When Elaine Elliott was a girl playing ball on the driveway and all the other sports, too, with her brothers in Tacoma, Wash., she imagined no other life than sports.
There were girls' travel teams in the Seattle-Tacoma area, so Elliott, now in her 20th season coaching at Utah, never wanted for a way to play. "I got great coaching in junior high," she says.
The daughter of two educators, Elliott also got into "girlie things in high school" after the family moved to Boise. She did drill team and the like and felt more accepted in school for that, but, "athletics won out," she said.
"It didn't matter who cared about it. I cared about it. My family cared."
In some ways, she came along at just the right time to be able to stay in athletics.
Oh, they didn't offer college scholarships to women until her final year at Boise State, and part of the reason she went there was that it was affordable for the family. But she was thankful for what she got and majored in physical education and played basketball, volleyball, field hockey and softball there.
As she was graduating, Boise schools were hankering for skilled female coaches for girls' teams.
Men didn't want the jobs because they paid too little, but Elliott loved it because she could spend most of her days thinking about coaching and didn't have to teach PE classes, though she did do a couple of health courses so they could officially put her on the payroll. "I really felt wanted from Day 1," she says.
When a graduate assistant's position opened under Fern Gardner at Utah, Elliott realized she'd love that even more. No health classes. "I wanted to spend all my time relative to coaching duties," she says, and a collegiate job provided that ability.
She moved up to assistant coach, then took over when Gardner retired, and she's been winning at an average of better than 20 games a year ever since.
Sometime in the next week or two, Elliott will reach a rather remarkable milestone for one who became a head coach in 1983-84 — the 400th win of her college coaching career, all of them at Utah.
Elliott has 399 career wins and can get No. 400 Thursday when Utah opens the Mountain West Conference season hosting Wyoming at the Huntsman Center at 7 p.m.
At the start of this season, 36 coaches of NCAA women's teams had more wins than Elliott's 389, but only three of them (Connecticut's Geno Auriema, Old Dominion's Wendy Larry and Iowa's Lisa Bluder) had coached fewer than 20 seasons, like Elliott.
"I don't count them," Elliott said of her wins, though she laments, "I should have kept a journal. I am an in-the-moment person." She doesn't take notice until someone else mentions them. Make no mistake. "I am proud of it," she said. "I don't want to sound unaffected. I'm real proud I still win 20 games a year.
"I appreciate every kid who ever played here, but I don't think in terms of separate moments. It's been awesome," she acknowledged about her Ute career.
She doesn't eat, sleep and think basketball. She likes to mountain-bike and take her dogs into the mountains, and family is a high priority, too. Her parents will celebrate their 50th wedding anniversary this summer during a prime basketball recruiting time. She will celebrate with them.
"It's important for my sanity. I have a need to be happy in other areas of my life," she says.
Elliott doesn't like to list favorites among her teams, but making the NCAA Sweet 16 round two years ago was probably her best memory. She'd like to top it someday.
Through the years, her style has evolved "in all aspects," she said. She takes ideas from all of her experiences. "I believe you grow every day."
Players have changed, too, in some ways. They look more to a future of "playing later in life" once college is done, whether it's in the WNBA, Canada or Europe. "It's of more interest to them," Elliott says, and recruits seem more interested in whether they'll get to play games on TV. "What they're looking for has changed," Elliott said.
Even though it's more accepted for girls to play sports in grade school and high school, Elliott said some of the players from her first teams could still play on these teams if they were just coming up, and players don't seem any more interested in coaching than they've ever been.
They leave that to Elliott.
E-mail: lham@desnews.com