ESPN Women's NCAA Tournament 2008

TAMPA, Fla. -- Solving Candice Wiggins is proving to be an impossible task in the NCAA tournament. Five teams have already tried and failed to slow the Stanford senior with a contagious personality and a lethal game. But should Tennessee find an answer for that riddle in Tuesday's national championship game (ESPN, 8:30 p.m. ET), it still faces a big challenge in getting past the Cardinal.

Two big challenges, actually.

Despite packing diametrically different approaches to the game into their respective 6-foot-4 frames, Jayne Appel and Kayla Pedersen have found that not only is there plenty of room for both of them in the post but they're better together than they could be apart.

Opponents, on the other hand, tend to find three is a crowd inside against the Cardinal.

The older of the two going by their birth certificates and by class, Appel is also the one who inspires teammates and coaches to analogies of youthful exuberance.

"We call Jayne 'Bam Bam,'" Rosalyn Gold-Onwude laughed. "Because she is 6-4, big as anything and just crazy, jumping on everybody, doesn't know her strength. Like before games, she is superhyper and is always hitting people, like, 'C'mon, you ready? You ready to go?' And you don't want to tell her to stop hitting you because you don't want her to lose her enthusiasm. But she needs to learn her strength."

The Pac-10 Freshman of the Year a season ago, Appel took a backseat to few post players in any class during her first season, but she ceded a certain amount of leadership off the court to senior teammates Brooke Smith and Kristin Newlin. With those two gone this season, Appel is still finding her footing, in a Frosted Mini-Wheats kind of way, as the elder stateswoman on the block. The kid in her still loves to turn the energy loose; the grown-up in her is finding ways to harness it for more than celebratory bruises.

"She's like a big little kid, in a sense," classmate JJ Hones said. "But I feel like she always knows what to say to me during games, kind of to keep me focused, keep me pumped up -- and kind of always holding me responsible, like 'You better take care of that ball.' … I feel like she kind of does it for a lot of people. I mean, she might not be Candice energetic, but I mean, she's Jayne energetic. She has her own way."

Pedersen also has her own way on the court, even if it sometimes bears an eerie resemblance to the way of a WNBA veteran. From coming up with 15 points and 11 rebounds against Rutgers in her second college game to checking Candace Parker one-on-one before taking her first load of Christmas laundry home for the holidays, Pedersen plays with unusual poise and calm for an 18-year-old. Far from being intimidated by her surroundings at the Final Four, she took former Stanford player Vanessa Nygaard's advice to soak in the atmosphere before Sunday's semifinal and said surveying the scene actually calmed her.

"Kayla does bring a lot of different things that Brooke and New didn't bring last year, but above all, Kayla's basketball IQ is out of this world," Hones said. "I feel like that helps Jayne know that -- maybe if Jayne messes up sometime on defense, I think she knows that Kayla has her back. They work very well in tandem together."

Stanford has shed its soft label time and again this season, beating Rutgers on the road and Tennessee at home, sweeping three games from Pac-10 rival Cal, and knocking off Maryland and Connecticut to reach Tuesday's title game. But the players got a taste of it long before the first game, watching Appel and Pedersen go at each other in practice.

"I think that we've developed a cohesive relationship," Pedersen explained. "At the beginning of the year, it might have been more competitive, but now we realize we need each other in order to contribute to the success of the team. And I think that she's just taken me under her wing, just really helped me learn the ropes of Stanford basketball."

The synergy was there again early in Sunday's semifinal, when -- after missing a couple of shots in a row on preceding possessions -- Appel forcefully established position by chucking Connecticut's Tina Charles out of the way in the kind of hand-to-hand combat pervasive in the post. Fed from the perimeter, she then turned and muscled her way to the basket for a layup in a crowd.

A water polo star in high school, Appel plays with tremendous agility in breaking out any number of drop steps and half-hooks. She's also a deft passer with her back to the basket, feeding many of Stanford's favored backdoor plays. But it's her single-minded bull rushes toward the rim for layups or rebounds that set a tone.

"There's a certain toughness that they bring to our program," associate head coach Amy Tucker said. "They're big, they're physical. You know, we're not going to wow people with our athleticism in the post, but we can have a strong presence instead. That has to be our strength."

It's also a well-rounded presence. Most coaches would happily settle for two 6-4 players with exactly the same skill set, but just as their personalities take different routes to the same destination, Appel and Pedersen complement each other on the court. As she has shown a national audience against Maryland and Connecticut, Pedersen has range far beyond the paint. She's a face-up post player without any of the negative connotations that sometimes carries about a player unwilling to use her size to mix it up inside.

That leaves plenty of room for Appel, with a back-to-the-basket game that rivals that of Courtney Paris or anyone else in the college game.

"They're a great one-two combination," Tucker said. "They really complement each other's skills; Kayla has the face-up game. They're totally different personalities, as well.

"Kayla is more serious; she really gets the scouting report, she really understands stuff from a high basketball IQ. Jayne just kind of goes with the flow and uses her gut feeling and instincts. But they need each other. If Jayne didn't command a double, then Kayla wouldn't get those shots."

As engaging and personable off the court as she is physical and unsmiling on it, Appel is an ideal candidate to inherit the daunting mantle of leadership Wiggins will hand down regardless of Tuesday's result. As Tucker said, Appel has merely scratched the surface of her potential and should be even stronger after offseason surgery to fix long-standing shoulder problems that limit her weight training.

But the more Appel can share that stage as part of Stanford's interior odd couple, the better off she'll be. And the better off Stanford will be, especially if it's defending a national title.

"Last year, I fouled out of a game in 12 minutes," Appel said. "And I've had to accept a lot more responsibility just from last year to this year, and Kayla's kind of helped with that. It wasn't such a big looming thing, like, 'Oh my goodness, I have to take care of these two big post player holes that [Smith and Newlin] left for me.' Kayla really took a lot of that upon herself, and I think that really helped me."

Graham Hays is a regular contributor to ESPN.com's women's basketball coverage. E-mail him at Graham.Hays@espn3.com.