'Nova women boast a Rhodes Scholar in Wamala

Villanova women's basketball coach Harry Perretta couldn't help but needle forward Jessica Wamala when he put her into Sunday's basketball game against Lafayette.

"Can you stop thinking about stuff and go in the game for a minute?" Perretta remembers asking her.

Perretta has done a lot of things in his long career, but he'd never had the chance to tell a Rhodes Scholar to get in the game.

On Saturday, Wamala had been in New York, interviewing for the most prestigious postgraduate fellowship program in the world. By the end of the day, she found out she had made the cut and will be studying at Oxford University in England next year.

"It doesn't exclude me from sprints, unfortunately," the 5-foot-11 Wamala joked after practice on Monday, swigging from a Gatorade bottle and grabbing a Kleenex to blow her nose.

Perretta said he had told Wamala he would start her if it helped her in the interview process. Playing time is irrelevant, she told him. Which is kind of how he looks at her role on the team. A walk-on who tried out as a sophomore, Wamala received a scholarship this year.

"I just wanted her around the program as long as possible," Perretta said. "Why wouldn't you want somebody like that around? She doesn't play [much] and she's as valuable as anyone on the team. When you have intangible people like that, it's beyond belief how good it is."

It's hard to say what this means exactly, but it's interesting - Wamala is Villanova's third-ever Rhodes Scholar, and all three have been female athletes.

Wamala's resume away from basketball is gold-plated. She graduated magna cum laude last spring with degrees in political science, Arab and Islamic studies, and global interdisciplinary studies.

She has been a Rangel Scholar and a Truman Scholar. Last summer, she was a political intern at the U.S. embassy in Belgrade, Serbia. She worked the previous summer at the State Department. She was president of the Arabic Culture Club at Villanova. The foreign service is her career goal.

The first half of her Rhodes interview was spent defending her foreign policy views, getting questions such as, "Does Egypt have a chance?" and "What is the most important quality in a diplomat?"

To the latter question, Wamala replied, "accepting responsibility," and went on to elaborate.

Then she was asked about chess, and what she loves about it.

This question didn't come out of left field. Whether or not you want to say she was once a chess prodigy, the 22-year-old from Milford, N.H., was ranked fourth in the United States for females under 21 when she was just 14 years old.

"I talked about - even as a young girl, when I was only 12 or 13 - I just really loved making a strategy and coming up with a plan," Wamala said. "You have to study [chess] a lot. I studied up to eight hours at a time. I really, really enjoyed tactics. Coming up with a plan, targeting people. . . .

"As a little girl [then], I'm facing these people that are tremendously older than me. Being able to see that it looks like I'm sacrificing a knight or a rook - but I'm going to take your queen, instead."

Wamala said her face lit up talking about all this. A panelist tried to put her on the defensive, saying, "Wait, you just said being sincere and accepting responsibility is the most part of being a diplomat. But now you're telling me that you're deceptive?"

Wamala remembers telling the panel, "It's not what I'm saying at all. In order for diplomacy to work, you have to be willing to come to the table and want a mutually acceptable solution.

"But at the same time, you have to come with your own strategy - you have to come with a plan or you're going to leave empty-handed."

It's easy to see why she got the prize.

"She could be president some day," Perretta said. "It could happen. You know what I mean? She could be a senator.

"I told her, 'Don't forget me.' "

Wamala makes it clear she won't. What does she get out of having a full-time job on the basketball team?

"I think [the reason] why I do it every day has changed," Wamala said. "I had to make the decision to even try and join the team when I walked on in my sophomore year. . . . I was decent enough to walk on. I was recruited by Division II and Division III schools."

("She couldn't play a lick when she walked on the team," Perretta helpfully explained. "She worked her way up.")

"It doesn't matter how many minutes you play," Wamala said of being on Perretta's team. "You're part of a system that encourages you to always ask questions, to stand up for what you think is right, to make decisions quickly."

She was already a Perretta Scholar.

"You don't even have to talk to her, she just understands," her coach said.

@jensenoffcampus