They may be No. 1, but Ravens still playing with a chip on their shoulder

When Rodney Dangerfield joked about getting no respect, people laughed.

It hasn’t been so funny for the Carleton University Ravens women’s basketball team, which for much of this season — despite 21 straight wins — has been pushed aside, left out of the conversation.

Maybe that hasn’t been such a bad thing for the Ravens and head coach Taffe Charles, who lived through the no-respect thing before as a standout Ravens men’s player from 1990-95.

“When I was with the men’s program, we were an afterthought,” Charles said. “Everybody was, ‘Who’s Carleton? They aren’t very good.’ Now it’s gone totally in the other direction, which is a testament to what they’ve been able to do.

“With the women’s team, we’ve taken a back seat. Even when we did well, people were talking about all these other teams. We thought maybe we weren’t getting the recognition we deserved. What we tell the players is, if you want recognition, you have to go earn it, do something special.

“We’ve been playing with a chip on our shoulder all year long. We’ve played pretty much every team in this (national championship) tournament and we’ve done well. We beat Laval, which was ranked No. 1. We beat McMaster, which was ranked No. 1. We played Regina at their place. We beat Queen’s three times. We beat McGill. What we have to understand now is each game is independent.”

And that’s the idea beginning Thursday when, on the biggest stage at the U Sports women’s basketball nationals in Victoria, the Ravens will look to justify the No. 1 tournament seed they have been given and, more important, win their first Canadian university championship. In two previous visits to the final eight in 2011 and 2013, the Ravens were crushed, losing all four games.

Carleton, which won the Ontario championship 49-41 over Queen’s in Kingston last weekend, starts the nationals with a quarter-final matchup with eighth-ranked Victoria.

“We play against the host and they’re going to have a really good crowd,” said Charles, who won five national championships as a Carleton men’s assistant coach before joining the women’s program 10 years ago. “We played Queen’s last week and they had a very good crowd. So we’re used to a hostile environment …

“As I like to tell the kids, even the best miss 60 per cent of the time, so 60 per cent of those shots are up for grabs,” Charles added. “We need to get those. We really focus on that fact — how important it is to rebound. Those extra opportunities decide who’s going to win and who’s not going to win.

“We defend very well — where we don’t do as great a job is the defensive rebounding, and that’s kind of ironic. We’re successful because we do have enough talent that we can score a bit more than we have in years past, but we need to rebound.”

Charles said this is the best team he’s coached at Carleton. It’s not only the veteran talent of starters Heather Lindsay, Elizabeth Leblanc, Jenjen Abella, Nicole Gilmore and Catherine Traer, it’s the maturity and confidence that comes with that.

“Success breeds success,” Charles said. “I tell the girls, ‘If we’re going to spend all this time on it, why not be successful at it?’

“If we’re doing what we need to do, we’re going to be successful. You just have to keep playing the same way for 40 minutes. Do your job — I know it’s a cliche, but do that and trust the process.”

And then, maybe, the respect will come.