The corn palace of Dakota Wesleyan was a remarkable sight. The entire building was plastered with portraits fashioned by, well, corn. Each year a new theme is decided upon and new corn masterpieces are created along the outsides of this palace. As you stand and admire the creations you can’t help but have butter on the brain and crave popcorn as that is all you can smell. Dakota Wesleyan nearly took a win away from us in our previous meeting, and despite their barely respectable record their strengths were our greatest weaknesses. They were exceptionally aggressive on the glass, and shot the ball without fear. Having the ability to slow us down and milk the clock before firing an outrageously deep shot that inevitably would go in, our momentum coming back from California was quickly shattered. Up 2 in the waning seconds we stayed in our matchup zone having held them to minimal scoring overall. Wesleyan needed a 3 to win and that’s exactly what they got. A quick entry into the high post following a kick-out to the left wing, their best shooter buried a dagger in our metaphorical hearts as she drained a three just before time expired. This added to the already long drive home from South Dakota and set up a potentially devastating week. Though I don’t claim to be a prophet I knew that despite the seemingly back breaking loss in South Dakota, the real swing game would be Doane. Despite giving the Tigers every opportunity to beat us on our home floor and send us into a two game skid and plummeting us to the depths of the GPAC we snuck away with a win which all but clinched our fifth place spot. All that was left was to win the games we were supposed to win and hopefully pick up one or two along the way for seeding purposes and find ourselves packing our bags for Sioux City.
Having made what I felt to be the key turn, our players didn’t feel the same effects. We struggled through our next 5 games, losing the ones everyone assumed we would lose and only hanging on to win the ones we were supposed to win. There was much uncertainty going into our showdown with Mt. Marty on the road as we were one game ahead of them in conference standings and facing another precarious point. For all intents and purposes a win would all but officially clinch a bid into the national tournament unless of course a ton of highly improbable upsets occurred in the conference tournaments. The game was back and forth from the beginning, but it ended as the Courtney Spawn show. A senior who had been demoted to the depths of the bench had been earning her way back into the rotation. That night she proved her worth. Always a consistent player, she rarely made mistakes. Solid is the best way to describe Court. The difference against Mt. Marty was she showed why she was once known as a three point specialist. Hitting three’s that sent us both into overtime and eventually won the game for us she permanently earned herself a starting position for the remainder of the season. In reality the stress of hoping for a tournament berth was over, but now we would enter the brutal conference tournament.
To keep from babbling as there are more important matters to discuss I will be brief regarding the conference tournament. Our swagger hit an all-time high only to come crashing down in a matter of days. Having to play at #12 Briar Cliff to open our conference tournament we shocked the country by rallying from a double digit deficit to a monumental victory (a feeling we’d be on the other side of in the coming weeks). The momentum swing that we were feeling though was soon short lived. The semifinal round of the conference tournament pitted us against #2 Concordia, a team that had beaten us handily only a few weeks prior. The ego was high though for in our last meeting our two stars, Stat and Brittney, were far under the weather so that, coupled with our premier win at Briar, accounted for a lot in the probability of us winning. That hope was not only dashed, but buried within the first 2 minutes.
A good coach always has a solid understanding of his or her team’s strengths and weaknesses. While the top level teams are able to minimize their weaknesses or at the least mask them by their strengths inevitably they are always there. Good coaches are also able to find their opponents weaknesses and take advantage of them. My senior year of high school we were loaded. We had the best coaching staff in the state in any classification, and we had 5 senior starters that had committed everything to winning a state title. We were 25-0 going into the final four against Del Norte and many people in the state thought we had no weakness. We had two, we couldn’t play well slow, and our three point shot was our difference maker scoring. The day after the game the article in the local paper would read the following: “Del Norte Stuns Rye.” Coach King from Del Norte would be quoted saying, “I told my guys before the game that if this game was ugly it would be in our favor...I am just speechless. I have a bunch of guys in that locker room in there who just refuse to lose. What a great feeling this is.” I hate that article. It burns me to this day, but I understand now that a person’s weaknesses are exceptionally scary when someone else knows them.
A bronze plaque that should be a gold ball
Our weaknesses all year have been the handling the press and scoring in the half court. With our inability to manage the shot clock against the press or to break it cleanly plagued us against Concordia, and from the tip off they simply owned us. It was ugly ball, but only on one end. While the loss would neither keep us out of the tournament nor would it destroy our seeding, it left a plaguing feeling my mind and I’m sure everyone else’s. 86-48 final.
Nevertheless we were off to the national tournament. For the first round of play we were to face off against the southern drawl of the Tennessee Wesleyan Bulldogs. An athletic team who lived and died by the three, quite simply died by the three in the first round. The grotesque half time score of 21-15 simply made me as a coach and I’m sure all of the spectators sick to their stomachs. Last year coaching high school my assistant coach began swaying my coaching integrity that had always pushed defense, defense, and more defense into the world of offense. While I’m still a student of the game, learning everything I can from anyone I can, the concept of whoever scores the most wins seems to be overlooked all too often. Coaches spend hours building the defensive prowess of their teams so that they can ensure their opponents don’t score. But high powered offenses, even if limited, can still stagger a defensive power. Connecticut’s 53-41 victory in the NCAA finals last year was the first time since 1983 that a team had scored under 60 points in the finals to win the title. It was also only the 5th game in that same span that a team had scored under 70 points in the championship game and won. In terms of the women’s game only 3 times ever has a team scored less than 60 points in the championship game and won. But with the Bulldogs shooting pitiful percentages (24% FG for the game, 14% 3-pt, and 52% FT) our 57 point outing was more than enough to carry us to the next round against C of O, the College of the Ozarks.
The Parade of Champions: Each team at the tournament is announced and escorted to the floor at the end of the first day to form the name NAIA on the court and exchange t-shirts with their first round opponents.
Last night the team sat at Bullseye’s, a sports bar here in town to watch the national championship game: Northwestern, a team from our conference who we lost by 12 to early in the year, was playing the team who we gave our season to. I intend to be very specific using the word “gave.” If you read any articles or ask any of the Hastings faithful the will all say that is was just that our shooting went cold in the second half. After having extending a 10 point half time lead to 14 early in the second half, it would be easy to equate our 1-14 three-point performance in the second half as the only justification for our loss, but we also allowed them to shoot 60% from the floor to our 28%, 80% (20/25) from the free throw line to our 50% (6/12), and their bench to outscore ours 15-4. My first year coaching at Rye I listened to Mark Kellogg of Ft. Lewis, one of the premier NCAA DII teams in the country, talk about how important shot selection is. Ozarks knew what they wanted to get, and they made sure they got it, as opposed to our take the first open opportunity regardless of who it is or where it is on the floor or what the time situation looks like. Believe what you will, but we gifted a talented team with every opportunity to beat us, and they took it. I equate it to our lack of offense, and their overpowerment of it. So as we sat, knowing that we should’ve at the least joined our three conference brethren in the final four (Northwestern ousted Briar Cliff, and Ozarks upset Concordia), we went on to witness two beatable teams vie for the title.
Courtney Spawn making a leaping pass to Kayli Rageth in our first round game at nationals
As we sat and watched two things struck me. Major revelations: one being exceptionally intriguing, and the other equally disturbing. The first was the talent level of the Northwestern team that would down Ozarks to three-peat as NAIA National Champions. They were not very good. While I know that’s an overstatement, what I mean to say is that they are not what I would describe as championship caliber talent for the college level. Northwestern has one very athletic, hard-nosed 3-guard/forward in GPAC MVP Kendra Da Jong. They have a talented guard who can shoot the lights out and handle the ball very well in the open court in Kendra Kuhlmann. After that they have a team full of role players. They have kids who have a job, know their job, and do that job well. They know both their skills and their limitations. They understand their part on the team be it a starter, a bench player, a 25 minute a game kid, or a 5 minute a game kid. They are also exceptionally disciplined. They ran the floor with purpose and understanding, they ran their offense until they found the shot they wanted, and they moved better without the ball than any team in the NAIA. Having watched the 4A Great Eight in Colorado the weekend before I would contend easily that Air Academy, Pueblo South, and even perhaps Pueblo West has more overall talent, and could’ve contended for a final four spot as is, nevertheless it is more apparent than ever that the most talented team does not always win: it’s the most hard-nosed, the most consistent, the most disciplined, and the team that works the best as a single unit knowing and excelling at their roles that wins. Every piece of the puzzle is different. With all the right pieces, put together in the right order, a masterpiece can be made. The other revelation that was the disturbing of the two was when our junior (soon to be senior) power forward made a quiet comment in the closing minutes of the game. Staring in what seemed like awe and wonderment at the screen she quietly said “How do we get there?” As one of the now senior leaders of the team, having finished 3 years here at Hastings, and just removed from the National Tournament, the question in my mind that responded to hers was “How do you not know!” It haunts me to think that our new leader, after all this time, still doesn’t know what it takes to win it all. Is that a fault of hers? (maybe) A fault of ours as coaches? (most likely How many on our team don’t know what it takes to win it all? (more than I’d like to guess) I don’t think I can convey the severity of this enough, but it’s haunting. If our team doesn’t truly know in their hearts what it takes to win at that level, if we as coaches haven’t pressed that in their minds, I don’t know if they’ll ever know. It’s sickening to me to think we may have ultimately failed our players. It does mean one thing for certain though: on the night of the championship game you’ll find them sitting in Bullseye’s watching.
Till Next Time
- Coach Kyle
