ATTLEBORO -- Missy Traversi is still reaching for the sky. But this time, the Sky reached for her first.

In this instance, the `` Sky'' is the Women's National Basketball Association expansion franchise in Chicago. One of the 16 names currently listed on its first-year roster is that of Traversi, the former Bishop Feehan High School and University of Maine standout from Attleboro, who left Friday morning for the Windy City to begin training camp.

Traversi, 23, is the first local female athlete to get the call from the WNBA, and she's taking the opportunity very seriously.

`` I know the game,'' she said during an interview at her Attleboro home Thursday morning. `` I can shoot. I can pass, I can dribble. I know the X's and O's of it. For me, it's such a mental thing. For me, it's going in there and being positive, believing in my capabilities, believing that the girl in front of me puts her shoes on the same way I do.''

Fresh off a six-month season with the Brahe Basket professional team based in Jonkoping, Sweden, Traversi knows that it's a long road to travel for any young woman to reach the highest level of basketball in this country. But it helps if you happen to know someone along the way -- and in Traversi's case, it's Dave Cowens, the former Boston Celtics' great, now the Sky's head coach and general manager. Traversi's connection with Cowens has deep roots. She played on the same Bishop Feehan team as his daughter, Samantha, during the 1999-2000 season, and has worked as a counselor at Cowens' annual summer camp at Wheaton College for six years.

Well aware of her outstanding career as Maine's point guard, Cowens took further interest in Traversi once he learned she was going to play professionally in Europe.

`` Last summer before I went into work,'' she said, `` he came up to me and said, `so, I hear you're going to Sweden, that's exciting.' I had no idea he had just gotten the GM job with the Chicago Sky. So we were talking like we always did in the summertime, and he said, `well, you know, if you play well over there and you're feeling good and I see your stats, I'll let you try out.'

`` I said, `try out for what?' and he said, `I'm the new coach and GM of the Chicago Sky.' And my jaw just dropped,'' Traversi said.

Cowens was true to his word. He and his staff followed Traversi's progress as she became the leading scorer in her league at a 24.3-point clip. Upon her return to the United States, a free-agency contract was waiting for her.

As a result, Traversi has become one of 16 women who will vie over a month's time to become one of the 11 players who'll take the court for the Sky's inaugural season.

Training camp begins this week at the Moody Bible Institute in downtown Chicago, and the first cut will take place in two weeks. More practice and exhibition games will follow, all leading up to the May 20 opener at Charlotte, opening the WNBA's 10th anniversary season, and the home opener at the University of Illinois at Chicago's 8,000-seat arena May 23 against Sacramento.

But for Traversi, training won't begin this week in Chicago. It started with every practice session in Sweden and continued practically from the moment she returned to Attleboro last month.

`` The expectations are so high, and I am so hard on myself and I have been over the years,'' she said. `` I feel I have to go in there with the mindset that I'm going to give it my all, work as hard as I can ... and I've worked, I've trained ... these last few weeks that I've been home, I've kicked my butt and done everything I can to prepare myself.

`` If I'm not ready now,'' she added, `` then when am I going to be ready?'' Traversi will meet this challenge well-prepared, both professionally and personally.

From an athletic standpoint, the former Shamrock is playing the best basketball of her life -- partially a by-product of the expectations placed upon her as the only American on her Swedish team.

`` As an American, you come over there with an education in the game and an understanding of that high level of competition that they don't really understand,'' she said of her European teammates. `` It's not that they don't play good basketball, but it really can't compete with Division I basketball.

`` So I was given the green light and I was highly respected over there,'' she said. `` Even before my first game, they expected so much performance out of me, and didn't really accept five or 10 points a game. They expected every game for me to score 20 or 30 points a game, and if you didn't, you were sat down and you were talked to.''

There were also fundamental differences in the basketball she played for four years at Maine and the European game. There was a greater emphasis placed upon endurance, quickness and speed and pushing the ball upcourt than settling into a more structured halfcourt offense.

`` The game was different ... it was a 24-second shot clock, and it's a quick, fast-paced game,'' Traversi said. `` You get the ball out of a rebound, and you go. It's not four or five passes in the offensive set. You get a shot, you're shooting it ... you're letting it go.

`` And, people are in shape,'' she said. `` I played 40 minutes a game, pretty much every game. After that, you'd have practice the next day and you'd practice for a few hours. And it's not just two hours of halfcourt drills. We'd get up and down the floor.

`` If anything, by the end of the year I was worn out and tired by the activity we did off the court,'' she said. `` But it's really no different than the kind of pressure we faced in Division I. I was just pushed to a different kind of limit in Division I than I was in Sweden. Division I was more of a mental, confidence kind of thing. In Sweden, it was, `OK, I'm good enough, I have a job here, I have to show them that I can lead them ... take care of business.'' '

Personally, living in Sweden proved to be one adjustment after another for Traversi.

The first was the language barrier. Practically isolated in the locker room as an English-speaker, Traversi took courses in beginner's Swedish so she could converse at a rudimentary level in daily-life situations.

Traversi also learned very quickly that her hosts' image of Americans was being shaped in a manner she knew to be flawed.

`` The knowledge they're getting of English is turning on the TV and hearing Paris Hilton talk,'' she said. `` That was the big struggle I had ... because when I got there, their idea of Americans is that they're lazy, dumb bimbos ... and it was disheartening. They see it in media, in pop culture, what they're shown, and I felt like the whole time I was over there, I wanted to prove to them that we're different.''

Another adjustment was purely geographic, given Sweden's closer proximity to the Arctic Circle.

`` In the months of December and January, it's very dark,'' she said. `` There's only about four to five hours of daylight, and there's a lot of alcoholism and depression in the town that I was living in.''

That, and the fact of being nearly 4,000 miles from home, occasionally took its toll, Traversi said.

`` I can see how for a lot of athletes that go overseas, it's short-lived,'' she said. `` You're playing a sport you love and you're getting paid for it, and there are good crowds, but it's not the same as being in your own country where you're comfortable, you're safe, you know what's going on and your parents are a phone call away and you're not an ocean apart.

`` There were times when it was tough, and there were tears,'' she said. `` But I grew a lot as an individual, too. You learn a lot about yourself when you're on your own. I thought I was on my own at Maine, but it wasn't even close.''

For those reasons, the bright lights and bustle of Chicago will be like a walk in the park for the well-traveled Traversi, who is guaranteed a stay of at least two weeks. But that will be the only thing easy about her journey.

Traversi knows she'll face an uphill battle to make the Sky's final 11-woman roster. At 5-foot-7 and a rock-hard 140 pounds, she knows she may be at a physical disadvantage to the taller and faster players with whom she'll be competing for jobs in the backcourt.

But she's faced those disadvantages before, in every game Maine played.

`` I played against (LSU's) Seimone Augustus, the No. 1 draft pick this year,'' she said. `` We were down in Louisiana, and when they came onto the floor, the first thing I noticed was that she has the ideal basketball body. The long arms, the long legs, the big feet, the big hands ... she had everything I didn't have.

`` A lot of the players in the WNBA are that caliber,'' she said. `` Most of them have strong bodies, long wingspans, the vertical leap. They're gifted in ways that I'm not. But for me, my heart always wins out ... I always have to ask myself, `can I be the kid who's got more heart, more desire, more passion than you?'

`` I'm 5-7, maybe 140 ... this is my body,'' she said. `` This is what I have to work with. This is what I have. I've pushed myself to every limit. I'm not going to grow in the next couple of weeks, and I'm not going to get a higher vertical leap. This is what I have to work with, so I have to prove myself again ... and again and again.''

MARK FARINELLA may be reached at 508-236-0315 or via e-mail at mfarinel@thesunchronicle.com