Seeing now how perfectly suited Kayla Pedersen is to the small-forward spot, it’s hard to believe the Stanford junior struggled to adjust to the position last season.

Kayla Pedersen (14) can play shooting guard or power forward, but is best at small forward -- Photo by Doug Benc/Getty Images

Through six basketball games this season, she leads Pac-10 women in scoring (20.5 points per game), is sixth in rebounding (8.8) and fifth in three-point shooting (44.4 percent), and at 6-foot-4 with the skills of a guard, she presents matchup problems for most teams, perhaps even the four elite teams the Cardinal will face next, starting with Sunday’s home game with DePaul and continuing with No. 7 Duke, No. 4 Tennessee and No. 1 Connecticut.

Pedersen can do more things well than any player on the team, and she has been, quite simply, the best player on a No. 2-ranked Stanford team filled with standouts.  There may be some issues when she or a teammate is forced to guard a talented small forward on the perimeter, but for now, it seems like the position was made for Pedersen.

“When I came in to Stanford, Tara (VanDerveer, Stanford’s coach) said, ‘By the time you leave, you will be a three (small forward).’”

For her first season and half, though, Pedersen played the position she had played in high school, a power forward spot  trading elbows with post players under the basket.   Only because of an injury to point guard JJ Hones did that change. 

 For the first few games after the loss of Hones,  Ros Gold-Onwude was plugged into Hones’ point-guard spot.  But in the 22^nd game of the season, with her team 17-4, VanDerveer made the radical move of changing four starting positions.    Freshman Nneka Ogwumike had shown she deserved to start, and she had to play inside along with Jayne Appel, which meant Pedersen had to go to the perimeter.  Jillian Harmon moved from small forward to shooting guard, and Jeanette Pohlen went from shooting guard to point guard.

“I was kind of happy, because I naturally like playing away from the basket,” Pedersen said.

But in her first game starting at small forward, against Washington State, on Feb. 6, Pedersen had just five points, and she scored in double figures in just one of her first five games at the new position.    Her adjustment was the biggest on the team, as she had to make the transition from playing with her back to the basket five feet from the rim to facing the basket at the three-point line.

“It was more of an adjustment than I expected,” Pedersen said.   “It was mentally different and it was a matter of teammates getting used to me at that position because I get open different than a guard.  I don’t think I ever really adjusted last year.”

It worked well for the team, which went unbeaten with the new lineup until it loss to Connecticut in the national semifinals.   But not individually for Pedersen, whose scoring average dropped from 12.6 as a freshman to 10.8 as a sophomore.   She did not score more than 10 points in any of the Cardinal’s five NCAA Tournament games and shot just 32.6 percent from the field in the postseason.

Although Pedersen knew she would be playing small forward again this season, her offseason regimen didn’t change much because she had always worked primarily on her perimeter skills.  And being the starting power forward on the gold-medal winning USA World University Games squad did not affect the transition because the USA offense was so much different from Stanford’s.

Most important, when she came to preseason camp at Stanford, she was prepared mentally to play the small-forward spot, and her teammates became acquainted with how to get her the ball in positions to score from the perimeter.

She still spends up to 10 minutes a game at the power forward spot and has even played some shooting guard this season, creating a rather imposing look in the backcourt.   But she has the skill and the mental agility to makes those adjustments now, and the Cardinal’s less restrictive style this season facilitates such transitions and fits perfectly into Pedersen’s sizable skill set.

“Basketball is just a game with our new approach,” Pedersen said.  “We’re structured, but we’re not.  The train is not tied to the rails.”

Pohlen is not surprised by Pedersen’s increased scoring.

“She’s so versatile and creates so many mismatches now,” Pohlen said.  “Who are you going to have guard her?”

So far no one has been able to guard her.  It will be interesting to see how she does against the nation’s best teams the next two weeks.

For more Stanford basketball stories, go to http://www.examiner.com/x-9324-Stanford-Cardinal-Basketball-Examiner.