Grentz, 56, cashing in on about 35 years of perspective since that day, joked that what they should have been worried about was all the running their coach, Cathy Rush, had penciled into the day's schedule.

What they noticed instead was that Rush, with Army-like precision, had allotted practice time - very little if Grentz remembers correctly - for "water."

"When we saw that practice plan, we were laughing," said Grentz, who starred for Rush on three straight national championship teams, from 1972 to '74.

"To think she even knew when we would get a drink of water," Grentz said. "Everything was timed."

She added: "Cathy was ahead of her time."

Today is Rush's time.

Rush will join six other inductees - Adrian Dantley, Patrick Ewing, Hakeem Olajuwon, Dick Vitale, William Davidson and Pat Riley - as part of the Basketball Hall of Fame's Class of 2008, to be enshrined tonight in Springfield, Mass.

Rush, 61, who coached Immaculata College (now University) from 1972 to '77, was a five-time finalist for the honor before gaining entry this year.

"It's a culminating dream for anyone who coached or played," Rush said.

Her story is atypical of Hall of Famers, as she coached the Mighty Macs for only six seasons before stepping aside to raise a family and run the company she founded, Future Stars Camps.

Rush said she was aware that the Hall usually considered coaches with 25-plus seasons of experience, but her remarkable stint at Immaculata - which included a 149-15 record, six straight Final Four appearances, and three AIAW national championships - coupled with her unique place in women's basketball history, made her a viable candidate.

Rush, a graduate of Oakcrest High School in Mays Landing, N.J., grew up a self-described "tomboy" who played basketball, football and baseball with the neighborhood boys, including two of her cousins.

Basketball, though, was her favorite sport.

"My cousin lived two houses down and had a hoop on his garage," Rush said. "We would play HORSE, one-on-one, two-on-two, three-on-three. It was one of the few hoops in the neighborhood."

Even when all the boys had gone home, Rush kept playing.

"My poor aunt and uncle could hear that basketball bouncing day and night," she said.

Rush attended West Chester University (Class of '68), where she played basketball.

A "fluke" was what Rush deemed her eventual landing at Immaculata.

She married NBA referee Ed Rush, who came home one night with news of a coaching opening. At the time, she was teaching junior high in Malvern.

"I was really a 1960s woman," Rush said with a laugh. "I was going to work for three years and not work again. I looked at it as a way for me to stay involved in athletics even after we started a family."

At the time, around Philadelphia, especially in the Philadelphia Catholic League, a crop of young, talented female basketball players, including Grentz, was unwilling to abandon the sport the players had grown to love.

Unbeknownst to one another, a handful of these talented players enrolled at Immaculata in hopes of earning a degree and playing hoops.

"I didn't go there thinking, 'Oh, I'll be able to play with this person or that person,' " said Denise Conway-Crawford, who graduated from Archbishop Prendergast High School in Drexel Hill.

"My expectation was to be able to continue playing a game I loved," she said. "We were all just players who loved the game, and Cathy wasn't looking for a high-profile coaching job. Cathy was looking to coach a team and a sport she loved."

Rush remembers the first day of practice at Immaculata. Through no recruiting effort of her own - Title IX had yet to equalize college athletics - she found herself in charge of a gym filled with talented players.

"I came home that first day and said to Ed, 'Wow, they're really good,' " Rush said.

During her tenure, Rush coached Grentz, who went on to a stellar coaching career at Rutgers, including a national championship, and Illinois. She now works as an administrator at Immaculata. Also on that team were Marianne Stanley, who is an assistant coach with the WNBA's Los Angeles Sparks, and Rene Portland, who coached Penn State for 27 seasons.

Rush's reach, like a game of six degrees of separation, touches all of women's basketball.

"You take anybody who is anybody in the women's game and somewhere along the line you can trace a connection back to Cathy," Stanley said. "She has influenced a lot of people who have loved this game."

At a time when women's college athletics were little more than recreational sports, Rush ran her program like a maverick: Her teams pressed, ran the fastbreak, and had two-a-days during Christmas break.

"She was a pioneer," Stanley said.

Said Grentz, "Cathy had ideas. She ran practice the way men run practice, and she was the first to do it. She was not a screamer, she did not holler, but don't get me wrong, she was intense."

Intense enough, it seems, to wait with arms crossed and foot tapping while her players scampered for water during their designated break.