Brooklyn Pope hadn’t heard much about Rutgers until last April. She was a junior playing basketball for Paul Laurence Dunbar High School in Fort Worth, Texas, and Piscataway, N.J., couldn’t have been any further from her mind. She would almost certainly suit up for Baylor when her college career began, not far from her home.

That all changed when a talk-show host thrust Rutgers women’s basketball into the spotlight.

‘When there was that big controversy with (Don) Imus that’s when I really found out about them,’ Pope said. ‘It was so publicized that you had no choice but to find out about them. It was everywhere. It was on every station.’

One week after the Scarlet Knights players brought Rutgers to its first ever national championship game, a 59-46 loss to Tennessee, they sat at a table with their coach to address the media. They were not there – on April 10, 2007 – to talk about the most successful season in school history. Instead, they stared defiantly into the camera to discuss disparaging remarks made about the players by Imus the day after the title game.

C. Vivian Stringer, the legendary coach of the team, stood up in defense of her players, becoming the face of the charge against Imus.

Now, less than a year after the remarks, No. 4 Rutgers (23-4, 13-1), which plays Syracuse Saturday at 1 p.m. at home, is after that national championship behind Stringer’s lead. And Stringer is set to bring in the most heralded recruiting class in school history for next season. The crop of stars consists of five McDonalds All-Americans, with players from Texas (Pope), California (Jasmine Dixon and Nikki Speed), Mississippi (April Sykes) and Florida (Chelsey Lee).

This, all after one of the most trying times of Stringer’s illustrious career.

‘She was very professional,’ Pope said of her soon-to-be coach. ‘She never lost her composure even though it was a time where she very well could have. She could have lost her composure and acted ignorant just like he did. She could have went to the same measures, but she didn’t.’

That’s because the story of Rutgers’ success begins and ends with Stringer.

She is the only person to lead three women’s basketball programs (Iowa, Cheyney State and Rutgers) to the Final Four. She has won three National Coach of the Year awards and was inducted into the Women’s Basketball Hall of Fame in 2001. And she became only the third women’s basketball coach to win 800 games last night with a 60-46 victory over DePaul.

But the well-decorated Stringer had more national visibility than ever in her career during the media firestorm surrounding the Imus controversy.

When asked during a recent Big East conference call if that visibility contributed to her successful recruiting class, Stringer’s voice raised considerably.

‘Why don’t we give credit to the fact that this team played for the national championship?’ she asked. ‘And we understand always that any time you go that far in the tournament and you get that kind of recognition, just by human nature it is a fact that the team that gets the most exposure will be that team that people will take a serious look at.

‘I think that one, it was the success of the program, period. In addition to that, I think that the parents as well as the players got a chance to see the character of the team that they were going to come to. And I’d like to believe that the combination of those two, not one single thing by itself, but the combination of those two was a positive factor for those players who decided to come to Rutgers.’

St. John’s head coach Kim Barnes Arico considers Stringer to be one of the best coaches and recruiters in the game, so she was not surprised by the size or strength of the Rutgers recruiting class. Even without the Imus situation, she sees Stringer as more than capable of convincing five All-Americans to play for her.

‘I don’t know if I would say (the Imus controversy) would be the reasoning behind it,’ Barnes Arico said. ‘She’s not in the hall of fame by accident.’

The California native Dixon, unlike Pope, knew all about Stringer before Imus made his remarks. Even though she was a junior playing for Long Beach Polytechnic, Rutgers made her list of schools she considered attending.

But it was not a short list. Dixon looked at schools all around the country, including UCLA, Duke, Arizona State and Baylor, and not one school stood out at that point.

Dixon said the increased visibility Rutgers received from the Imus press conferences was not the deciding factor in her decision, but it did play a role in her search.

The way Stringer carried herself throughout the controversy impressed Dixon, and encouraged her to make a visit to the campus in the fall. During that visit, Rutgers jumped to the top of Dixon’s list.

‘It was the coach, and then the way the girls bonded with each other while I was there,’ Dixon said. ‘It was like a big family atmosphere, which I love.’

While Pope learned about Rutgers from the Imus publicity, she too said it was not the reason she selected the school instead of Baylor. Pope didn’t choose Rutgers because of the team’s success either.

‘I chose Rutgers because they are unified,’ she said. ‘They stay together.’

While Stringer doesn’t like to give full credit for her recruiting to the controversy, she does hope young women saw her in a positive light for standing up for something she believes in. She also hopes and thinks her players will reflect that attitude.

‘The young people who have decided to come are strong young women, who appreciate a coach who is willing to stand up for what is right, and I think this is probably a thing of the day,’ Stringer said. ‘There’s no question that the young people who we have now and are coming in as freshmen are those that say we’re going to rewrite history.’

bntahmos@syr.edu

Published on February 27, 2008 at 12:00 pm