By Jim H. Smith

Power. Heart. Beauty.

Those words, and the corresponding images that serve as a doorplate for the Web site of Swin Cash ’02 (CLAS), www.swincash.com, are far more than a description of the estimable gifts of one of UConn’s greatest student-athletes.

They are nothing less than the essence of who she is. Though basketball has been the most dramatic showcase for those attributes, it would be a mistake to view Cash — whose given name, Swintayla, means “astounding woman” — one dimensionally.

Cash’s Internet presence begins with basketball because it’s the way she’s best known.

But it also embraces Swin Cash Enterprises, the business activities in which she is currently engaged, such as the line of fashions she has helped to design for herself, her budding career in broadcasting and those ventures she dreams of pursuing in the future that will last far beyond her storied basketball career.

There is also Cash for Kids, the charitable arm of her nascent empire, through which she is paying back the debt she owes to those who helped her rise above humble beginnings in a broken home in rust-belt McKeesport, Pa., a suburb of Pittsburgh.

Understanding how those ventures are interrelated and what they mean to Cash requires a little historic perspective.

“I was just a little girl when I started playing basketball at the playground near where we lived,” Cash recalls.

“My mom played basketball. She was a coach at high school. Everyone in my family was into sports. So it was natural that I would get into it.”

By 1993, just before she entered high school, she was playing in a varsity summer league and met Tamika Williams ’02 (CLAS) who later would become her teammate at UConn.

That same year, Cash played in the AAU National Championships and discovered just how gifted she was.

“I was doing things that should have been hard,” Cash remembers. “They were hard for some of the other girls. But they were easy for me. I was playing really dominant basketball.”

For the first time, people outside her family and friends in McKeesport began to take notice. There was talk of scholarships.

“There was something unique about her even then,” says UConn women’s head coach Geno Auriemma, who noticed his future star forward for the first time that summer.

“I could see right away. . .she had a swagger, this tremendous pride in herself and her family.”

That year, when she was 14, basketball took on a whole new meaning for Cash.

Although she was a versatile athlete — she participated in baseball, soccer, track and gymnastics — she also had other interests, such as drama club and student government.

Swin Cash, reading with children in Detroit, has established her own charitable organization to benefit children, called Cash for Kids.

Photo by Allen Einstein, NBAE/Getty Images

Many of those interests took a backseat when people who could help to change her life began to take Cash seriously as a basketball player.

“When you’re a poor kid growing up in a place like McKeesport,” she says bluntly, “and you can play basketball well enough to get a good education, you can’t afford not to give that your attention.”

So Cash dedicated herself to the sport that has consumed much of her energy for the last 15 years.

Always a good student, she divided her time primarily between her studies and refining her athletic skills, turning natural athletic gifts into the arsenal of abilities that would eventually earn her a UConn scholarship.

Along the way, Cash says her mother instilled in her the idea that she should be versatile and not accept just what society expects.

Heeding her mother’s advice, Cash began thinking about her life after basketball while she was still in Storrs.

When she graduated from UConn in 2002, she was already on her way to becoming, as Auriemma puts it, “a conglomerate.”

Cash works with the WNBA to support programs and organizations that help disadvantaged kids succeed, such as Cash for Kids, which receives proceeds from her line of clothing.

It is a mission she embraces enthusiastically, a way to give something back and keep her feet on the ground.

“The proudest moment of my life,” says the only woman who has won two NCAA championships, an Olympic gold medal, and two WNBA championships with the Detroit Shock, “was when I graduated from UConn and started my charity, Cash for Kids.”

“Nothing about Swin’s success surprises me,” says Rebecca Lobo ’95 (CLAS), a member of the UConn Board of Trustees, who became the first of Auriemma’s former players to move into television.

“She always had a lot of irons in the fire.”

Ruth Riley and Swin Cash celebrating the WNBA Championship with their Detroit Shock teammates.

Photo by Jesse D. Garrabrant, NBAE/Getty Images

Though Cash was the Shock’s leading scorer in her rookie season, the team posted a dismal 9-23.

In the off-season, she made an important decision. Rather than traveling to Europe to play basketball as other players do, she stayed in Detroit.

She trained aggressively, preparing for the next season, when the Shock would live up to its name, winning the WNBA championship.

She also used the time to work with the Shock’s creative team to set the stage for her future business.

“Many people said, ‘You’re missing out on a lot of extra money by not playing overseas,’ ” Cash explains, “but that wasn’t what I wanted.

There are sacrifices you have to make sometimes if you want to advance in the long run.

The Shock organization has really helped me to see my vision for myself and take the steps for tomorrow.”

Clearly, Cash had been taking those steps for some time.

Being self-confident, she will tell you, means being confident enough to heed to the advice of others.

When she was reunited last December with some of her former Husky teammates, she was celebrated as one of the inaugural group of 10 former UConn All-Americans whose careers are remembered on a wall in Gampel Pavilion recognizing “Huskies of Honor” (Around UConn: Honoring Husky Hoops).

It was another addition to a stellar resume that includes an appearance in the 2006 film Bring It On: All or Nothing and selection by ESPN as the first active WNBA player to serve as an analyst for NBA games.

On the night that her name and uniform number were unveiled in Gampel Pavilion, Cash — whose power, heart and beauty are never in question — used her remarks to express humility.

She thanked her family, who are always present, and the Husky fans.

She acknowledged her teammates and UConn coaches. And she saluted her UConn professors.

“The best thing UConn does for athletes,” the astounding woman said, “is help set them up for life.”