, which I didn’t understand,” Woodard recalled. “When I had played for her before, she knew quite a bit of my history. She was asking me if I really wanted to be there, and I said yes I did. This (the Olympics) has a special place for me in my heart.”
Woodard said she planned to work on her Japanese and take up tae-kwon-do this summer.
“I’ve been in (Japanese) classes for both years I’ve been there,” she said. “Now that I have a summer, I hope to find someone in Lawrence that speaks Japanese. It’s not really as different as we think.”
