Perseverance, potential
Cal women: On a big roll and anticipating deep NCAA run
The Cal women’s basketball team began the season believing it possessed more depth and versatility than it has had in years.
The 20th-ranked Bears will open Pac-12 play this weekend knowing that they’ve also got more fortitude.
“We have more ability to handle various forms of adversity,” head coach Lindsay Gottlieb said. “That’s where you want to be heading into conference, because it’s coming. … You just have to play through it if you want to be a championship team.”
Cal (9-2) has responded to losing Mi’Cole Cayton for the season to a knee injury and to losing to then-No. 23 Missouri 55-52 on Nov. 25 by
winning six straight by an average of 20.8 points.
During the stretch, the Bears have beaten man and zone defenses, shown the ability to dominate inside and out, and most important, have won without production from two-time All-America honorablemention selection Kristine Anigwe.
The junior center sat out Cal’s 70-45 victory over BYU on Dec. 16, and scored two points as the Bears pulled out a 62-52 victory at Kentucky on Thursday. The Wildcats used what former Washington head coach Mike Neighbors used to call the “50-toe defense” — both feet from all five players in the lane to stop an opponent. In this case, Anigwe in the post.
“Kristine has scored a lot of points in her career, but she’d be the first to say we haven’t won enough games,” Gottlieb said of her 6-foot-4 junior, who is averaging 17 points and 8.6 rebounds per game but has led Cal to only one NCAA Tournament win in her first two seasons.
During the team’s preseason-goals meeting, Gottlieb filed away the players’ attention to short-term goals and used that in the past two weeks. Things can get sketchy around final exams and the holiday break, so Gottlieb implored the players to treat the BYU and Kentucky games like first- and secondround games of the tournament.
Mikayla Cowling got the message and played some of the best ball of her career. After averaging 5.7 points on 38.5 percent shooting in the first nine games, the senior guard/forward averaged 18 points on 53.6 percent shooting in the past two.
She was also the primary defender on West Coast Conference Player of the Year Cassie Devashrayee, who scored only 10 points on 4of-15 shooting, and Maci Morris, who needed 26 shots to score 21 points.
“It was like a visceral thing. You could see it. You could see (Cowling) morphing into that senior who is just not going to let us lose,” Gottlieb said. “There’s a sense of urgency, and they’re hanging on messages. When you’re a senior, you can understand the message, and then you can control your physical self enough to do everything in your power to make things happen. That’s what we’re seeing.”