The stands in the Ben Light Gymnasium aren’t filled, so when Erika Steele yells, her shouts ring and bounce back on the court, where they hang without the weight of a crowd to contain them.

“Let’s go. Let’s GO!”

Her hands are glued to her opponent, always on a jersey or an arm, but her eyes never leave the ball. A SUNY-Oneonta point guard is stuck at the top of the court with a dead ball, and the girl that Steele is guarding looks as if she wants to be anywhere other than at the top of the key, blocked by a mess of arms and elbows she’s surprised to find move more quickly than her own.

But offensively Steele’s shots won’t fall — from the arc, from 12 feet down the baseline or right below the hoop. It’s an off night, and when she gets back to the bench she smoothes down stray brown wisps of hair, leaving her hands on her head. She gets up at a timeout and walks through a play with the center that’s in the game, giving her a playful shove as she walks back on the floor.

After her team loses by a basket in the last seven seconds of the Feb. 5 game, Steele is in the hallway of the Hill Center, hand on her hip, phone on her ear, talking with her father, Dave, who had spent almost two hours listening to the game online.

They talk out her stats: two points, two rebounds and a steal in 16 minutes on the floor. A bit of a slump, she said, compared to her 20-point performance against the same team last season. A slump that includes four double-doubles, six games with 10 or more rebounds and 14 games with 10 or more points. But a slump nonetheless.

The best centers in basketball have two distinct advantages on the floor: weight to gain position and height to do something with it. Steele is one of them, boasting the program’s first 20-point, 20-rebound game in 25 years last season against Utica; a career-high 26 points in a sophomore season game against the Rochester Institute of Technology; and 24 points and 11 rebounds last Friday against St. John Fisher.

But the senior starting center is not like some who have come before her: Lauri Hancock ’90, Margo McGowan ’98, Jill Post ’06. Natural post players. ‘Girth’ and weight are not things the 6-foot Steele has to her advantage. She is “scrawny,” a glider, not the bang-’em-up low post player most coaches look for.

“I started as a point guard handling the ball, and as I grew I moved to the wing, then finally down low,” she said. “I wasn’t a big girl, and I didn’t get rid of my outside game. New coaches didn’t know what to expect from me — I wasn’t going to throw bodies around.”

What Steele does have is speed, a quickness on her feet that lets her keep pace with the point guards and slip by her defenders before they get good position. What other players have in bulk to push to the basket, Steele has in a length she extends around, under, over the top, or sometimes, in two directions with the same fluid movement. What other players have in muscle, Steele has in agility to start low and finish up top.

When she drops, feet planted and knees over ankles to anticipate a rebound, she extends her arms backward to seal her opponents away from the basket, one hand on their hip and the other across their arm. Without weight to conceal them, her elbows and knees are the main points of contact. They form strategic but visibly uncomfortable angles —  especially for the players who try to move around them.

It’s exactly what Head Coach Dan Raymond saw when he went to see her finish out her high school career in Hopkinton, Mass. — the starting point of the Boston Marathon, 26.3 miles Southwest of Boston.

“She would fit into places and do things offensively, reach around or reach through people,” he would say later about watching her play.

It’s a style that made her one of the biggest threats in Central Massachusetts’ Tri-Valley League during Steele’s last two years of high school, when the competition abandoned defensive strategy and just tried to stop her. It wasn’t a match up against the Hopkinton Hillers. It was a match up against Steele and her team.

The advantage of growing up in a small town — a basketball town — was her access to the game: a connection to her teammates, lifetime coaches and older girls, high school players, she admired. There were tournaments and pick-up games in the driveway, but the summer “Bliss Camp,” named aptly for the high school varsity coach, was where egos were thrown on the line, confidence was built and respect was earned. Before there were thoughts of the NCAA there were drills, endless free throws and sprints, a 40-year-old hardwood floor and a coach who liked to push players he knew had potential.

Steele was one of them. Through Bliss Camp and the three years he taught her in middle school P.E., he knew he had a player that could unite his team off the floor while leading them to another state championship on it.

“She was easy to spot — because of her height — [but it was also] her passion to want to learn and to play basketball,” Bliss said.

And play she did. When the Hillers entered tournament play her freshman year, Steele, the leading scorer and rebounder on the junior varsity squad, was recruited as an extra body for varsity. For four games she saw more of the bench than the court, but in the 2001 Division IV-State Championship game she finally got her chance, checking in at the table at the end of a second-half blowout over Manchester, Mass. She bounced onto the old Boston Garden’s parquet floor with at least a hundred hometown fans cheering her name. With less height, less confidence and even less muscle, she got open under the hoop and put up the ball. It went through. Four minutes later the Hillers clinched the title and she was stuck in a pile of 15 screaming girls, sprawled across the Boston Celtics mascot painted across the tip-off circle, arms linked and kissing the floor.

It was only the beginning to Steele’s high school career, which she finished in the top-five list of scorers and as the third-highest rebounder in Hopkinton High School history.

Academics were the top priority in her college search, but thoughts of playing Division III basketball became more of a reality as coaches, including Raymond, began to scout her AAU and high school games. When Steele stepped on Ithaca’s campus she “got that feeling,” but it was the team that solidified her decision.

“I thought, ‘I can see these girls as my teammates, I want these girls to be my friends,’” Steele said.

So Steele came, six hours and 320 miles, to become a Bomber, but her respect for the game and the way she worked the court stayed the same. She played 16 games as a freshman, and during her sophomore season she was the leading scorer off the bench and second in blocked shots.

At the start of her junior season, after the departure of Jill Post ’06 and Meg Micho ’06, she sat with Raymond in preseason meetings and asked him not to start her — unless she deserved it.

“I said, ‘I want you to start me because I earn it, not because I’m the next girl in line,’” she said.

The result was not only a starting spot in 20 of the team’s 28 games, but a handful of impressive statistics to go with it. She led the team in nearly all stats, excluding points, with 7.9 rebounds per game, a .488 field-goal percentage and 53 blocked shots. She scored double figures in the last 15 games of the season. The Empire 8 named her Player of the Week after she notched averages of 20.5 points, 18.5 rebounds and four blocks per game in the Empire 8 championship tournament. She had a tournament record 37 rebounds in two games and closed the season with six double-double performances.

Going into tomorrow’s game she leads the seniors — and the team — in career points with 754; in rebounds with 487; blocks with 110.

In a perfect sports story, Steele could talk about her numbers and her statistics and consistently match them with her playing. She’d walk back through her 55th block or recreate the shot that marked her 700th point with her arms.

But hers is not a perfect sports story. Its one about passion, persistence and standing behind what she calls the most important part of the game besides the ball itself: her team.

The real story is that in four weeks or sooner those days will be over — but Steele doesn’t talk about it.

“We come together and talk for a second … little things, comments we make to each other, like ‘Four games left,’ you know, ‘Play like its your last, give it everything you’ve got,’” said Molly Friel, the second half of the Bombers’ post duo. “It’s to motivate each other to make sure we’re working hard and don’t have any regrets at the end of it.”

But what senior Brynn Fessette said Steele will miss most is the girls, the bus rides, the day-to-day responsibilities of being on a team. Enter the “Fab Four” — the seniors who, as freshmen, found an immediate connection that made them inseparable.

The four stand facing the flag in the Ben Light Gymnasium, holding hands while the national anthem plays: Kali Carnovale, the “rock star”; Friel, the “quiet one”; Fessette, the “social butterfly”; Steele, the “goofy, goony” girl.

“You know Kali … she’s the tough cookie, but she’s the most loveable, quirky girl. Then Molly, she’s kind of quiet out there on the court, but if you get her in a room by herself you’ll have one of the best conversations you’ll ever have in your life. Brynn is … always bringing people together. And me, I guess I’m that goofy girl who likes to have fun, keep the atmosphere light.”

The group disagrees on how the name started, but where they agree is that the name — and how it connects them on the court — never stopped.

“When we got in the game it was almost at once, we just clicked,” Friel said. “From then until now, when I play with Erika and she plays with me, we read each other. We know where everyone’s going to be. … Its [like that for] all four of us.”

You can see it on the court, if you look. There’s a certain way Steele approaches Fessette as they warm up before the second half of last Friday’s contest, still feeling out a less-than-capacity Alfred field house. They stand behind one another in a right-handed lay up drill, swinging arms and rolling necks to shake off a first half they were trailing. Fessette is first. Steele follows, and as she jogs to half court Fessette claps. Steele claps twice. They touch the floor. And so it goes. Their high-fives are longer, their conversations shorter. They steal glances at the clock as if it’s counting down to the last second they’ll ever step on the court wearing blue and gold.

The pair and Friel jog back onto the court side by side at the start of the second half of the same Alfred game. They’re all side by side on the bench six minutes later. One, two, three post players rotate into Steele’s spot to try to overcome a five-point deficit. And they do. It’s a 2008-09 season preview eight months too early, played out in front of a senior whose four years are ending too soon.

Elissa Klie was one of the first, and the way the freshman moved around the court could almost mark her as a young Steele — the thin frame, the advantage of speed, the way she used her arms to defend opponents and steal the ball.

“She gives me a lot of confidence and that means so much — and playing with confidence is something that she’s always stressing,” Klie said. “She tells me ‘Be strong’ and it really works. The fact that she tells me she believes in me and stuff. It helps a lot.”

When Klie — or any other player, really — is in the game, Steele never stops watching the court. There’s an intensity on her face when she follows the game, the ball, as she shouts out encouragement, “help side,” from the bench. When Raymond calls a timeout, sighing with his hands folded on top of his head, Steele runs out to meet each player as they come off of the court, the first to give a tap on the back or toss their hair as they run by her.

The Bombers won against Alfred, but it was another off night for Steele. She walks out of the locker room on the phone again, throwing her blue and gold bag on the floor and turns out of sight, around the corner, wiping sweat off of her forehead. She had a game in less than 24 hours, and the frustration with her performance was building.

Until Steele faced what she calls the “Fisher Factor.”

“It’s a just feeling you have – you don’t hate the girls, but it’s a pretty deep rivalry,” she said. “ As a senior you’re not guaranteed to see them again, and to go 2–0 on their home court, on their senior night, is something I had to do for myself and the girls. Not to be cliché, but I just left it all on the floor.”

It clicks. Steele explodes. Eighteen hours after she posted some of her lowest statistics of the season, she leads the Bombers to a 83–57 win against St. John Fisher with a 24 points and 11 rebounds.

This is the kind of Steele the Bombers are used to; the kind of Steele whose palm stretches across the leather of an Alfred ball and shoves it straight back into the shooter’s chest, pushing her down to the floor where the player takes a seat, stunned. It’s the kind of Steele that, with a new and bigger rivalry at stake against Stevens tomorrow night, should be ready to close the season with a bang. But most of all, it’s the kind of Steele that just wants to win for (almost) the last time, next to the Fab Four, surrounded by her team on the last court she’ll call home.

After her name is called with the starting lineup, she’ll greet the other starters with a leaping jump, an NFL-style chest bump as they run through the tunnel of hands and arms the team weaves onto the court.

“It’s passion — no matter what happens off the floor, the ball always bounces back, it never lets me down,” Steele said. “The consistency [of that] ... and the team, that keeps me coming back.”