When Tausha Mills got the phone call, she thought it was a joke.

“I was just going through one of those days, wondering if there was still some basketball out there for me, and the phone rang,” she said.

It wasn’t a joke. It as W.P. “Rip” Drumgoole, the athletic director at Trinity Valley Community College in Athens, Texas, and he told Mills that she had just been inducted into the school’s Cardinal Hall of Fame as part of its second class.

“I didn’t even know there was a Hall of Fame,” said Mills, a resident of DeSoto and a former player professionally in the WNBA and in Europe.

“That was awesome. It was a blessing,” Mills said. “I started working on my speech right away.”

She had no idea if she would be asked to speak, but she hoped she was.

“I’m a motivational speaker, first and foremost,” she said.

Mills was inducted on Oct. 3 at the school, along with several other big-name athletes. Mills shared the stage with former Dallas Mavericks and Los Angeles Lakers guard Nick Van Exel, former Texas A&M and NFL player Robert Jackson, longtime NFL defensive standout John Randle – who is also a finalist for the NFL Hall of Fame – and Betty Lennox, currently active with the WNBA’s Los Angeles Sparks.

“It was a true honor just to be in their presence,” said Mills, who went on to play for a collegiate Final Four team at Alabama before playing professionally with the now-defunct American Basketball League as a member of the Chicago Condors.

She was the second tallest member of the Hall of Fame class behind Michael Battle.

“I told him, ‘You have to raise up on your calves to look tall in pictures,’” she laughed. “I said, ‘You have to hold them up, Michael, you can’t let them fall down.' But he couldn’t hold them up.”

Mills, at 32, still hopes to play professionally somewhere and calls herself a free agent.

“A restricted free agent,” she laughed.

Most likely, Europe will be her destination if she plays again. She started her WNBA career as a draft pick of the Washington Mystics and also played for San Antonio and Detroit, where she won a championship as a member of the Shock.

“The timing needs to be right. It’s all about the timing,” she said.

Mills’ most recent pro stint came in Turkey, and she has played all over the globe, including Israel, France, Italy, China, Poland, Greece and Spain.

“I’ve been in a lot of countries,” said Mills, who works in for J.P. Morgan Chase’s office in Irving.

Israel has been her favorite destination so far.

“I don’t know what it was, exactly,” she said. “Maybe it was the holy part – the spiritual aspect – but it seems like I played my best games there.”

In college, Mills led TrinityValley to a national championship in 1996 and was named National Junior College Player of the Year – despite not starting a single game at Trinity.

No other junior college player has ever done that.

Her mother missed her induction ceremony because of an illness – she has since recovered – but Mills had one of her biggest supporters there in Kay Seamayer, who plays and coaches senior women’s basketball teams.

“When I was there, everyone came up to me and said, ‘Now tell me all of your stories about Tausha,'” said Seamayer, who considers Mills her mentor.

Now, Mills wouldn’t mind getting another phone call one day – from the University of Alabama.

“It would mean even more if it would happen just like the first call did – totally out of the blue,” Mills said.