Wisconsin
Reusse: Gophers basketball legend Janel McCarville brings experience back to her hometown in Wisconsin
STEVENS POINT, WIS. – This is a city of more than 25,000 people with one public high school. The district also serves smaller outposts in the region and is known to all as SPASH, as in, Stevens Point Area Senior High.
Janel McCarville’s address was Custer, a dot on the map 7 miles from Stevens Point. “Three bars and a post office, that’s Custer,” she said.
McCarville, now a member of the SPASH Athletic Hall of Fame as a basketball player, was recruited for the University of Minnesota by coach Cheryl Littlejohn. “Cheryl was on me from the get-go, the first major school to offer me” McCarville said. “I appreciated that.”
Janel McCarville, right, hugs teammate Lindsay Whalen near the end of the NCAA Mideast final game against Duke in March 2004. (Chuck Burton/The Associated Press)
Littlejohn was not around to be rewarded for her confidence in McCarville. Littlejohn was fired at the end of the 2000-01 season and replaced by Brenda Frese (then Oldfield).
“Brenda called me and said, ‘The scholarship is still yours,’ and I said, ‘I’ll be there,‘” McCarville said.
Frese would stay one season and head for Maryland. McCarville would be in the middle of a four-year run that still stands unchallenged as the most unforgettable for Gophers women’s basketball in its half-century.
McCarville would leave Minnesota as the WNBA’s No. 1 draft choice to the Charlotte Sting in 2005. She would play 11 seasons in that league; three of those with the Lynx, including the 2013 championship.
Janel McCarville holds up the trophy at the start of the championship celebration parade for the WNBA champions in Oct. 2013 in Minneapolis. (Renee Jones Schneider/The Minnesota Star Tribune)
More dramatically, she played internationally from 2006 to 2016 in Slovakia, Russia (Moscow), Italy, Turkey, Poland, China, Turkey again, and then went to Stockholm in 2017 with urging from Gophers teammate Kadidja Andersson.