Griner knows what they all want. It's what they always want.

"Yes, I can feel it," Griner said after her debut with a Dallas-Fort Worth-based team, DFW Elite, at the Basketball on the Bayou evaluation tournament. "They want to see me dunk."

Brittney Griner

And, yes, she'd like to oblige. But Sunday, for the most part, the fans who arrived with such hope all left draped with a tinge of disappointment. Griner gave them a taste, slamming several during warmups, including, on request from an opposing assistant coach, a two-handed flush. All were done without malice or fanfare, but with considerable ease - as if she'd done the deed many times before. Which she has.

There almost was a convergence of ball, hand and rim - courtesy of Brooklyn Pope, the 6-foot-1 forward out of Dallas who is ranked 13th by HoopGurlz in the 2008 class. She dunked - two hands, hanging off the rim - during warmups at this event last year. This time, she went at a defender with the ball cocked, but lost control, yet managed to pull the rim down, making it snap back to attention, as if in salute.

"The best would be if they both dunked in the same game," said DFW's marvelous point guard, Destini Hughes, relegated like the others to dunk-induced fandom. "Maybe Brooklyn would go up, miss and Brittney would be following and slam it back through." Hughes smiled widely. "I really wanted to set one up because I know it would excite the crowd - and the team," she said. "I was trying really hard to get a steal and maybe set up a breakaway."

Make no mistake, no matter how the nailed-to-the-floor, they-actually-play-basketball purists may cringe, this is where the girl's and women's game is going. Lisa Leslie and Candace Parker only started the female levitation act. The true elevator is Brittney Griner, a 6-feet-7-and-still-growing 16-year-old with two more years of high-school ball left to play, and she is going to take the game the rest of the way up.

Raymond Griner had a sniff of all this, 16 years ago, when his daughter was born at 10 pounds, 11 ounces and overran the measure on the scale.

"She was so long, and her feet were really narrow and long," Raymond Griner said. "I knew I had a big daughter."

Griner gets contact on nearly every shot

No one knows yet how big. While Griner was having partially torn ligaments in her right ankle examined about a month ago, her father had doctors x-ray her growth plates. The plates still are about a half inch apart, the elder Griner said, and she could grow to about 6-9 or 6-10 by the time she graduates from high school. Right now, she's all limbs, with arms that extend like a cast fishing line. Raymond Griner is only 6-2, but says a strain of height runs through the Griner bloodlines, including a pair of non-hooping nieces who are about 6-7.

Size alone doesn't tell the tale of Brittney Griner. Size, combined with how fluid an athlete she is, blows the mind. She can beat most guards down the floor, and often tries to. Griner once ripped a rebound off the glass against the Alabama RoadRunners, dribbled the length of the floor and, with the crowd practically begging for an aerial exhibition, delivered a layup because she had to factor in a change of direction. She is nimble, rather than forceful, around the basket and not yet strong enough in the lower body to hold her ground against leveraged defenders or in the upper body to battle the multiple defenders who hang off her arms like extra appendages. In an effort to address some of that, Raymond Griner has converted his dining room into a workout station for Brittney, complete with treadmill, stationary bicycle and other assorted exercise equipment.

Griner learned the game on the playgrounds, playing with boys, who were the ones who taught her how to dunk. "That's why she dunks like a boy," her father says. She didn't take up organized basketball until the ninth grade, when, based on potential, she immediately was promoted to the varsity team. Potential? During her sophomore year at Nimitz, Griner averaged 23 points, 11 rebounds and six blocks.

It was during that season that Raymond Griner learned of his daughter's dunking ways. A longtime Harris County Sheriff, he had to sleuth it out. He first was informed by one of his daughter's classmates, but Griner was noncommital when asked about it. He bought her a new rim and backboard, only to find the goal bent one day after work. "Britt, are you dunking?" he asked. She had been found out.

"I didn't want to tell him until I was good enough," Griner explained. "I didn't want to try dunking in front of him and mess up."

Griner and future Baylor teammate Odyssey
Sims, who is 5-7

Her relative inexperience in the game has rendered Griner somewhat of a hybrid player. Though she has the size and defensive presence of a post, her offensive game is more suited to power forward. She doesn't get low on her postups and doesn't seal out even smaller defenders, doesn't really know how to use contact or gain separation on the low boxes, and appears more comfortable shooting turnaround jumpers in the lane than trying to muscle point-blank layups. Because of the massive investment in time needed to teach footwork, moves and counters, Griner's future may indeed be at forward, where she can exploit her mobility and her unique perspective on passing lanes, put the ball on the deck once from the elbows and explode for scores, and make a living at the free-throw line.

Whatever the case, Griner is virtually certain to change the game. And, when women's basketball undergoes the Griner-induced explosion, Waco, Texas, will be Ground Zero. There, Griner will attend Baylor in the fall of 2009. She will be joined the next year by Sims, a 5-7 bolt of lightning, and perhaps she will be preceded by another DFW star, Pope, who is considered a Baylor lean, though she says Rutgers still is in the picture with Georgia a darkhorse. So Baylor will be loaded for the revolution.

Still, even as recently storied as coach Kim Mulkey's program has been, it will, in many ways, be a vessel for the transformation. As evidenced by the massive squeals any time anyone even contemplates a dunk during a girl's game, there is much pent-up demand for the manuever. In that way, Griner will belong to the game at large.

And, of course, always to Dad. Raymond Griner says he likes watching his daughter dunk a basketball, but the self-described "over-protective father" says it makes him nervous because he fears she will be injured.

"Everyone tells me that she's going to change the game," he said. "Anything she does, I will support. If it's time for women's basketball to move up like the men, I'm all for it."

He and every bobbing ponytail from Texas to Connecticut.

Brittney Griner

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