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Gaucho81 · Joined: 12 Jun 2002 Posts: 147 Location: Ventura, CA

I thought I would share an article written in the Santa Barbara News Press by John Zant, just prior to Kayte's last home game at UCSB.

Enjoy :D :lol: :!:

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RASING KAYTE

Life on the ranch made
UCSB's Christensen tough

2/24/02

By JOHN ZANT
NEWS-PRESS SENIOR WRITER

Alturas, population 3,300, sits on the Wind-scoured high plains of northeastern California. A sign along Highway 395 on the outskirts of town declares that it's "Where the West still lives."

Follow a country road a distance of 33 miles from Alturas, and you'll come to the 750-acre ranch where Kayte Christensen grew up.

That's where, without ever touching a basketball, Christensen developed the qualities that made her one of the all-time great players in UCSB history.

Her scoring and rebounding numbers -- even her career shooting percentage of .560, a school record -- do little to describe Christensen's impact on a basketball game. Nobody has counted the number of times she has flung herself to the floor in pursuit of a loose ball. Nobody has added up the miles she's run at top speed -- the only speed she knows – even though, as a 6-foot-3 post player in women's basketball, she could get by with less effort.

Here is a 20-second sequence from last Sunday's game at San Luis Obispo:

A Cal Poly player grabs a defensive rebound, holding the ball waist high. Suddenly, two other hands are on the ball. Christensen, on her knees, has reached in to tie it up. The possession arrow points to UCSB, giving the Gaucho women another scoring opportunity.

After they work the ball around, Christensen takes a shot from 10 feet. The ball clatters off the rim. Two Cal Poly players are in position for the rebound, but they fumble it. Christensen, following her shot, dives to the floor. She looks like an Olympic skeleton rider sliding face-first on her tummy, and she bats the ball off an opponent's shin and out of bounds, giving UCSB yet another possession.

"I've never seen anybody who plays as hard as Kayte Christensen," Gaucho coach Mark French said after a recent game. "She puts a phenomenal effort into every practice and every game. She's crazy. She's taken it beyond any other player I've coached. I couldn't imagine, when I was a player, getting cranked up like she does all the time."

Maybe that's what happens when you put a mustang in a corral with domesticated horses.

"I'm very different from everyone I've played with," Christensen said. "I don't know anybody on the team who's had a similar life. I think the way I grew up is the reason I play so hard, and I don't give up, and I'll play hurt." Not everybody who lives on a ranch is going to be adventurous, courageous and tenacious. Kayte, the third daughter of Cathy and Randy Christensen, seemed to be born with those attributes. She came into the world weighing nine pounds and decorated with bruises, her father said, after a difficult birth.

One of the family's favorite stories is told by her uncle Fletcher. He lifted her up on his saddle and rode out to herd cattle one day when she was 3 or 4 years old. When they came to a gate, her uncle got off to open it. He left Kayte up on the horse, hanging onto the saddle horn. The horse bolted out from under her, and she was tossed to the ground. "Kayte, are you OK?" her uncle asked worriedly. He'll never forget her reply: "I'm always going to be OK."

The time Kayte spent trying to irrigate acres of pasture all by herself at the age of 7 is another family legend. Her father was a part-time rancher -- he's had a job as a UPS driver for the past 16 years -- and one day he left the irrigation responsibilities in the hands of his daughters. Kayte's older sisters, Emily and Erin, decided to go swimming. She stayed out on the fields until after dark, getting soaked and muddy, furiously trying to plug up every groundhog hole with sod.

It's not surprising that Christensen, a classics major at UCSB, is drawn to the story of Hercules.

"It's fun to read," she said. "I like the 12 labors he had to go through."

Then there was the time Kayte rode a steer, for a few seconds, in a rodeo contest you get the idea. She grew up very hardy and rambunctious. By the time she got to Modoc High School in Alturas, she was tall, strong and athletic.

Mike Martin first noticed her in the classroom. He was a math teacher and football coach, and he also was going to start coaching the girls basketball team in Christensen's freshman year.

"She gave 100 percent effort in class," Martin said. "Then she came out for basketball. In a school of 300 kids, you don't expect to get somebody that good. She was wild and crazy in terms of controlling her body, but she was so competitive. It wasn't long before I brought her up to the varsity. I knew it was going to be a fantastic ride. She'd block shots on the perimeter, take it to the other end and score. The guys' coach and I just shook our heads. A 13-year-old doing that to 18-year-olds."

She could have compiled mega-numbers in high school, but Martin wouldn't let Modoc's Braves run up the score. They once led 29-0 after the first quarter, and Christensen had 27 points. She rode the bench after that. Her high game as a prep was 34 points.

Martin remembered leaving her in one game because she had carelessly committed four fouls. "I told her, Just foul out. Put me out of my misery." he said. "She played the rest of the way and got her only triple-double (points, rebounds and blocks)."

Christensen also played volleyball and ran track.

"She was all-league and MVP in every sport starting her freshman year," Martin said. "But she always was very humble. I don't know many people who have the confidence she needed to do so well, yet still stay humble. The way she was brought up has something to do with it. She's one of four kids, with a fifth kid whom they adopted her father's a blue-collar guy. I held practices at 5:45 a.m., and they'd have to leave home at 4:30 to make the drive through the snow. Randy would drop Kayte off and go to the UPS warehouse and sleep before he had to make his deliveries."

Eventually, the Christensens moved to a house in Alturas, which eased their hardships quite a bit.

Modoc won the state Division 5 girls basketball championship in Christensen's senior year. "Kayte sat on the bench and cried like a baby because it was her last game," Martin said. By then, she was committed to attend UCSB.

"Kayte always had big dreams," said Cathy Christensen, "and she always seemed to accomplish what she set out to do. Before she got to high school, she said, Mom, I want to go to a big university.' I said, You'd better get good grades.' She always did. Then she said, I am going to go on a basketball scholarship,' and it happened."

Gaucho assistant coaches Cori Close and Tony Newnan saw Christensen in a tournament at Oregon City, Ore., the summer after her junior year. Recruiters from several other colleges were already hot on her trail. UCSB took a patient and personal approach.

"Other schools would say, ‘People will see you on TV,' but that was not the kind of thing to impress Kayte," her mother said. "She wanted to be a good person."

"I didn't now anything about college basketball, the NCAA, the different leagues," Christensen said. "I made my decision based on the coaching philosophy at the school. Other schools were just recruiting me as a basketball player. At UCSB, they cared how I was going to turn out."

As far as her mother was concerned, she just didn't want the school to mess her up.

"Cori Close asked me, ‘What kind of person do you want your daughter to become?'" Cathy Christensen recalled, her voice cracking. "It still chokes me up. I said, I like her just the way she is now."

Five years later, Kayte is older, wiser and scarred somewhat, but she's still much the same person whenever she goes home to Alturas.

"My classroom is full of her pictures," Martin said. "Every business in town that follows our program has clippings, posters and pictures of Kayte all over the place. But when she comes back, she never brings up basketball. She never lets anything go to her head."

For the past two seasons, Christensen has written a diary for UCSB's athletic web site. Not once has she commented on her basketball achievements. She talks about her teammates as friends, not as players. Her diary consists mostly of poignant and humorous observations about college life.

It's up to the media to report on Christensen's 24 double-doubles, her 16-for-17 shooting night at Arizona, her All-Big West athletic and academic honors.

Her basketball career has not been smooth sailing all the way. As a sophomore, she broke her left wrist and had to sit out the last 16 games of the season. She looked at it as an opportunity.

"Not every player gets to see the game from that vantage point," her mother said. "She said, ‘I'm still part of the team. I'm just in a different role. The best thing I can do is help them on the sidelines.' It made her a wiser and better player."

Another problem that Christensen has encountered is foul trouble. She has fouled out of 15 games in her career, four this year.

"I'm going to have one or two a game when I'm not smart, and I foul somebody on a hustle play," she said. "I can try to control those. But I'm not going to change the speed and the aggressiveness of my game."

She'll play her last home game at 2 p.m. today when the UCSB women take on UC Irvine. Her parents, who have made the 750-mile trip to attend many games this year, will be there. Martin, her high school coach, was planning to attend.

It was outside the Events Center that Christensen's parents said their farewells to her in the fall of 1998 at the start of her freshman year at UCSB.

"We were starting to get choked up," Cathy Christensen said. "She was due at the track for a conditioning workout. She turned her back and sprinted off toward the track. Randy and I stood there thinking she might look back. She never did. Kayte never looks back."
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Skew--
I do have this in Word format and PDF format if you would like to add this to your Kayte site.