Sheri Dew: Living the unexpected life

On the day of tryouts, she reported to the Richards Building, opened the gym door a crack, peeked at the players inside and the confidence drained right out the bottom of her shoes. She couldn't make herself step through the door. She thought she could work up her courage if she paced the hallway outside the gym for a while. She walked back and forth — for three hours.

She never did enter the gym. When the tryout ended, she walked slowly to her dorm, castigating herself for not having the guts to try out.

"It's is one of my biggest regrets," she says. "I've never gotten over it."

One of her e-mail addresses says it all: hoopsdew.

Jump ahead to last autumn. BYU athletic director Elaine Michaelis, who coached the basketball team when Dew was a student, invited Dew to speak to the school's female athletes. Dew told the above story for the first time in her life, one she hadn't even confided to her family. Her point was that these athletes were doing something she had wanted to do, but lacked the courage to try.

Afterward, Michaelis told Dew, "I remember my 1971 team really well. You know why? We played all season one player short. I tried to fill my roster, and I couldn't. That year I was looking for a tall center who could post up."

Sitting in her office, Dew finishes this story and says, "I felt as if I had been kicked in the stomach when she told me that. That was supposed to be my spot on the team. You mean out of 25,000 students they couldn't find one girl who could fill that spot?!

"The truth is, nobody can take your place. That was a very interesting lesson. I thought I was good, but I'll never know. My fear and shyness paralyzed me. My whole life I've felt like I didn't quite measure up."

If there is one statement that defines Dew's life, it is that last one. It is a recurring theme and one she repeats frequently during several hours of interviews. Such feelings undoubtedly have their beginnings in her youth.

She grew up on a large farm in southwestern Kansas, where six generations of her family are buried on the Plains. She was driving farm equipment as soon as she could see over the steering wheel, which was the fourth grade in her case. She drove trucks loaded with grain during harvest and dragged a disc and sweep over the fields behind a tractor.

Dew grew up shy and backward and dated rarely. She was isolated in many ways — by her size, by the farm, by her religion. She reached her adult height by the seventh grade — "No 11-year-old girl wants to be 5-10," she says. "I always felt big and unattractive." Her religion was just one more thing that made her "different." She was the only Mormon in her school.