Sara Sampsell-Jones is Pretty Darn Cool...

Wednesday, 29 February 2012 02:00

Sara Sampsell-Jones is a lawyer and a former scrappy little point guard at Edina HS and later, albeit briefly, at Dartmouth. She still has several college sweatshirts and she wears them often, albeit one at a time. Her husband Ted, who went to Yale and thus refuses to wear his wife's sweatshirts, is really, really fixated, albeit not in a sick way, on women's basketball, especially on the collegiate level, though he's really into the WNBA, too, and was totally stoked when Maya Moore signed with the Lynx. Since 2002, Ted and Sara have co-authored "Women's Hoops Blog" (LINK) which features a totally cool cutline: "Inane commentary on a game that deserves far better." It is arguably the most read women's basketball blog in the U.S. (Ted and Sara have since turned over the Blog's editorial reins to people who have more time to devote to the site.)

How cool is all that!

Because she's not real tall, Sara can't dunk. But don't underestimate her. She's quick and her crossover dribble is deft and blurry-fast. She can take you to the hole in a blink. She prefers Caribou (Breakfast Blend) to Dunn Bros., pancakes over French toast and Ricky Rubio over Steve Nash. She doesn't play hoops as much as she used to. That lawyering thing gets in the way, as does the fact that she is raising one or two excrutiatingly cute children....

But the biggest reason for her absence from the hardcourt is that she has become a triathlete, and a pretty goshdanged good one, at that! She's entering her third full season of racing and we believe that 2012 will be a breakout year for her and her sister, Laura, who looks a lot like her sibling--it's a genetic thing--and is similarly talented.

Here's what Sara has accomplished in her first two multisport seasons:

2011 HIGHLIGHTS:

- 3^rd @ One Last Tri

- 4^th @ Mpls Citizens

- 18^th @ Buffalo Olympic

2010 HIGHLIGHTS:

- 9th @ Square Lake Sprint

- 15th @ Lakes Country