Women's basketball practice runs three hours, sometimes longer, at Tennessee, and within 20 minutes, the light-gray T-shirts the players wear start to darken across their backs. With an hour to go, most of the Lady Vols look as if they had driven a convertible through a car wash. But Chamique Holdsclaw's shirt is still dry, which only reinforces the widely held suspicion that basketball comes amazingly easy to her. After all, Holdsclaw, a 6'2" sophomore forward from Astoria, N. Y., didn't just start the opener of her freshman season; she also averaged 12.7 points and 8.0 rebounds over her first three games and was named the SEC player of the week. She didn't just lead Tennessee in scoring (16.2 points per game) and rebounding (9.1) last season; she also led the Lady Vols to the NCAA title. And she did it with enough style and grace to placate her grandmother June, who always dreamed that Chamique (pronounced sha-MEE-kwah) would become a ballerina. "But could you imagine, with those feet?" June says of Chamique's size 14s. "Now I tell her she's like a ballerina on the court." With a braces-filled smile and a shake of her head, Holdsclaw stops way short of conceding that basketball is no sweat for her. "I'd say I make it look smoooooth," she says. But the combination off Holdsclaw's smoothness and dry practice T has at times even fooled the Tennessee coaching staff. "I'll practice really hard, and the coaches will look at my shirt like, Why aren't you sweating?" she says. "I just don't perspire much." Holdsclaw was just 12 games removed from high school last January when Lady Vols coach Pat Summitt pronounced her potentially the best player ever to come to Tennessee. Photos of the Lady Vols' 12 Olympians and 14 All-Americas covered the locker-room wall behind Summitt as she made this proclamation, and you could almost see each former star raise an incredulous eyebrow. The way the rest of Holdsclaw's freshman season played out, though, was enough to erase their—and anyone else's—skepticism. During a week last January in which the Lady Vols beat then No. 1-ranked Louisiana Tech, No. 2 Vanderbilt and No. 20 Arkansas, Holdsclaw averaged 20.3 points and 11.0 rebounds and was named college basketball Player of the Week by ESPN, the only woman so honored in the five years the award has been given. At the end of the season she was named to the Kodak women's All-America team, the only freshman on the 10-member squad. "I imagined she'd make a positive contribution as a freshman," says Vincent Cannizzaro, Holdsclaw's coach at Christ the King High in Queens, N.Y. "But I don't think anybody envisioned her accomplishing what she did." Chamique was 11 when her parents separated and she and her brother, Davon, then eight, moved to nearby Astoria to stay with June. Davon eventually moved back in with their mother, Bonita, who lives in Staten Island, but Chamique never left. She had become too attached to her grandmother, whose name she lists on her Tennessee bio where other players list their parents. Chamique does keep in touch with Bonita, though, and with her father, Willie, who also lives in Queens, and both plan to visit her at Tennessee this season for the first time. They'll find that their daughter has maintained a humble charm even as she has become the toast of Knoxville. She seems incapable of saying anything vaguely flattering about herself without punctuating the sentence with a self-conscious laugh. She comes across as mature and confident for a 19-year-old, but if you made her repeat that assessment back to you, she couldn't do it with a straight face. She isn't your stereotypical loudmouthed New Yorker, that's for sure. The Tennessee players found that out when Holdsclaw went for her recruiting visit in the fall of her senior year in high school. Holdsclaw, in turn, quickly found out that her prospective teammates, all of whom had impressive basketball pedigrees of their own, wouldn't treat her like a big star if she decided to join the Lady Vols. After attending the Tennessee-Alabama football game on a Saturday afternoon, the players went to see Wes Craven's New Nightmare, a blood-and-guts movie in the Freddy Krueger series. Somehow blocking out the horror-film pandemonium, Holdsclaw dozed off. Her new friends promptly inserted straws into her nostrils. "I was trying to breathe and it felt all weird," she says. "Then I realized I had all this stuff up my nose." Holdsclaw knew she had found a place where she would fit in. In her final season at Christ the King, which has arguably the best girls' high school program in the country, Holdsclaw averaged 25.0 points and 15.0 rebounds. The Royals lost one game that year, giving them four defeats in Holdsclaw's four years on the team. Christ the King also won the Class A state championship, its sixth in a row. "We've been blessed with a lot of great players," says Cannizzaro, who in 16 years at Christ the King has coached 56 players who earned college scholarships, "but she has to be the best." Tennessee, too, has been blessed with a lot of terrific players, and it's a rare freshman who can make an instant impact. In her first game, against No. 2 Virginia, Holdsclaw contributed 13 points and 10 rebounds. "She's very competitive, very intense, but she has this composure," says Michelle Marciniak, a senior guard for Tennessee last season who now plays for the Portland Power in the ABL. "From a freshman, I couldn't believe it. We could draw confidence from her."   
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