By Doug Carroll

Oh, the places Ryneldi Becenti has been since she began dribbling a basketball as a 5-year-old girl on a dirt court on the Navajo Reservation.

She has been to cities and towns across the country. Sweden. Greece. The WNBA. Even the children's TV show "Sesame Street."

Along the way, she earned associate's and bachelor's degrees, played for her basketball idol and a U.S. national team, had her number retired twice, made a half-dozen halls of fame and was featured in Sports Illustrated magazine.

She proved herself to people who thought she was a boy, to others who peppered her with racial insults, to coaches who doubted she could handle good competition and to a father whose scrutiny of her ability was relentless.

She rallied the Native American population of Fort Defiance, Ariz., behind her play and she inspires Native children to this day, conducting free basketball camps for them and sharing her remarkable story.

The journey is uniquely hers, but Scottsdale Community College helped punch Becenti's ticket to a world beyond the reservation. Without the notice and guidance of SCC's Bike Medder, she might never have played after Window Rock High School, which she led to the Class 3A Arizona state championship in 1988.

"Bike took a chance on me when others didn't, and I ran with it," says Becenti, 51, who now lives in Shiprock, N.M.

Medder, then SCC's head coach for women's basketball, already had successfully recruited another Native player from Window Rock, Kim Ashley. He says he saw "a diamond in the rough" while watching Becenti at a tournament in Winslow. She was a 5-foot-7 point guard who was developing toughness to go with her skills, and her team won.

The challenges for her had begun in earnest when she was an eighth-grader playing in a tournament in Phoenix.

"I was a tomboy with short hair, and I had a flashy style of play," she says. "People were saying, 'Hey, that's a boy out there!' It upset me. After the game, my father said, 'Wipe away those tears. You be proud and hold your head up high. You're a Native woman and you're Navajo.'"

Learning the game at home

Raymond Becenti Sr. was an accountant for the Navajo Nation and the Window Rock school district. He knew basketball, and his only daughter of five children loved sitting with him to watch NBA games on TV, analyzing the play of point guards such as Magic Johnson and John Stockton.

Raymond and his wife, Eleanor, often played in Native tournaments and took little Ryneldi along.

"At a young age, I knew what a gym rat was," says Ryneldi, who also took note of the impact being made by African-American star Cheryl Miller on the women's game. She wanted to do the same for Native Americans.

The Becenti family's dirt court was home to shooting and ball-handling drills of all sorts. Raymond was "a Navajo Phil Jackson," his daughter says, referring to the cerebral coach of Michael Jordan and the Chicago Bulls. She was determined to make him proud.

"Basketball is an art, and you're always painting a picture," he would tell her as she lofted shots in the rain or jumped rope for conditioning. Words of praise were few, however, in the criticism he provided. He was hard to please.

Ryneldi was 13 when Eleanor died of an illness, and the girl was devastated by the loss of her mother.

"I had no motivation," she says. "My father told me to go to her gravesite and get my tears out. I was out there for hours. He told me, 'You can live your dream for your mom.'"

What Raymond Becenti had planted, Medder was prepared to grow. Players from the reservation often drew little interest from college coaches because they had faced mostly small-school competition and were regarded as untested. But Ryneldi was an unselfish, smart player who made her teammates better. She was different.

"I don't want you to just sit on the bench there," Raymond told Ryneldi before she left for SCC. "You go there and be the best point guard."

With Medder pushing her to succeed on the court and in the classroom, she delivered. She was a two-time NJCAA All-American for SCC, leading the Artichokes to 44 wins over two seasons and averaging 21 points per game as a sophomore. Opponents included future pros Sheryl Swoopes (of South Plains College) and Bridget Pettis (Central Arizona College).

"By far the best player I've ever coached," Medder says.

"He helped make sure I was focused," Becenti says. "I had to get better, faster and stronger. He knew I could go Division I, but I had to get my A.A. degree."

Turning things around at ASU

Indeed, NCAA Division I schools were interested, and Arizona State University benefited from being one of the first. The Sun Devils program was struggling, losing games and drawing few fans. Coach Maura McHugh convinced Becenti that she was the missing ingredient.

The Navajo Nation turned out, traveling in large numbers to Tempe to support Becenti at home games. Behind the new point guard, ASU went 20-9 in 1992 and made it into the NCAA Tournament for the first time in nine years.

McHugh tried to prepare Becenti for what she might hear on the road as a Native American student-athlete.

"She said, 'These fans will say harsh things to you.' At a game at Washington, I could hear it. I didn't say anything. But we won and they were all quiet. It made me strong mentally."

In her two seasons at ASU, Becenti averaged 7.1 assists per game — a Pac-12 Conference record until recently — and made the all-conference team twice. She graduated with a sociology degree and played in 1993 for the U.S. team at the World University Games in Buffalo, N.Y.

She went off to Sweden to play professional ball. But first there was a brief crisis of confidence at the airport in Phoenix. While awaiting her flight, she broke down and cried, telling her father that she was having second thoughts.

Perhaps she should just go home and be done with basketball.

Raymond would have none of it.

"He said, 'You're getting on this plane. This is what you wanted, to play professionally,'" Ryneldi says. "He told the stewardess, 'Don't let her get off the plane.' I flew to Dallas, then New York. When I got to Sweden, I told him thank you, that I was so grateful.

"I tell kids that sometimes you just need that push. My dad knew what he was doing."

Making history with Mercury

After playing in Sweden and then Greece, she received an invitation to a tryout in Orlando, Fla., for the WNBA, which was about to launch in 1997. She did well enough there against elite competition to sign as a free agent with the Phoenix Mercury, who would be coached in their first season by her idol, Cheryl Miller. She was a backup to starting point guard Michele Timms of Australia.

And that is how she came to be the first Native American to play in the WNBA.

"It was huge," Becenti says. "I was living dreams for kids."

However, when her father fell ill, she retired after one WNBA season and returned home to care for him. Before he died in 2005, the Navajo Phil Jackson told her he was proud of all that she had achieved.

SCC and ASU retired her uniform number, and she is in the Hall of Fame at both schools. She is friends with some of the biggest names in the women's game, including former Olympian and WNBA star Dawn Staley, now coach of defending NCAA champion South Carolina. She connected with Staley at last year's Women's Final Four.

That came shortly after "Sesame Street" had tracked her down. Initially, she thought the phone call was a prank.

"They were looking for Native athletes and they said my name kept coming up," Becenti says. "I was the first Native to be on there. I went to New York City for a week, and I met Elmo."

Oh, the places she has been.