'Female Yao' a head above the rest

WUHAN: Wei Wei, the sizable center of the Guangzhou women's basketball team, caused quite a stir at the 6th Chinese City Games. Her performance earned her a reputation as a "female Yao Ming".

Although her team failed to top the podium on Sunday after losing to defending champion Nanjing 80-72, plenty of observers took notice of the towering talent.

The 18-year-old Wei is 2.07m tall, three centimeters taller than Zheng Haixia, the enormous center who helped the national women's basketball team win the silver medal in the 1992 Barcelona Olympic Games.

"Other than Wei Wei, we haven't found any other potential stars," said Gong Luming, former head coach of the Chinese women's national basketball team. 

Despite her potential, Wei's performance at the City Games was underwhelming. She never appeared in Guangzhou's starting lineup, and her play was inconsistent.

After two years on the national basketball team, coaches are still waiting for her to develop into the player they know she can be.

"Wei should become a leading player on the national team, but she is still too weak in strength and not forceful enough in the paint," Gong said.

Wei has basketball in her blood. She was born in Taiyuan in Shanxi Province to a father who stood 196cm and used to play center for the local police team and a 182cm-tall mother, who was once a top player for the Shanxi team. The first gift she ever received from her parents, in fact, was a basketball.

"I've loved basketball ever since I was a child, and I have a lot of basketballs at home," Wei said.

"Although my parents are basketball players, they didn't teach me to play basketball on purpose," she said. "I just played it with my classmates in primary school. Only until they realized that I had a deep love for the sport did they begin to teach me."

When Wei was in fourth grade she was already 185cm tall. A coach from Guangzhou Weilun Sports School noticed her and brought her to the school to receive systematic training.

As tall as she is, Wei weighs only 90kg and is not very muscular. Her frail body and inexperience led to a number of demotions from the national team, forcing her to miss competitions like the Doha Asian Games in 2006.