The Setup

So who is Brenda Dean? How did she get created? What does she want from us? This involves the story of a wonderful game called Statis Pro Basketball.

I'll give you some background about the game itself. Back in the days before the personal computer reigned supreme, there were people who wanted to take their sports fandom to the next level - immersion. A company called Avalon Hill, which produced pencil, counter and dice wargames created a game called Statis Pro Basketball, a part of their Statis Pro line of products. (Statis Pro Baseball, Statis Pro Football, etc.)

Each player in the pro game would be represented by a card with a range of numbers for field goal shooting, fouling, etc. Instead of dice, something called a Fast Action Deck would move the game forward. Players would consult this deck of playing cards and look at the numbers on it if they wanted to pass to another player, make a shot, etc.

It was a game well adapted to solitare play. If you didn't have a friend, you just set whatever strategy made sense for the opposing team and had at it. It was probably the best of the sports based board games.

What happened to Statis Pro Basketball? Two things. First, there was a change in the system from "base eight" to "base ten". Without going into detail, this upset the purists, and other rules changes took a lot of the strategy out of the players' hands. Second, the death of the board game companies (including Avalon Hill) as the PC could do things a lot better and smarter than it could be done with boards and paper.

So why, Pet, are you resurrecting this tired old format? The answer is simple: PC games don't give me what I want.

What I want is women's basketball. The WNBA. Women's college hoops. The problem is that PC games cost money to create and are market creations. There are a lot more men's basketball fans than there are women's basketball fans, so the attitude of the computer gamers to fans of women's basketball is a big raised middle finger. If I want NBA Live 09, I can get it in a thousand places; if I want a similar version for the WNBA, I can get a handful of WNBA players from the Wii version of NBA Live 09. No teams. No leagues. No franchise mode. That's it.

I want more. And if I can't get what I want, I'll figure out a way to get it on my own.

Frisco del Rosario wrote about his experiences with Statis Pro Basketball, which sparked memories of an experience where I played out the entire season for the Golden State Warriors as a young adult (it was the 1987-88 season). I managed to get 40 wins out of the Warriors, namely because Ralph Sampson stayed healthy. So I thought could I do women's basketball with Statis Pro Basketball?

The answer was "yes". I could. As it turned out, there was a man named Phil Graham who loved SPB (which I'll call the game from now on) and had made his own cards. He not only had all of the WNBA sets which he had made himself, but he had a Fast Action Deck suited not only for WNBA play, but for college basketball play as well.

I wanted to avoid my dependence on Phil Graham's largess for the time being. I would create my own imaginary universe of players based on real life players - only the names would be changed. If the game didn't work right, I could simply say, "well, that's how basketball works in the imaginary universe". I would become the umpire of my little world: whatever I said happened, happened.

Why college basketball and not the pros? I happened to bump into an article written about "Pistol" Pete Maravich which stated that he averaged 40 points a game while playing for LSU. The hook was that one of his coaches had done a chart of his shot selection, and estimated that if the 3-point goal had been part of the rules when The Pistol was playing, he would have averaged 57 points a game.

Then the lightbulb went off: if there were a women's basketball player that averaged 57 points a game, could she lead her team automatically to the NCAA championship?

I had found a card-creating spreadsheet that, with a few tweaks, would print out entire card sets for any basketball team I wanted to put into the data. I could therefore follow the premise to its logical conclusion - create a player with Pistol Pete's stats, put that player on a college basketball team, and watch what happened.

There were some hurdles, obviously:

One was which team? If you put this Pistol-Pete-In-Drag player - which I decided to call "Brenda Dean" - onto a team, how do we know the team wouldn't have won without Maravich/Dean? Furthermore, if you put Maravich/Dean - I'll just refer to her as "Dean" from now on - on a crappy team, what's to keep Dean from being double and triple-teamed all game?

She had to go to a team that was not very good, but not abysmally bad. I decided on the team in the #226 position of the RPI Women's website at Real Time RPI.

Of course, I had to get a copy of this out-of-print game first. EBay solved that problem. About $40 later, I was in business. I just had to wait for the game to show up. So while I waited, I'd visit the RPI and see what kind of teams ended up in the #226 spot - the spot where the bottom 1/3 of women's basketball begins.

Each day, the team would change. Wright State. Lafayette. Northwestern Louisiana. Massachusetts. And on the day the game finally showed up at my door, the team was....University of Texas at El Paso.

Mighty UTEP. Hail Miners.

Brenda Dean was going to be a Miner. But there were other hurdles to overcome.