On a cold January night in 1995, the fire marshal walked into the gymnasium at Fountain Central High School, took a look around with a scowl on his face and mumbled something about a possible code violation.

The gym was raucous, rowdy and loud, and it was absolutely packed. People were sitting in the aisles, standing shoulder to shoulder in the bleachers. Folding chairs had been brought in and set up two deep on the sidelines.

"There were people hanging from the chandeliers," said Gary Hart, Seeger High's athletic director at the time. "There was a line of people lined up all the way out to the highway, waiting outside to get in to see that game. It was a full house."

Inside the gym, the fire marshal walked around a little bit longer to survey the scene, then turned to the person standing next to him and asked, "Where can I sit?"

Stephanie White was about to break the Indiana girls high school basketball career scoring record. Everyone, it seemed, wanted to see the Seeger senior phenom score her 2,617th point in a game against Turkey Run to topple the record Charleston's Abby Conklin had set two years before.

According to the official schedule, the game was supposed to be played at Turkey Run, but that gym was tiny. Just a few hundred people would have been able to witness White make Indiana basketball history.

Hart, who had coached White as a freshman at Seeger, negotiated to move the game to a bigger venue. He even reached out to Purdue to see if Mackey Arena was available.

In the end, Turkey Run agreed to play the game at Fountain Central's much bigger gym where a sold-out arena watched a girl with long dark hair wearing No. 22 deliver exactly what the people had come for.

It happened at the line. White scored her record-breaking 2,617th point on a free throw with one second left in the first half and Seeger leading 41-17.

A timeout was taken as the crowd roared. This was a huge moment. Even the Turkey Run fans couldn't help but cheer for their opponent's greatness. White leaned down, put her hands on her knees and held back tears.

When she returned to the line for her second free throw, White missed the basket.

"She was so ticked off," said Diane Hearn, who was White's volleyball coach at Seeger. "She said, 'I lost focus.' She was so mad at herself. Steph was always so competitive, so devoted to her sport, so incredibly hard working that she never really gave herself a moment to step back and say, 'Look what I did.'"

White wasn't thinking about breaking the record that night nearly 30 years ago. That's not what great athletes do in the middle of a game, said Lin Dunn, a mentor to White and her former coach.

"That wasn't what mattered to her. She was thinking about how she missed the free throw. That's who she is," Dunn said. "And some of those traits are similar to the traits that Caitlin Clark has. That competitiveness, that investment in her game, that high basketball IQ. They're very similar like that."

There is a lot of Caitlin Clark in Stephanie White, the Indiana Fever's new head coach. Or, perhaps, it should be the other way around. There is a lot of Stephanie White in the Fever's star player Caitlin Clark.

After all, long before Clark was rocking the world of women's sports on the court, White was doing it on a much smaller scale -- without the glitz of social media -- showing those who were watching that women's basketball could be great.

“I think we all know how good of a basketball mind she is, but also how much of a legend she is in Indiana,” Clark told IndyStar last week. “I think that's really cool."

'She wore basketballs out, you know'

The signs came early. The first time Dunn met the little girl who would become her future player, White was attending a summer camp at Purdue, even though she wasn't old enough to be there.

"Steph was 8 and I remember us deciding, 'OK, let's just put down that she's 10,'" said Dunn, who later coached White at Purdue and with the Fever. "She was as good or better than most of the 10- and 12-year-olds. That would be the first time that I saw her and realized how gifted she was, how smart she was as a player."

In fifth grade, White played up on the sixth-grade team at her elementary school. "Steph was the best player on the floor," said Hart. "I don't say that to put down the other kids. But she was a special kid from the get-go."

Just like Clark who, by the time she was in third grade, was playing basketball on the boys' team. Not only that, but she was playing up a year.

Jill Westholm's son was one of those boys a year older than Clark at St. Francis of Assisi Catholic School in Des Moine, Iowa.

"Honestly, I was kind of like, 'OK, I have to see this. Why is she playing against the boys?'" said Westholm, who taught Clark in sixth grade math and science. "And when I saw her, I was like, 'Yep, this is where she belongs, with the boys, playing up a year.'"

People in Iowa started talking about this Clark girl. Twenty-two-years earlier, people in Indiana were talking about this White girl.

By the time White was at Seeger Junior High, she was a household name in the sports community. She not only played basketball but was a star at volleyball and softball. That was around the time Hearn was interviewing to be the Seeger High volleyball coach.

"And they kept talking about Stephanie White, Stephanie White, Stephanie White, like she's seriously the real deal," said Hearn. "They even knew that in eighth grade."

White ended up outperforming everyone's expectations in high school as a three-sport, all-state athlete in basketball, softball and volleyball. She was Indiana's Miss Basketball and led the team to four straight semistates. She played middle in volleyball and shortstop in softball.

"I knew that we had this really good athlete coming up. What I didn't understand was that she could do anything," said Hearn, who still coaches volleyball at Seeger with White's mom, Jennie, who is an assistant coach. "She could have gone Division I in any three sports, but her love for basketball, I don't even know for sure if her mom knows where it comes from."

At White's news conference last week at Gainbridge Fieldhouse where she was officially introduced as the new Fever coach, replacing Christie Sides who led the team the past two seasons, White made clear it had always been basketball for her.

A gym with a hoop and a ball in her hand is the only place White has ever wanted to be. It didn't matter which sport she was playing in high school, White always made time for basketball.

During volleyball season, she convinced Hearn to meet her at the school at 6 a.m. Some mornings, she'd do a pool workout for her legs. Other mornings, she would lift weights. But she would always go into the gym and practice ball handling and shooting.

Hearn, who is only 5-2, would hold up one of the big brooms used to sweep the gym floors, to give White something to shoot over. "She just told me what to do, and I did it," said Hearn.

After school, White would go to volleyball practice or to a game. Any night she had open, she would play pickup basketball with a bunch of 30-something guys in a tiny gym in West Lebanon. The gym didn't have heat, and there were holes in the court.

"These guys, they would quite literally just beat the crap out of her to get her toughened up," said Hearn.

White always wanted to be ready for any opponent that came her way.

"She was one of the most hard-working people, players, kids that you're ever going to find. She's competitive at anything and everything that she was ever involved in," said Hart, especially at the sport she loved most. "She wore basketballs out, you know?"

Like White, Clark's a 'combo guard'

As the years went on, Dunn kept an eye on that 8-year-old who had impressed her at summer camp as she coached the Purdue women's team from 1987 to 1996.

"Early on in her high school career (as a) freshman, sophomore, we all saw how smart she was, and how invested she was in being the best that she could be," said Dunn. "She was always working on her game in the off season, during the season, just totally invested in being the best that she could be."

Dunn watched as White was named Indiana Miss Basketball, the 1995 Gatorade and USA Today National Player of the Year, WBCA High School All-American and MVP of the WBCA All-American game.

She watched as White set the IHSAA girls basketball scoring record, finishing with 2,869 career points after averaging 28.3 points as a sophomore, 31.0 as a junior and a state-best 36.9 as a senior, including a single-game high of 66 points.

"And then, of course," said Dunn, "we recruited her at Purdue."

With the Boilermakers, White scored 2,182 career points, 671 rebounds, 582 assists and 277 steals, leading Purdue to two Big Ten titles and two Big Ten Tournament titles. In 1999, she led Purdue to a 34-1 record and an NCAA championship, the first and only Big Ten conference women's team to win a national title.

As Dunn coached White at Purdue and then with the Fever, she saw a generational player and one that today reminds her a lot of another young player wearing No. 22.

"Steph was what I call a combo guard, and that's what I think Caitlin is. I mean, they're point guards, but they can also play the two because they're scoring guards," said Dunn. "So, they have the ability to play either position, but they could be a true point guard and also be a shooting guard, and they're both very similar in those skills."

In Dunn's opinion, White is the perfect coach to be leading Clark into her second season in the WNBA. After Purdue, she played four seasons in the league with Charlotte and Indiana, followed by coaching roles in college and the WNBA, including the Fever's 2012 championship run and 2015 WNBA Finals.

White already has some ideas on how to make her new team more successful.

"Offensively, we can be more creative. I think we can utilize more versatility, utilize certain players in different ways," White said. "I'm a forward thinking, outside the box kind of coach. I like to challenge them on a number of levels. They are a high IQ team, so also giving them the freedom to make plays."

A good basketball team doesn't run plays. They make plays, said White.

"Everybody knows at the end of the day, players win the ballgames, right? You've got to give them the freedom, the confidence to believe in their abilities to make those plays," she said, "but also a little bit of the structure to help them see the different ways that you can attack."

White then laughed as she talked about how she would like to see Indiana get better on the defensive end of the floor.

"And I was never a player who played defense. Dunn can attest to that," she said. "But it is a big part of how I coach and it's an important piece of us positioning ourselves to win ball games when the shots aren't falling."

Dunn also laughed about White's defense, but then she stuck up for her former player.

"Well, she did play defense, but just like Caitlin, they're offensively gifted," she said. "They're gifted with their passing skills, they're gifted with their ability to get to the rim, the pull-up jumpers, the 3s. And so first and foremost, that's who they are. Now, that doesn't mean that they don't value defense."

Putting offense and defense aside, White has an overall vision for her team.

"More than anything, we want to continue to be exactly what they are," she said. "A fun, fast-paced, up-tempo style of play. They're sharing the basketball, making teammates better, building quality depth."

And becoming a team that can win a championship.

Together? A magical duo

"It's going to be really hard for me to not get emotional here today," White said as she opened her press conference last week. "This is coming home for me. The future is so bright, and our ultimate goal is to hang another banner in the fieldhouse. And our ultimate goal is to come back in here after we win that championship and celebrate again like we did in 2012."

White hasn't forgotten what it was like to play a role in raising women's basketball to another level even as a high school player whose competitive spirit and drive lifted up her teammates.

"You know, back in the old days we used to sell out arenas, too," she said. "And for the first time, it's becoming the norm. Having fans in the building whether they're cheering for you or not is huge. Just by doing what you love to do every single day, just by signing autographs before or after the game, just by getting on the floor after a loose ball."

White, who with her partner Lisa Salters has four boys, said their sons wear WNBA jerseys, Clark jerseys, Aliyah Boston jerseys and pretend like they are those players when they shoot around. Their first jersey wasn't LeBron James or Steph Curry or Paul George. Their first jersey was Fever legend Tamika Catchings.

"This is such an incredible moment on a global scale for our game, for our players, for us who have been around for a long time. And I'm embracing this. I will always embrace it," White said. "I don't think any of us will ever take it for granted because this is what we envisioned. And now we get an opportunity to live it."

Hearn said she still gets goosebumps when she thinks back to that high school game at Fountain Central where White broke the record.

"I have never seen more people at a high school game in my entire life," she said. "What she did for Indiana and especially in our area is what Caitlin Clark does for the nation. With them together as player and coach? It's going to be magical."

Follow IndyStar sports reporter Dana Benbow on X: @DanaBenbow. Reach her via email: dbenbow@indystar.com

This article originally appeared on Indianapolis Star: Stephanie White: Why she's the coach for Caitlin Clark, Indiana Fever