There are athletes and there are competitors.

Jackie Stiles is a competitor.

The former Southwest Missouri State University (now Missouri State University) women’s basketball standout closed out a phenomenal career as the NCAA Division I women’s basketball all-time leader in points scored in a season (1,062) and for a career (3,393).

In talking with Stiles, it is quickly apparent that she would have applied the same hard-nosed work ethic, unwavering commitment to excellence and driving passion to win regardless of the sport or profession she may have chosen. Those elements set Stiles apart as one of the defining personalities among the thousands of NCAA student-athletes who have impressed and entertained sports fans for more than a century.

If Stiles hadn’t become a basketball player, she said she would have pursued tennis because of her just-under-six-foot frame.

"Most of my teammates would get the 'you're so big and tall. You must be a basketball player’ treatment. Me? I blended," Stiles said.

Maybe she blended physically, but for someone as competitive as Stiles, blending is nearly impossible. Case in point, as recently as two years ago the former Lady Bears standout was on the verge of making a career of cycling. While rehabbing from one of the multiple injuries that ultimately ended Stiles' basketball career, she read Lance Armstrong’s book "It's Not About the Bike."

"I didn’t know anything about cycling, but I thought one thing I could do through all these surgeries was bike,” she said. “It was the one thing I could do where my body didn’t limit me. I bought a road bike and, crazy me, I just threw myself into things."

By May 2005, Stiles was racing. She spent that summer training and racing and, not surprisingly, excelling. She was ready to ride her new passion for cycling as far as it would take her, but her body began breaking down…again. Afraid of getting hurt and convinced that she couldn’t be as good as she wanted to be, Stiles pulled up.

"A blessing and a curse is that my personality is either all or nothing. It’s taken me to incredible heights, but it can get me into trouble," said Stiles, who admitted she couldn't have just cycled for recreation. By her own admission, she’s always had a deep love for competition. Without it, something was missing. "Now I’m going to have to learn how to get that satisfaction from my mind and my job, instead of my body. It’s just tired and worn out. It can’t do it anymore."

A star is born

There was a time, however, when Stiles could do it all.

Stiles didn’t actually get her first taste of competitive basketball until she was 12. Her father would drive her four hours from her hometown of Claflin, Kansas, to Kansas City to play on an AAU team. Up until then, she had attended camps; absorbed the game’s fundamentals from her father, a coach; and played against boys in her neighborhood.

A Missouri State assistant happened to be in the stands and spotted Stiles during her first AAU game. "She leaned over to my dad and asked who was No. 5," Stiles recalled. The assistant coach stuck around afterward to encourage the budding star to keep working — perhaps there was a future in Division I basketball waiting for her. "This completely inspired and motivated me," Stiles said.

That was the spring of 1992. Missouri State was coming off an appearance in that year's Women's Final Four. Stiles remembered watching the Lady Bears on television. She became intimately familiar with the program over the next six years through attending camps at the school. Such familiarity made the decision to attend Missouri State easy.

Current Lady Bears’ assistant coach Carly Stubblefield played with Stiles all four years of her own career at the university. For Stiles, Stubblefield said, it wasn’t about the numbers. Rather, it was about the victories. "It didn"t matter how many points Jackie had at the end of the night, she wanted her team to win. It was about getting the team a win and doing whatever it took for that. Ultimately, that’s what you want out of every teammate," she said.

Stiles capped a magical four-year stretch at Missouri State with an improbable run to the 2001 Women’s Final Four in St. Louis. The march through the bracket included beating Rutgers on the Scarlet Knights’ home floor and downing Duke, the tournament’s No. 1 seed, behind Stiles' 41-point performance. The Lady Bears advanced to the national semifinals after defeating Washington. Though Missouri State eventually fell to Purdue, memories of the tournament are among Stiles’ favorite from her playing career.

A legacy remains

That she never sought or was motivated by individual recognition or awards didn’t stop them from coming her way. A three-time consensus Kodak all-American, Stiles earned the Wade Trophy, as the top women’s basketball player in the nation, and the Honda Broderick Cup, honoring the top women’s collegiate athlete.

"I never imagined when I first started playing that one day I would get the Wade Trophy, then the Broderick Cup, I'm like ‘I don’t deserve this because I’m sitting next to an Olympic swimmer and all these incredible athletes’ and they give it to me anyway. These were two awards that hit me," she said.

As moved as she might have been with the honors, it’s tough to argue the impact Stiles had on the game. Stubblefield said Stiles’ legacy lies in her ability to score.

Teams deployed every kind of defense to contain her. Box and one. Triangle and two. Junk defenses. Nothing worked. "It's was an uncanny knack to have and it showed. She’s the all-time leader in scoring history,” said Stubblefield. “Once you see it and you’re a part of it, you don’t realize until a couple of years later how special that was. It was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to have a player like that on your team."

In spite of spending summers watching games and recruiting, Stubblefield said she hasn’t seen a player since with Stiles’ ability. "The thing is that she worked on it every single day. It wasn’t just something that was a given talent. There was some talent there. She made herself that type of player by practicing it every single day," she said.

Stiles believes her legacy is her work ethic and passion for the game, and she wants to inspire others to achieve their own dreams. “I want people to say that no one worked harder and no one had more passion for the game.”

That commitment and hard work made Stiles the fourth pick by the Portland Fire in the 2001 WNBA draft. She collected rookie of the year honors and became the first Fire player to become an all-star. But injuries and a staggering 13 surgeries crippled her ability, if not her desire, to play.
In 2005, Stiles went into business for herself as a personal trainer and offering private basketball lessons. After the foray into cycling, she made one last attempt to return to the basketball court late last year, signing with a team in Australia.

Injuries, though, curbed the comeback. She broke a rib in the early minutes of her first game with the Canberra Capitals, and though she healed from that, she couldn't beat a severe case of tendonitis in her knee. When the team doctor refused to let her play, Stiles decided to walk away from the game for good. "My body just couldn’t do it anymore," she said.

It wasn't necessarily the way she wanted or envisioned the end of her career, Stiles said, but she’s at peace with the decision. These days she plows her energy into her business while keeping pace with the progress of the game she helped build, a game she said has changed drastically since she ruled the hardwood.

The talent and level of competition continues to improve, Stiles said, because of increased television exposure and the opportunities now available for girls and women playing basketball. Although when she started playing, her biggest dream was to be in the Olympics because that was the highest level to which women’s basketball players could aspire, Stiles said now girls can dream about getting paid to play basketball.

As much as Stiles has contributed to the game, it hasn't been a one-sided exchange."Playing college basketball was the best four years of my life," she said. “I always tell people I would have traded in every contract I received after playing college basketball to go back and play another four years. Yes, playing in the WNBA was a dream job, but nothing compares with the college game. It was the experience of a lifetime.”