College Basketball

Shooting Stars

As accomplished three-point shooters, Brett Roberts of Morehead (Ky.) State and Andrea Congreaves of Mercer in Macon, Ga., are familiar with long shots. It wasn't so long ago that they both were long shots. No one could have predicted that either of them would lead the nation in scoring. But both are doing just that.

Roberts, a 6'8" forward who had a 29.3-point average at week's end, nearly skipped his senior season—after scoring 14.5 points per game as a junior—to concentrate on a career in baseball. He was drafted as a pitcher by the Minnesota Twins in the fourth round last June and finished 3-0 for Minnesota's rookie league team in Elizabethton, Tenn. He is expected to pitch at Class A Kenosha after he finishes classes in the spring.

Roberts has played so well on the court that NBA scouts have been showing up at Morehead State games and complicating his career plans. "I had no idea [scouts] would be watching me," he says. "Basketball is my true love. I'd love to play both sports the rest of my life."

For Congreaves, a 6'3" junior center with a 33.8 average at week's end, the surprise is not so much that she is leading the country in scoring but that the country is the United States. Congreaves was born in London and lived there until she graduated from high school. Ed Nixon, the former Mercer coach who signed her, found out about Congreaves through a friend who recruited her in Europe, where she played on a club team. "I really wasn't thinking about coming to the States," says Congreaves, who has let a hint of a Georgia twang seep into her British accent. "But people at the school were very persistent, and after a while I latched on to the idea."

Roberts and Congreaves have more in common than their scoring ability. Both played against weak competition before going to college—Roberts at South Webster ( Ohio) High, where his graduating class had 88 students, and Congreaves in England, where her high school didn't have a basketball court, much less a team. And both are supposed to be inside players but are equally comfortable on the perimeter. Roberts had made 40.0% of his 160 three-point attempts through Sunday, Congreaves 44.1% of hers.

In the NCAA's most recent Division I statistics, Congreaves's scoring average was 8.3 points better than that of her closest pursuer, Tracy Lis of Providence. That edge would be the largest for a women's scoring champ since the NCAA began keeping statistics for women in 1982.

Conflict of Interests

With six road wins in its first season in the ACC, Florida State has already put a damper on a lot of postgame parties at other schools in the league. Now the team has thrown a wrench into the plans of its own school's football program.

Charlie Ward, a 6'1" sophomore and the leading contender to succeed Casey Weldon as the Seminoles' first-string quarterback next season, is busy starting at point guard for the basketball team. Football coach Bobby Bowden had scheduled spring practice to begin in the second week of March, but the ACC tournament runs from March 12 to 15, so Bowden has invoked what he calls "the Charlie Ward rule" and postponed spring practice indefinitely.