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ALTUS, Okla. (AP) — Janice Beach-Hardwick offices out of a quiet room attached to the Altus Junior High gymnasium now, organizing papers from her desk. The cool, concrete walls around her are splattered with class and sports schedules.
Semi-retired and assisting the Altus High School athletic department, the pace is a little slower than the days when she once torched opposing teams with a devastating jump shot — like the one she used to hit a game-winner for the U.S. women's national team against Cuba in the first round of the 1971 Pan-American Games in a steamy Cali, Colombia, gymnasium.
"We're down one with time running out. One of our girls steals the ball and dribbles down, I'm trailing her and she throws it to me and says, 'Shoot it!'" Hardwick remembered.
The shot went in, lifting the Americans to a one-point win, The Lawton Constitution (http://bit.ly/1FNlbL9 ) reports.
"It was so exciting," Hardwick said. "The (U.S. national) baseball team was there and they came running out onto the floor."
Hardwick is 62 years old, trim and lanky with short gray hair. Armed with a sharp stare and firm handshake, she still looks as though she'd be willing to score 10-12 points a game if someone asked her to.
But her days seem quieter now, unlike when she led Southside, a Class B school near her hometown of Elmer that has since been incorporated into the Altus school district, to a 32-0 state championship season in 1970. She scored 61 points in a 6-on-6 state tournament game that year— a record that will stand forever.
Things are quieter than her days playing at Wayland Baptist University, where she was a three-time All-American and won two national championships, all while soaking in the school's pioneering and extravagant culture of taxiing players to and from games in private jets — a traveling method sparsely used in college athletics at the time.
Things are quieter now, but looks can be deceiving.
Hardwick's competitive juices boil as they always have. One of the more vocal and intense assistant coaches you'll find, Hardwick will bark orders from the Altus girls basketball bench today when the Bulldogs play in the Class 5A state tournament in Tulsa.
She took the job about two years ago, roughly the same time doctors discovered she had ovarian cancer.
Things are actually not so quiet.
The Southside Scorcher
Hardwick grew up in Elmer, a town south of Altus that still has a thumping heartbeat despite consisting of little more than a country store, church and post office.
The oldest of four children, she abused the basketball goal hanging above the garage on her family's farm and honed a useful jumper that wore out goals for years to come. Hardwick remembers taking 18-20 shots per game in high school, when her average hovered in the 40-point range.
A sharp-shooting forward who rarely ever missed a free throw — and she attempted a lot of them in 6-on-6, which allowed a coach to at times pick who they wanted shooting charities
— she held the state's scoring record in a single state tournament with 117 points in three contests, which helped lead Southside, coached by Dub Woolbright, to a 32-0 state championship season.
The beacon of those three games was a 61-point outing against Canadian, in which Hardwick made 25 of 26 free throws. Her scoring stats have always swelled in part because she was so deadly at the foul line.
"You shoot that many free throws, your average is going to go up," said Hardwick. "Ridiculous, isn't it? But I could always make free throws. Now, that's my worst pet peeve (when players miss). There's a reason they call 'em free."
Hall of Fame girls coach Charlie Heatly, after getting stung by 55 points from Hardwick in the semifinals of his prestigious Lindsay All-Girls tournament, famously bet an opposing coach that Hardwick would drop 50 again in the finals — she scored nearly 60.
Hardwick's talent was something special. In modern day, it would've drawn the eyes of the Baylors, UConns or Tennessees of the women's basketball world.
In the 1970s, it caught the attention of The Flying Queens.
Wayland Baptist University in Plainview, Texas, made women's basketball popular two decades before Title IX, and almost 30 years before the NCAA started sponsoring the sport in 1982. Unbeknownst to many, the pride of Plainview, the Flying Queens, won a college basketball record 131 consecutive games from 1953-58.
The team's coach, Harley Redin, was in his last few years of coaching when he began recruiting Hardwick
— Oklahoma basketball's best scorer. She became a three-time All-American shooting guard while adapting to the 5-on-5 game, starting on two American Athletic Union (AAU) National Championship teams while playing for the Flying Queens.
"Those four years were probably some of the best of my life," Hardwick says now.
The Queens picked up the "Flying" tag because of their lavish traveling style. A local businessman name Claude Hutcherson provided three Beechcraft Bonanza planes — often flying one himself — to tote the Queens to games as far as Mexico and California. It was a foreign concept to colleges at the time, much less a luxury afforded to female athletes.
Hardwick recalled how Hutcherson had once struggled to land a plane in Orange County, California, before a series of West Coast games. He was hampered after taking a pain pill to ease a twisted ankle, and needed three tries to properly land the aircraft; it finally came to rest off the side of the runway with a clipped wing and its landing gear detached.
"They had to send another plane to get us," Hardwick said. "We weren't too fired up about getting on that plane again."
The doors WBU opened for Hardwick led to the world. Later, after hitting her game-winning shot in the 1971 Pan-American Games in Columbia, she rubbed elbows with teammate Pat Summitt while playing for the U.S. women's national team in the '73 World University Games in the Soviet Union.
"We all got to know her. She was probably the most famous one on there," Hardwick said of Summitt. "We were all together for about four, five weeks; we trained for a couple weeks together in Boston before flying to Moscow."
Summitt went on to make the Olympic team in 1976, then later built a dynasty at Tennessee and blazed her way into the Naismith Hall of Fame.
Hardwick settled into a nice coaching career, too, though not as flashy. She found a foothold at Navajo High School, where she won more than 500 games in 28 seasons and qualified for seven state tournaments. Not long after retiring in 2004, she embarked on a less-successful five-year stint as head women's coach at Western Oklahoma State College from 2004-09.
"I don't even know if I was.500 there; maybe .500. I was glad I did it, but finally just decided it was not my thing," said Hardwick, who after her time at Western headed into a stage of early retirement.
When a former Navajo player, Stacie Terbush, had an opportunity to take the Altus girls head-coaching job last season, Hardwick suddenly found herself doing the recruiting — this time trying to talk her pupil into accepting the position, which in a roundabout way would lead Hardwick back to basketball and into one of the biggest struggles of her life.
'Always a hollerer'
Bob Knight's stares have nothing on Janice Beach-Hardwick. She might give him a run for his money with her yell, too.
"I've always been a hollerer," Hardwick admits. "Some coaches can get things done and barely say a word. This is just how I've always done it."
Altus head coach Stacie Terbush experienced that playing for her at Navajo. In 1988, one year after reaching the state tournament, Terbush blew out her knee and spent her entire senior season next to Hardwick on the bench. She didn't say much, just watched and learned.
When Altus had an opening for a head varsity girls coach in 2013, Hardwick convinced an apprehensive Terbush to take the job, and even offered to be her assistant since it was Terbush's first high school headcoaching gig.
"She was the reason I got into coaching in the first place," said Terbush, whose words could be taken literally. "She forced me to do it."
There was little celebration a few months later, when the two were forced to confront something not even the best game plan could defeat.
In April 2013 doctors diagnosed Hardwick with Stage 3 ovarian cancer, which led to surgery and five months of chemotherapy, or six full treatments of what Hardwick calls "the hard stuff." She lost all her hair but continued working at school through all the energy-draining body aches and side-effects.
For awhile, she thought she had beat the disease.
"We thought it was pretty much all gone," Hardwick said. "But right before Christmas (of 2014) some of it came back. I've done three more treatments so far and will probably have to do a couple more."
Hardwick never slowed down. She yelled at players from the bench as if she was 30 years old. She kept working right along with the Bulldogs, who lost five straight games in January only to rebound and become the surprise team in this year's Class 5A girls state tournament field.
"She hasn't missed a beat," Terbush said.
Hardwick learned through chemo treatments that pain reaches its peak in the five days following a session, then by the time you rebound it's time to go back again. Her resiliency has been mirrored by a team that refused to give up on its season.
Altus' second-leading scorer Carsyn King has drawn the ire of coach Hardwick before. It isn't fun and it certainly isn't for everyone.
"But I've grown to love it," King said. "Even with a pop of a towel or hearing her yell from across the court, I couldn't ask for a better coach. She's helped shape me into the player I am today."
Hardwick admitted that, if she can't stay cancer-free, retirement might come earlier than she initially planned. But for now she's treating it like one of her high-scoring performances at Southside, or the game against Cuba when she had the ball in her hands with time winding down.
Quitting or slowing down was never an option then, and it isn't now.
"I'm not built that way," Hardwick said. "When I found out I had cancer it was l
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Information from: The Lawton Constitution, http://www.swoknews.com
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