Freshman finally finds her form

By Ryan Greene     Mar 6, 2007

Richard Gwin
KANSAS UNIVERSITY FRESHMAN DANIELLE MCCRAY, FOREGROUND, has worked herself into shape and become a key contributor for the Jayhawks late in the 2006-07 season.

One by one, Kansas University women’s basketball players descend from the upper level inside the Anderson Family Strength Center.

Practice ended 30 minutes ago, and the team made its way down the labyrinth of hallways to its lavish weights-and-conditioning facility. After brief sessions of lifting and light cardio, another day of work is passed. Casually strolling to the locker room, the Jayhawks wear expressions that show it’s time to relax for the evening.

And here comes Danielle McCray.

While her teammates appear fresh, she glistens with sweat as she takes a few minutes to catch her breath, hands placed firmly on her waist.

The 5-foot-11 freshman forward has just concluded a series of sprints on the treadmill, which has become a post-practice ritual.

Rachel Seymour
Kansas freshman forward Danielle McCray, right, dribbles by a Santa Clara defender in this file photo from Dec. 17. A lack of conditioning limited McCray's minutes early, but her playing shape - and game contributions - have improved lately.

Under the watchful eye of KU strength-and-conditioning guru Andrea Hudy, McCray plugs away. She’ll strap on a heart-rate monitor, crank the treadmill up to 12 mph and go for roughly 40 seconds – the equivalent of 200 meters. The machine slows, McCray catches wind and lets her heart rate come back down to earth. Then she does it all over again.

“I wouldn’t say for an athlete who’s finishing up the last month of a season that’s common,” Hudy said of the workout. “We’re trying to get Danielle to get comfortable being uncomfortable. And if she learns that, I think she’s got unlimited potential. I think until she gets successful with the conditioning aspect of basketball, we’ll have to hammer her with it.”

Set back at the start

Last spring, while KU’s other six incoming freshmen were following a regimen of workouts on a list sent to them by Hudy, McCray was donning a navy and orange track get-up.

After winning Kansas Class 6A state gold in the triple jump, shot put and discus as a junior, she repeated in the first two events as a senior.

Therefore, her physical activity after school involved practicing throws in the vast, open spaces behind Olathe East High, walking to fetch the shot and disc and doing it again while jollying with throws coach Jeff Meyers.

“In track I didn’t really run,” McCray said. “I wouldn’t say that’s a big part of it and make that an excuse, but I would say that wasn’t to my advantage, throwing and not running.”

It’s not that she couldn’t run. McCray averaged a sizzling 63-second split for the Hawks’ 4×400 relay team as a sophomore. But as she became a dominant thrower – earning a national ranking last spring in the shot, the events began to overlap, and throws got the focus.

Almost immediately after graduation, McCray packed up and moved to Lawrence, where the biggest setback kicked in.

The persistent pain in her lower legs while playing was becoming a problem, and McCray needed surgery on the compartments in her calves, as the muscles were bulging from their sheaths.

“She put on a little weight, so when she came in the summer she wasn’t as fit as she should be, and then she had the procedure on her shins and then she’s out for a month,” said KU coach Bonnie Henrickson, who had intensely recruited McCray since arriving in Lawrence three years ago. “Once she got back, I think it overwhelmed her how out of shape she was and then looked around at how in shape everybody else was, because everybody else was two months ahead of her.

“Then everybody’s kicking her butt and she’s looking around like ‘I can’t even compete.’ And then I think in her head she talked herself into not being able to get things done.”

When she returned to practice, her poor eating habits, which she fesses up to having had at the time, were exposed.

All of the sugar and fried delights had taken their toll.

“I just knew (college conditioning) was a lot of running, but I never knew you had to watch what you eat,” McCray said. “I wasn’t working out since I was in a boot and everything, and just eating and not worrying about what I need to be eating since I’m not active or anything.”

The mental roadblock McCray had constructed showed on the court, as her minutes and production fluctuated. She posted 19 points and nine rebounds in 32 minutes against No. 16 California on Dec. 10, but from then tapered off until she ultimately was benched for the team’s second conference game of the season Jan. 6 against No. 9 Baylor.

Unlikely inspiration

Just as responsible for the upswing after hitting her low point in early January as McCray herself was sophomore walk-on Katie Smith.

“As a walk-on kid who busts her fanny, who wins most of the sprints (in practice) and then on top of it doesn’t play, Katie tried to get in her ear about ‘Listen, the coaches are after you, but it’s because they know you’re good, and I wish I had what you had,'” Henrickson said of Smith, who has played a total of five minutes in three games this season.

The message was sent loudest when the coaches intervened.

“There was one day where I had to run backwards, and I ran next to Danielle and she had to try and beat me running forwards,” said Smith, who laughed while denying disclosure of who won. “Now she’d probably kill me, but that day she struggled.”

Added McCray: “One day she said ‘D, I’m not getting any playing time and I’m beating you in sprints. You can’t let me beat you in sprints.’

“I just got tired of, everyday, ‘Danielle, you need to win your sprint. Danielle, why are you last all the time?’ And I just felt like I needed to stop hearing them say that, and there’s more to the game than just hearing about your conditioning.”

Around then, McCray’s conditioning regimen kicked into full gear. On top of practices, Hudy had her doing low-impact cardio, such as stair machines, elliptical work and the stationary bike, to get rid of excess body weight. The sprints have helped McCray up her minutes on the floor, and while Hudy said McCray still has further to go, she’s now roughly 20 pounds lighter than when she arrived on campus.

Also part of the plan was work on an underwater treadmill and a calorie-restricting diet, monitored by nutritionist Randy Bird.

Foods from the deep fryer were replaced with baked and grilled items. McCray now can’t even say the name of her favorite food – fried chicken – without a trailing whimper.

All the while, the pressure from teammates was non-existent, even though McCray was locked into a season-long game of catch-up.

“Her teammates were good with her because they were as patient as they probably could have been, because they’re smart enough to look at her and go, ‘You know, she’s got a chance to be pretty good,'” Henrickson said. “They can evaluate talent. It’s not like you wouldn’t be as patient if she wasn’t as skilled, but they would say, ‘We gotta get D back. We gotta get D right.’ I heard that a hundred times.

“They were smart enough to know that Danielle McCray, when she got herself in shape, that she could help us be successful.”

The benefits

McCray became Olathe East’s all-time leading scorer and rebounder as a senior, earning the state’s Gatorade Player of the Year honors along the way.

More impressive about it was how easy it all looked. In the Sunflower League, McCray’s size, strength and skill did the trick.

In college, there was the game inside the game. And once she had a firm grip on it, that same old knack for making the difficult look simple returned.

One of McCray’s biggest victories came in winning her first sprint during practice in early February, roughly eight weeks after she was labeled two months behind everyone else in terms of conditioning.

The crown jewel of her freshman year, though, symbolized everything her teammates had preached to Henrickson in her regards earlier on.

As KU ended a streak of 12 straight losses to Kansas State on Feb. 18, McCray hit six three-pointers and snatched 10 rebounds to go with her career-high 25 points. Above all was the 47 minutes she played in the 82-74 overtime thriller, still leaving her with enough gas to celebrate a late game-clinching trey. K-State coach Deb Patterson after the game compared her physically to the type of player you’d expect to see playing in the talent-laden Southeastern Conference.

During the Jayhawks’ 4-3 stretch to close Big 12 play, she’s played 28.7 minutes a game, scoring 13.4 points per effort and averaging 7.6 rebounds a night.

Though now that a foundation has been set, McCray’s overall game still has plenty of room for improvement.

She was exposed defensively by Oklahoma’s Courtney Paris, a probable first-team All-American, just three days after slicing K-State. Paris posed a challenge not yet seen on McCray’s part, and forced the KU freshman to foul out in just 13 minutes of play.

McCray can also rattle off offensive shortcomings, but now in shape and on pace with the rest of her team, working on just basketball again might feel like an offseason vacation.

Though now time off takes on a different meaning.

“I’m focusing on being off-balance when I shoot, having my footwork right, coming off of a screen, stuff like that, so I can start off where I left or even better,” McCray said. “This summer I’m going to work my butt off and be in the gym all day. Just by seeing how far I came, where a long time ago I couldn’t do some of the things I’m doing now.

“It just shows how hard you work and how much love you have for the game where I never gave up or gave in and kept fighting to get it right.”

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