When Heather Buck first met Paulla Solar, Buck was 11 years old, a sixth-grader at Mystic Middle School and the manager of the combined middle school basketball team in town, with sixth-graders not allowed to play.

Buck traveled often to Pawcatuck Middle School for practice. Solar taught physical education at Pawcatuck and was in the first year of her return to coaching the girls' basketball team at Stonington High School. Buck admired her future coach even then.

Did she scare you, Heather?

"Yes," Buck said recently, emphatically, yet with a laugh.

Buck, who would go on to win a state championship under Solar at Stonington, is now a redshirt sophomore on the two-time defending national champion UConn women's basketball team. Solar is in the 10th season of her second reign at Stonington, the first of which began in 1974 and encompassed the 1980 Class M state championship.

Solar won her 300th career game Saturday afternoon at Ledyard 34-30, getting four free throws in the last 30 seconds from seniors Megan Rose Chapman and Lia Vann to break a tie. The Bears are 6-7, making Solar 300-115 with a pair of state titles.

Buck has been to more than one game this season.

Here's why:

"Coach Solar, she's the kind of coach where if you work your butt off and give her your best effort, she's always going to be there for you," Buck said. "I felt like when I was there, we would talk about everything. I was always the last one out of the gym, and some of it's because I'm slow. But sometimes it's because I was talking to coach.

"For her, it's not just about basketball, it's about the people. I'll always go back there."

When Denise Domnarski first met Paulla Solar, she was 10 years old, a fifth-grader at Pawcatuck.

"'Mrs. Solar' came before 'coach Solar,'" Domnarski last week. "I had her for four years in middle school, got her sportsmanship award and it's still my favorite award I've ever gotten."

Domnarski was a three-sport captain at Stonington, including for Solar's girls' basketball team in 2008-09. She's now a sophomore physical education major at Springfield College, a budding teacher and coach, and when she returns to Stonington is most times in the gym helping Solar with her practices, camps and with the occasional scouting report.

"The reason I'm majoring in PE and love basketball and try to become a better person every day … a lot of it is because of her," Domnarski said.

"I go to practice because I want to help coach Solar somehow. She has always been there for me. I write her a thank you note probably every month because she's still doing things that mean the world to me. I've written so many cards, Hallmark can't keep up."

A 1986 graduate of Stonington High School, I first met Paulla Solar when I was 15 years old, a sophomore at the school, and she was a physical education teacher there. She signed my yearbook.

The most defining moment I have regarding her, however, is this: I was struggling personally, really struggling, prior to the death of my mother in 2007 from the complications of multiple sclerosis. I went to a Stonington game coached by Solar during the Buck era and somehow ended up at dinner with her afterward.

As I told Solar what was going on in my life, she said something I won't ever forget.

"You've always got a place here, you know?"

It meant a lot. It's how I got to know her as a person, not just as a coach but as someone who tries to do the right thing every single time, even when a weaker person would walk away and wait for the next fight.

Her words are what I think about every time I go to a game and see Buck or Domnarski, now engaging young women instead of little girls, or countless other former players who come back to watch Stonington games.

Even former assistant coach Adam Baber, now the head coach at Ledyard who was in the Stonington gym for win No. 299 against Griswold — scouting the Bears as Saturday's opponent - couldn't help grinning a little as Solar found a way to win that one without one of her best players and with a back injury that had her hobbling around the sidelines.

Buck was at the game Dec. 23 at Stonington, a 59-46 victory over Waterford. After the game, as Solar sat on the team bench, wrung out and chatting with a few hangers-on, Buck pulled up a chair, snacking on a bag of Tostitos Hint of Lime. A few days before UConn headed for a two-game road trip, Buck was the last one out of the Stonington gym, just like the old days.

"Not as soon as you step off the court, but once you step off the court, you realize she's not just a coach, she's a teacher," Buck said.

And Solar, too, has created a environment where there's always a place for you to come back to.

This is the opinion of Day scholastic sports editor Vickie Fulkerson.