Shoot for success

FLYING TO THE Final Four with 5 p.m. e-mail deadlines for classwork in women's studies, Mistie Williams and Wanisha Smith of Duke studied all the way from Durham, N.C., to their hotel room in Boston. Williams nearly panicked because at about 4 p.m. her Internet connection failed. She went from teammate to teammate until she got to Smith's room, filing at 4:45 p.m.

As they worked at the hotel, Smith called the team's academic adviser, Heather Ryan. Ryan received the call on her cellphone as she toured downtown. Ryan said she did not tell the players to do homework, letting them relax until after dinner.

Talking at Duke's semifinal victory over Louisiana State on Sunday night, Ryan said Smith told her, ''I'm just letting you know that I'm going to get this paper in." This level of focus at the Final Four was impressive, even for an academic adviser of a program with a 100 percent graduation rate. Ryan immediately called a veteran academic adviser in California to exclaim, ''You would not believe this! One of my students just called me to say she's not going out in Boston until she finishes her paper!"

Ryan said her colleague said, ''No way!"

Ryan asked her colleague how many times had she heard of that at something like a Final Four.

Ryan said her friend said, ''None."

After the victory over LSU, Smith said her paper was on intersexed infants, babies who are born with ambiguous genitalia. ''I looked at the controversy of what people go through and what doctors go through in deciding whether or not to do surgery to make it female or male," Smith said.

Now it was me who felt like calling someone to say, ''You would not believe this! I'm interviewing an athlete who is on the verge of a national championship and she is filing the bibliography and footnotes of a paper on the controversies in medicine that affect, according to a 2001 article in the Lancet, up to 1 in 3,000 babies? No way!"

Williams's paper was on how women were once mistreated for premenstrual syndrome. March Madness did not stop Williams from finishing her paper on women labeled as mad. ''It's crazy what they used to do in the 19th century, putting women in insane asylums because men didn't understand our hormones," Williams said.

Several reporters and columnists at the Final Four question whether this studious focus became studied censorship as Duke and NCAA officials shut off questions about what the team thinks about the nationally publicized, alleged rape of a black woman from North Carolina Central University who was hired as an exotic dancer by white members of Duke's lacrosse team. The recovering sportswriter part of me wishes that they felt free to speak their mind about a situation that is roiling Durham along gender, race, and class lines.

It could have been especially meaningful since they have players like Chante Black, who is deeply thinking about issues of sexism and racism. Black talked about how last season, she buried herself in the rare-book section of the library for seven straight hours to pore over faded, hard-to-read manuscripts from slave owners that she could not take with her on a road trip to the Bahamas. This was for a 25-page freshman paper in Afro-American history. She said she became angry as she read how casually and candidly the slave owners valued the slaves for their labor and devalued their humanity with sexual abuse and beatings.

''It was like watching 'Roots,' " Black said. ''It took me awhile to calm down."

Regardless of what they really think about the controversy, you have to admire them for not being distracted. If Duke won last night, it would mark the first time since the NCAA began keeping detailed statistics in 1991 that the women's and men's basketball champions could both boast a 100 percent graduation rate. Duke's women are perfect in both the old, more strict federal statistics and the new Graduation Success Rates that account for transfer students who graduate and for players who leave early in good academic standing. Florida's men have a 64 percent federal rate and a 100 percent GSR. Given that 8 of the last 12 men's champions had federal graduation rates of 33 percent or lower, while all 11 of the last women's champions have been at least 62 percent, such an occurrence could not have been predicted. The normal response would have been, ''No way!"

Derrick Z. Jackson's e-mail address is jackson@globe.com.