Women's Hoops Guru

By Mel Greenberg

NEWARK, Del. - Elena Delle Donne is having fun again, even if the volleyball wins at Delaware at the moment are not as plentiful as the slew of victories at nearby Ursuline Academy in Wilmington where she had been the reigning national high school girls sensation.

"I love it, " Delle Donne said Tuesday night at the Carpenter Sports Building's Barbara Vierra Court after Temple stopped her Blue Hens, 25-17, 25-23, 2514 in a nonconference match.

Delle Donne had five kills and two blocks in the match and she has quickly moved into the starting lineup.

"I have so much to learn. I keep trying to improve myself every day in practice as much as I can," the 6-foot-5 Delle Donne added. "But I have so much fun when I practice. I look forward to every practice, every game. I'm just enjoying it."

Several months ago Delle Donne was thought to be elated over the start of what was projected as a high-profile collegiate hoops career with NCAA-favorite Connecticut, until she began to have doubts and returned home two days after her arrival in Storrs for summer school in early June.

Thus began nearly three months of suspense over whether Delle Donne would show up on the first day of class. The outcome was finally resolved when she proclaimed a week before her scheduled return that she was turning down the UConn scholarship.

Two days later, Delle Donne in a statement announced her intention to enroll near her home at Delaware. A week later she tranformed rumor into fact when the Blue Hens called a press conference to introduce her as the newest member of the volleyball team, a sport she played for just her senior season a year ago at Ursuline.

Delle Donne's arrival was so late that no trace of her exists in the school media guide and under NCAA rules by arriving after Aug. 1, she is listed as a non-scholarship player with the defending Colonial Athletic Association champions, who are 2-4 in the early season.

Her father Ernie joked on Tuesday night that the money he would have had to spend on gas making the 500-mile round trip so he and his wife Joanie could watch Elena at UConn can now be re-invested in her tuition costs.

At the press conference Delle Donne revealed she had suffered burn out over the attention that had been placed on her since the seventh grade in basketball.

"Ask (Tennessee) coach Pat Summitt who first told her about Elena," Blue Hens volleyball coach Bonnie Kenny, a Vols' graduate, said of Delle Donne's early presence on the basketball landscape. "The burnout must have really been bad. In the seventh grade I thought she was better than Carol Blazejowski."

Kenny's reference is to the former Montclair State scoring sensation of the late 1970s, a hall of famer who holds the Madison Square Garden individual game record for men or women and is now the administrative head of the WNBA New York Liberty.

Of course, one sport's loss is another's gain and Kenny is enthusiastic over what she sees in the budding stages of Delle Donne's career.

"She's coming along really well," Kenny said. "We're teaching her that little step out and that slide. She's working hard on her blocking. She has good timing. She just doesn't have the vision yet you need to be a really good blocker.

"But her presence is obviously something we need at the net and she's doing a good job helping us there."

The rules of volleyball media interviews at Delaware matches these days is that the time for the basketball discussion was at the press conference. However, Delle Donne will talk about the transition of coming from a sport she seemed ready to play at birth to one in which her experience had been virtually non-existence.

"It's tough because, obviously, I've never played volleyball, really, other than last year and last year I just hit the ball and swung at it," Delle Donne said.

"There's so much I have to learn. With basketball, since I played it since I was age two, I was so used to it. But now I'm just picking up on things every day, but I love it," Delle Donne explained.

There are some aspects of her basketball talent that have been helpful.

"Layups and running slides," she said. "Running a slide is a lot like running a layup."

The Blue Hens suffered a tough injury when senior co-captain Kelly Gibson tore her ACL in the season-opener out West.

Temple dominated the first set Tuesday night, but the Blue Hens pushed the Owls in the second before the visitors then powered away in the fthird set to make up for last season's loss in Philadelphia after Temple led 2-0.

"We're working on that killer instinct to fight back and get through games like that," Delle Donne said. "We just need to keep working in practice and improving."

Sometimes, being the local talent can bring its own pressure but Delle Donne is enjoying having the home folks around that she grew up with.

"It's great. I love seeing people I know in the crowd so I really enjoy it."

Temple coach Bob Bertucci praised Delle Donne's upside.

"She's going to be a phenomenal volleyball player if she decides to stay with it," Bertucci said. "She's a big kid, athletic, I mean she made one block against our big kid, so I think it's just a matter of time."

As for the statistical star, that honor went to Temple's Yun Yi Zhang of Shanghai, China, who had 19 kills and just two errors while Cayleigh Ashman had 10 kills.

"They served us right off the court," Kenny said of the Owls.

"They always have an outside hitter and No. 12 (Zhang) did a good job of that. She ate our lunch. She had us at will. She could do anything she wanted and that's pretty disturbing that one player can dominate so much against six," Kenny added.

"We made her look like an all-American, but she is a pretty good player, now. I'm not going to take anything away from her. She can do a lot with the volleyball."

Delaware now heads to Atlantic Coast Conference country in North Carolina this weekend where the Blue Hens will compete in Wake Forest's tournament.

-- Mel