Cardinal hit thrilling notes
Jones’ go-ahead jumper with 32 seconds left holds up after Gamecocks’ turnover, misses
SAN ANTONIO — In terms of acoustics, the Alamodome leaves a bit to be desired. Booming bass gets lost in the open spaces, the treble fizzles into the rafters, and no sane conductor would want to work there, unless her concerto was less about sound than it was about motion.
The latter is the kind of harmony Stanford created Friday night. On more than one occasion, Cardinal coach Tara VanDerveer has compared her basketball team to a symphony, and if that seemed like a stretch before the Final Four, it didn’t once her players found their rhythm, and their flow, and their pace.
“When someone is doing a solo, the other members of the orchestra are still playing,” VanDerveer had said coming into the national semifinals about Stanford’s style. “They aren’t putting their instruments down.”
They did, however, nearly put them down a second too early.
In an epic national semifinal showdown pitting one virtuoso against another, South Carolina came agonizingly close to hitting the final glorious note. It was not until a putback attempt by Aliyah Boston caromed off the rim at the buzzer that the top-seeded Cardinal escaped with a thrilling 66-65 victory.
The Gamecocks’ plan, in the words of coach Dawn Staley, had been to “muck things up.” This was almost exactly what they did.
Stanford, who had taken the lead on a Haley Jones jump shot with 32 seconds left and then forced a South Carolina turnover, was just trying to inbound the ball and wait for the Gamecocks to foul in the closing seconds. But Stanford, which had spent most of the evening operating its offense with melodious precision, turned the ball over near midcourt.
With time running out, South Carolina’s Brea Beal drove hard toward the rim and tried an off-balance layup. It didn’t fall, but Boston — the Gamecocks’ emotional leader — grabbed the rebound and fired the ball back at the rim as time expired.
When it refused to fall, a crushed Boston collapsed in tears, and the Cardinal players exulted, clinching a trip to the national championship game Sunday against Connecticut or Arizona.
If the back-and-forth affair looked at times like a match of wits decades in the making, there was good reason for that.
In 1992, Staley was a college point guard with loud tools and big plans, and VanDerveer put an end to one of them. Staley’s Virginia team lost to VanDerveer’s Cardinal that year in the Final Four, but that duo would later team up to win an Olympic gold medal.
At the time, the coach thought the young player might have a future as a lawyer, or a politician.
“Whatever Dawn decided to go into, VanDerveer said, “she was going to be at the top.”
When Staley got her first college coaching offer 21 years ago, VanDerveer advised her against taking it. Staley said she suspects it was meant as a compliment — she was still an outstanding WNBA player at the time — but Staley consciously decided to use it as another doubt to overcome.
“I thank her for making the chip a little bit bigger,” Staley said.
And when Staley won her first national championship as a coach at South Carolina four years ago? Along the way, her team rallied to beat VanDerveer’s Cardinal in the national semifinals.
This time, though, it was VanDerveer’s team that pulled off the theatrics. Jones led the way with 24 points, but her teammates played their instruments well.
San Antonian Kiana Williams, a Wagner alumna, started slow but made two huge plays down the stretch, hitting an off-balance shot in the lane with 2:06 left and firing a long pass for a fast-break bucket with 1:42 to go.
As a whole, the game was played brilliantly, not only by VanDerveer’s Cardinal but also by Staley’s Gamecocks.
And even though it shouldn’t have been their responsibility to justify interest in their sport — any more than it will be Baylor and Houston’s job to prove something about men’s basketball Saturday — the Gamecocks and Cardinal did it anyway.
They reminded everybody that the real shame of the past few weeks was that it wasn’t about the basketball all along. It sure wasn’t the players’ fault that people were talking about other problems that shouldn’t exist anymore, and NCAA president Mark Emmert admitted as much this week.
“When you lay the men’s and women’s championships side by side, as has been made clear over the past weeks, it is pretty self-evident that we dropped the ball in supporting our women’s athletes,” Emmert said.
“And we can’t do that. That’s a failure that should not exist. That 60-year head start that men had, that shouldn’t exist anymore. That’s got to be put behind us.”
It won’t be behind them by Sunday, of course. It won’t by next year, either. But VanDerveer said she hopes “this is a watershed moment” for the game she’s coached for more than four decades, and more nights like Friday won’t hurt.
The melody is catching on.
Whether the acoustics are perfect or not.