Quick Turnaround a Tough Trick for Silver Stars

How hard must it be for a team to be five games into a season and wondering if its season is over?

How hard must it be for veterans such as Shannon Johnson and Edna Campbell to be part of a franchise that brought in a bunch of new players and a new coach, but didn’t seem to give itself much of a chance to bond?

On the surface, the San Antonio Silver Stars look to be a mess, 1-5 coming off a 9-25 season, and again buried in the Western Conference cellar.

But while every WNBA team has had obstacles in trying to get ready for this season, the Silver Stars had some of the biggest.

Despite seven new players and a new coaching staff headed by Dan Hughes, the Silver Stars had only one exhibition game along with a scrimmage with the Chinese national team. And after their home opener -- in which they lost touted rookie guard Kendra Wecker to a season-ending knee injury -- they had a brutal early schedule of road games against Detroit, Sacramento, Seattle and Los Angeles.

“A lot of our chemistry is being established by playing games,” Hughes said this week. “We’ve basically either traveled and practiced or played. We’re not getting the kind of practice time this young team needs.”

Hughes, a former WNBA coach of the year who went to the playoffs three times in four years with Cleveland, has the unenviable task of keeping the Silver Stars competitive and interested while developing a cohesive roster. Then there’s the matter of fan interest. Silver Star faithful haven’t had much to cheer about since the franchise moved to San Antonio from Salt Lake City three years ago.

“It’s still early in the season and we’re coming from a situation where we haven’t been a dominatingly good basketball team,” Hughes said.

“We’re trying to play good basketball and getting people integrated into playing in a new system. The main problem so far has been lack of practice time.... We’ve got to grab some wins wherever they may be. But I also have to be smart about the evolution of the team, especially with a new system.

“Winning and losing will take care of itself when you start playing good basketball.”

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Some observations two weeks into the season:

* A couple of veterans are off to sizzling starts. Houston’s Sheryl Swoopes leads the league in scoring, averaging 25 points a game. The league record is 23.1, by Minnesota’s Katie Smith in 2001. A bigger surprise, however, is Taj McWilliams-Franklin. A career 12.2 scorer, the Connecticut forward is fourth in the league at 20.0 points.

* There is only one rookie among the top 30 scorers, and she wasn’t even drafted. Laurie Koehn, a 5-foot-8 guard from Kansas State who signed with Washington as a free agent, has averaged 10.5 in four games -- with a high of 15 points against the Sparks on May 26. A three-point specialist, she has made 12 of 23 three-point shots.

* No coach should be on the proverbial “hot seat” yet, but the chairs seem to be getting warm in Charlotte, New York and Phoenix -- all teams, coincidently or not, coached by women.

All three teams last year gave the reins to longtime assistants -- Trudi Lacey in Charlotte, Pat Coyle in New York and Carrie Graf in Phoenix. Only New York had reached the 2004 playoffs and the teams are a combined 3-11.

The WNBA is a league female coaches should aspire to, but there is concern that teams may again look primarily at men no matter what their experience.

The 2005 season began with five female coaches; Minnesota’s Suzie McConnell Serio and Seattle’s Anne Donovan are the others. If Lacey, Coyle and Graf, who are all in their second seasons, can’t rouse their teams in the coming weeks, how hard will their teams look to include other women in the job search?

More important, are two seasons enough to truly gauge their worth as coaches?

One thing is certain: Men usually get plenty of time to succeed or fail as coaches.

No one knows yet, at least on the pro level, if women will be given equal consideration.

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SPARKS TODAY at Sacramento, 1 p.m., Channel 7

Site -- Arco Arena.

Records -- Sparks 3-2, Monarchs 3-1.

Record vs. Monarchs (2004) -- 2-2.

Update -- The Sparks get their first look at the team that eliminated them in the first round of last year’s playoffs. And Sacramento, which jumped to a 3-0 record before losing in Indiana on Wednesday, has undergone a makeover. There are four rookies among seven new faces, including two from China. The notable one, however, is Nicole Powell, who replaced Tangela Smith when Smith was traded to Charlotte. Powell is averaging nine points a game. Tamecka Dixon had a career-best eight assists in the Sparks’ victory over San Antonio on Tuesday.

-- Mike Terry