Growing Into Role : Vanderbilt’s 6-10 Heidi Gillingham Is Comfortable Being the Tallest Player in Women’s Basketball

NASHVILLE, Tenn. —  It’s a frosty February morning on the Vanderbilt University campus.

Leafless American elms, sugar maples, poplars and Shumard oaks stand like frozen sentinels amid century-old brick buildings.

Heidi Gillingham strides along a walkway, on her way to a psychology class. Her brown hair, scarf and long coat trail along behind her.

Her smooth, long stride eats up concrete like no other woman can in college athletics, because Heidi Gillingham is unlike any other woman in college athletics.

She is 6 feet 10.

That’s in her basketball shoes.

In four-inch high heels, she quips, she’s “no more than 7 feet.”

She says her true height is just over 6-8.

*

Two years ago, Vanderbilt women’s Coach Jim Foster saw her standing next to a height scale, a piece of wall tape marked in inches up to 7 feet.

“Hold it, Heidi--stand up straight,” he said.

Foster looked closely. He was right. In basketball shoes, she was 6-10. He asked if the school could list her as such, and she consented. Big-time psychological advantage, Foster explained.

Fine, Gillingham must have thought at the time, I’m due for a psychological advantage.

This remarkable athlete--who plays with style and grace, runs the court with a rare smoothness and artfully blocks shots at a rate few in her sport have matched--is only now able to look down upon other earthlings . . . and be happy with her view of the world.

After all, she said, being 6-10 at 22 is a cakewalk compared with being 6-4 at 14. Heidi Gillingham could write a book about what that’s like.

“There were a lot of tears, growing up,” she said. “I used to look at myself in the mirror and cry. I’d say: ‘God, why are you doing this? What is going on?’ ”

*

Now, Gillingham is an All-American, almost certainly headed for a pro basketball career in Europe. She’s the tallest player in women’s college basketball, its best shot-blocker and certainly a star in Nashville, where the Vanderbilt women’s team is riding high.

Her stage is antiquated Memorial Gymnasium, a 1952 concrete-block structure that seats 15,300, where the Vanderbilt women’s team averages about 5,000 a game, compared with the men’s average crowd of about 14,000.

Gillingham’s team is 18-6 this season and was 30-3 in 1992-93, when the Commodores reached the women’s final four.

In the low post, she has a smooth turnaround jump shot, with a high release. In a recent 84-82 loss to Tennessee before 12,645 at Nashville, 645, another prominent post player, Tennessee’s 6-6 Vonda Ward, never came close to blocking it.

Gillingham, in early foul trouble, had a so-so game, playing only 24 minutes and scoring 14 points with one rebound.

But even on an off night, her athleticism is apparent. When her teammates shoot free throws, she plays back, like a free safety. With her quickness and great reach, few dare to break for the basket.

On offense, she’s often knocked around by players who are shorter, fronting her and employing a low center of gravity to back her up, sometimes to directly under the basket, while contesting passes to her.

“That’s supposed to be against the rules,” Foster said.

*

Gillingham is a big woman from a little farm town.

Home is still a 75-acre farm in Poth, Tex., about 30 miles southeast of San Antonio.

Her mother, Janet, is 5-8. Her father, Kent, who died in a small-plane crash last September, was 6-6. Her little sister, Gwen, is a 6-7 sophomore who plays for North Carolina. An older sister, Heather, is 6 feet and works in the fashion industry in New York. And older brother Greg, who played football at Rice, is 6-6.

Janet Gillingham remembers Heidi standing before the mirror a decade ago, crying.

“She does enjoy being tall now, but back then, when she was 6-4 as a 14-year-old . . . well, it was difficult for her.

“Her father would tell her: ‘Don’t worry, you know you won’t be taller than me.’ But she did become taller than Kent, of course.

“A lot of it was tied to the fact that some day she’d want to look for a husband, and would any man be interested? That was involved in it. Now, she knows God has someone for her someplace, when she needs that person.”

Heidi hopes so.

“When my sister (6-7 Gwen) was being recruited by Vanderbilt, I was a sophomore here,” she said.

“When she made her visit to Vanderbilt, I told her: ‘Look, you’re going to have to go someplace else. There just aren’t enough tall men here to go around.’

“I was dating a 6-8 guy here when I was a freshman, but he transferred to Penn State . . . but not because of me.

“Socially, being this tall isn’t that great. It’s been so long since I’ve had a real date. “I have a lot of short-guy friends, but that’s different. Overall, I feel my height is a (positive) attribute. My friends accept me and that’s important to me.”

Time grows short when you’re a 6-10 woman, said Gillingham, who is majoring in psychology and has a 3.2 grade-point average.

“It really impacts on my school time,” she added.

“There are a lot of media demands on my time. If I was a 5-8 basketball player, there wouldn’t be half the interviews, because I’m not that great (as a player). It’s because I’m tall, and there’s some sensationalism to a lot of it.

“But I’m on Earth to serve God, so if my time is divided up a lot, I just deal with the interruptions.”

Extra-tall boys were in short supply at Poth High, too. Once, the Gillingham sisters decided to make a statement.

“No one asked us to go to the prom one year, so we decided to go together,” she said.

“It was a spur-of-the-moment kind of thing. We had a ball. We showed people that night it was fun to be tall.”

It hasn’t always been that way, of course.

“It was very hard for Heidi when she was a young teen-ager, and all her friends and cousins began going out on dates and no one asked her out,” Janet Gillingham said.

In a space of 13 months, starting when Heidi was 13, she grew from 6 feet to 6-4, her mother said.

Last fall, Gillingham was elected homecoming queen at Vanderbilt.

“I hesitated before filling out the nominating form,” she said. “I decided it would enable me to make a statement to the whole country . . . that it’s OK to be different. I knew there would be a lot of media there, so I did it.

“I loved it, the whole experience. Luckily, my sister (Heather) in New York had ordered a nice outfit for me without even knowing about homecoming. It was a long crushed black velvet palazzo pants outfit with a vest.

“I think, when I was on the stadium field that day, everything came together for me.

“When I was out there, I remembered being a skinny, 12-year-old, looking in the mirror . . . So you learn to live and learn. Great height evokes strength and independence, I decided. “And for a woman to be this tall--it’s really a challenge, every day. No one can understand what it’s like to be this tall.

“The result is, I’ve become a strong person. Strength comes from being tested.”

She was asked if she’d ever met a taller woman.

“I met Anne Donovan (a 6-8 former U.S. Olympian) once, but I’d probably inch her out,” she said.

Strength and independence. That’s pretty much what Vanderbilt women’s basketball has acquired since Gillingham arrived.

In her senior year, she narrowed her choices to Vanderbilt, Rice, Stanford, Duke and Colorado.

The year Gillingham arrived, Vanderbilt drew an average of about 1,400 for women’s games. Now, it’s up by more than 3,600. Last season, the Vanderbilt-Tennessee game drew 15,317.

What comes next?

“I’d like to go to graduate school,” she said. “I’d like to be a counselor in a Christian environment some day, maybe with a ministry.”

Don’t look for her in Atlanta in 1996.

“I’m really not interested in the Olympics,” she said. “Most of my experiences with USA Basketball haven’t been happy ones. The only one I really liked was Pete Newell’s big player’s camp (where women must be at least 6-4 to be invited).

“I was never mentally prepared for those training camps--they’re very physical. I guess my college season takes a lot out of me.

“I would like to try playing pro ball in Europe, though. That appeals to me.”

Foster said Gillingham has perfectionist leanings, which put her in deep funks when she doesn’t play well.

“She really gets down on herself, and I keep telling her she shouldn’t equate basketball with perfectionism,” her coach said.

“I point out to her that the Hall of Fame is filled with players who missed half their shots.”

Said Gillingham: “I understand what Coach is saying, but I don’t know if there’s a way to correct that problem.”

There have been times, she said, when she considered quitting basketball.

“In my sophomore year, I felt like I was playing only because of my height,” she said. “I kept wondering what else I could be doing if I wasn’t this tall.”

Rod Williamson, Vanderbilt’s sports information director for women’s basketball, has a favorite Gillingham perfectionism story.

“I showed her a story an out-of-town writer had done on her, after an interview here with her.

“She started wincing and acting upset when she read it. She was really upset. When I asked her what was wrong, she said: ‘I used the wrong tense for a verb!’ ”

Ten Tall Reasons

For a recent feature, the Nashville Tennessean newspaper asked 6-10 Heidi Gillingham to write a Dave Letterman-style top-10 list of reasons why it’s great to be a really tall woman.

Her list:

10. It doesn’t matter if my barrette doesn’t match.

9. I save money shopping for clothes and shoes. Nothing fits!

8. I can store stuff on top of cabinets.

7. I never need a shower cap.

6. I can swat flies on the ceiling...with my hand.

5. I don’t need stirrups to mount a horse.

4. When trapped in packed elevators, I can breathe the only fresh air left.

3. I don’t have to climb sycamore trees at parades.

2. I have great access to airborne bridal bouquets.

1. ‘Cause that’s just how God made me!