Duquesne basketball coach Ron Everhart remembers seeing the wisp of a little girl doing backflips down the left field line at Consolidated Park in Fairmont, W.Va., while he and her older brother, Ronnie, were in a Little League baseball game in the early 1970s.

The team's coach was the girl's father, Ron Sr., who had been the starting point guard on the Jerry West-led West Virginia University basketball team that was runner-up to California in the 1959 NCAA tournament.

That park now is named after that little girl -- Mary Lou Retton.

"That's pretty cool," Retton said yesterday by phone from Houston, where she and her husband Shannon Kelley, a former quarterback for the University of Texas, are raising four daughters between the ages of 5 and 12. "I grew up at that park."

She grew -- all the way to 4 feet 9 -- and became America's gymnastic sweetheart when she won five medals, including a gold in the all-around competition, at the 1984 Olympics in Los Angeles.

For a long time, she kept those medals in a plastic bread bag under her bed. But they now are mounted on a beautiful plaque in the trophy room of her house.

"When I watch films of that Olympics, I know it's me doing those twists and turns, I can remember being there, but it seems like a different person," said Retton, 39, who travels the country giving motivational talks to youth groups. "First and foremost, I'm a mother and a wife. I'm just mommy to my girls. But I'm on the road at least one night a week."

Retton, a second cousin to Everhart (their grandmothers were sisters), will be the guest speaker at the Women and Girls Foundation annual fund-raiser and awards ceremony Oct. 13 at the East Club Lounge at Heinz Field.

Suzie McConnell Serio, a member of the U.S. basketball team that won an Olympic gold medal in 1988 and a bronze in 1992, will be among 25 women and girls in southwestern Pennsylvania who will be honored for their impact on sports at the event called Women in Sports: Leveling the Playing Field.

"I've never met Suzie, but I know there will be an instant bond," Retton said. "It [gold medal winners] is like a big fraternity. There's an immediate respect.

"When I speak, I'm really aimed at anybody who has a dream and not letting people put limits on you. Go for it."

Retton's dream of one-day winning a gold medal first came into focus when she watched on TV as Nadia Comaneci, a 4-11, 86-pound, 14-year-old, registered a perfect "10" score on the uneven parallel bars for one of three gold medals she won at the 1976 Games.

"That was truly when my seed of the Olympic dream was planted. It wasn't real to me until I saw the Olympics in 1976," Retton said. "I was enthralled. She was just a little girl, just like me. I finally had a name for what I loved to do -- gymnastics. Up to then it was just called acrobatics."

At 14, Retton left Fairmont, W.Va., for Houston to train under world-renowned coach Bela Karolyi, who also was Comaneci's coach.

"I was very scared going to live with a family I had never met," she said. "And I was a little afraid of him.

"I knew that to train for a world goal, you had to sacrifice a lot, but that [training] was normal for me. I didn't know there was a life outside the gym."

Retton has ties to Western Pennsylvania because her sister, Shari Timko, and her husband, Mike, a quarterback at West Virginia in the mid-1980s, and their three daughters live in Houston, Pa. The girls are standout athletes in tennis and softball at Chartiers-Houston High School.

"Growing up in my family, athletics was our thing. In some families, music might be the thing," Retton said.

"For the Rettons, it was athletics. I can't ever remember not being involved in some kind of sport."