Women's basketball hosts ‘healthy' outdoor game

The Fit Bones Hot Shot Classic, hosted by the ASU Women's Basketball team, including senior Aubree Johnson (left), and the Arizona Osteoporosis Coalition brought community members to campus to talk about hoops and health.

Giving it their all
Team focuses on service, success

When players step into the women's basketball locker room at ASU, they are immediately met with a list of the program's priorities. At the top of the list are three simple words: “Be a giver.”

It is that kind of spirit that surrounds the women's basketball team. Led by their coach, Charli Turner Thorne, the team seeks out ways to serve others as readily as it seeks success on the court.

“We feel it's our job,” Turner Thorne says. “I believe strongly our coaching staff and our team are very privileged to be doing what we are doing. Not only as representatives of Arizona State , but by virtue of all the opportunities we are given. For better or worse, for right or wrong, we are held up as role models and we welcome that.”

Turner Thorne says the primary outreach for the team comes in schools and classrooms across the Valley. To help spread positive messages, the team even has developed its own program, called Star POWER, which focuses on pride, self-image and healthy choices.

“Besides working at the crisis nursery, the diabetes walk or all other sorts of things, we schedule ourselves out,” she says. “We do it because we feel it is part of our mission. We have an opportunity for people to listen to us, and we should take advantage of that.”

During the 2000-2001 season, the team gained national prominence for playing against Tennessee in the nation's first college outdoor basketball game, held at Chase Field. Aside from the spectacle of the location, the game went to support the Susan G. Komen Breast Cancer Foundation.

The team is doing it again this year, this time as part of the Hoops for Health Classic, which takes place Dec. 18 at Chase Field against Texas Tech. The event will include a health expo, with educational material aimed at giving families tools to make healthy choices.

In January, when the team hosts UCLA, the game will be held at 11 a.m., so that school children will be able to attend as part of field trip day. More than 4,500 children in the fourth through eighth grades are expected to attend. UCLA agreed to the event, only if they could hold a similar day when ASU visits.

All of these events come while the team is having tremendous, unprecedented success on the court. The Sun Devils are in the midst of a school record seven consecutive postseason appearances, with invitations to the NCAA Tournament four times in the last six years; a first Pac-10 conference title in 2001; the Pac-10 Tournament championship in 2002; and a trip to the Sweet Sixteen of the NCAA Tournament for the first time in more than 20 years.

“From day one, when our kids get to the program, they know they have not only given themselves over to this team to be successful and win championships,” she says. “They know they are giving of themselves to this community.”