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PrintKatie Smith: Into the Mystic
Shortly after signing a one-year contract to play for the WNBA’s Washington Mystics in March, former Ohio State basketball star Katie Smith told Insider she chose the team in large part because of its coach, Julie Plank, a former Buckeye with deep Columbus ties. “I’ve known her for many years,” says Smith, who lives in Upper Arlington in the off-season. “I have trust in her.” A Bishop Hartley graduate whose family owns Plank’s Cafe & Pizzeria on Parsons Avenue, Plank played hoops at Ohio State in the early 1980s and then got a job as an assistant coach with Tara VanDerveer when she left OSU for Stanford University in 1985. While at Stanford, Plank spent a lot of time on the recruiting trail in the early 1990s chasing Smith, then a star at Logan High School. “It came down to Ohio State and Stanford,” Plank recalls. Smith, of course, spurned Plank. “I always give her a hard time—she just wanted to come out to California for a trip,” Plank says. But the pair stayed in touch over the years. (Plank was an assistant on the Olympic women’s team in 2000, when Smith won her first gold medal.) And that connection helped Plank win the second Katie Smith sweepstakes. Every team in the WNBA reportedly pursued Smith this off-season. “It only took me 20 years or something to get her,” Plank says with a laugh.
While recent Wexner Center programming has focused on access to food, the Ohio State arts institution also is taking matters into its own hands. It’s launching the Market at 15th & High, a farmers’ market on the center’s plaza every Thursday from 4 to 7 pm from May 27 through Oct. 28. Karen Simonian, director of media and public relations, says the market is in partnership with Wayward Seed Farm in Marysville, and 12 vendors will offer fresh produce. (Vendors are being encouraged to accept coupons and food stamps.) Simonian says organizers hope it will be a “boom to the campus area and university district.”
Insider hears there may be something more going on between Tami Longaberger and Bernie Kosar than pitching Longaberger baskets. The former Cleveland Browns star quarterback, who was in bankruptcy court earlier this year, teamed with the Longaberger CEO (and former Ohio State trustee) to launch a new sports-themed basket line in 2009. Now sources say that the pair has been seen together socially in southern Florida (where Kosar lives) and also at the gala for the reopening of OSU’s Ohio Union in early April.
Everyone in town knows you don’t mess with Abigail and Les Wexner, the most powerful couple in Central Ohio. The same goes, apparently, for their personal assistants. In early March, someone fatally poisoned with antifreeze a 5-year-old Cairn terrier named Elliot that belonged to Karl Koon, Abigail’s longtime aide. While Columbus police didn’t find enough evidence to bring criminal charges against anyone, Koon sought another way to seek justice for Elliott. The Victorian Village resident discovered the Ohio Senate was considering a bill that would force antifreeze manufacturers to add a bitter-tasting chemical to their potentially deadly products (antifreeze has a sweet taste that animals like). He lobbied Sen. Steve Buehrer, the chair of the committee considering the proposal, and urged his friends to do so, too. The effort seems to have given the bill a boost, with Buehrer holding two hearings on the proposal in March. (There was no more action on the bill as of mid April.) “I’ve been with Abigail for 17 years,” Koon says. “Certainly, I’ve learned how to push the buttons I need to push.”
