St. Francis coach has no regrets after team took its shot

STORRS — Joe Haigh had watched the game Friday night. The St. Francis women’s basketball coach had watched as the supposedly impossible turned, moment by moment, into a wondrous historic upset.

Never before had a 16thseeded team beaten a top seed in the men’s NCAA Tournament. UMBC not only would beat the No. 1 team in the nation, the Retrievers had, in the candid words of Virginia coach Tony Bennett, given his Cavaliers a thorough butt-whipping.

“I didn’t bring it up to our team because we didn’t need a different message than we had coming in anyway,” Haigh said, after a very different message had been sent in a historic 140-52 loss to UConn on Saturday at Gampel Pavilion. “There’s a piece in the back of your mind that maybe this is the day and instead of 10 for 57 [on 3-pointers], you go 40

for 57 and you have a shot.”

This would not be that day for the No. 16 seed Red Flash.

UMBC had tilted the athletic world Friday night. It was March and, yes, anything was possible. There was little K.J. Maura dancing around like a hyperkinetic elf. There was Jarius Lyles making shot after shot after shot. There was Arkel Lamar, the kid out of Bridgeport and St. Thomas More, banging out a double-double against the undisputed ACC champions.

Yeah, anything is possible. And on Saturday, St. Francis showed it was so against the No. 1 team in the nation.

“Nobody else in the world stopped them, so we were going to try to outscore them,” Haigh said.

It is a good thing Joe Haigh is a basketball coach and not your financial adviser, because you’d be on a street corner today begging a brother to spare a dime.

It’s a good thing Joe Haigh didn’t jump into a rental car late Friday night and head to the Mohegan Sun, because there’d be no meal money left to feed his St. Francis team after this 88-point loss.

It’s a good thing Joe Haigh is a basketball coach and not a battlefield general, because, well, let’s just leave it at that it’s a good thing he’s not a battlefield general.

St. Francis’ 57 3-point attempts broke the NCAA Tournament record, one of 52 set in a four-overtime game by Alabama.

“We wanted to show how we play and how we

could compete at St. Francis and not worry about the end results and I think we did that today,” Haigh said.

Yes, mission accomplished. UConn’s response would be to break NCAA Tournament records for points in a quarter (55), points in a half (94), points in a game (140), most rebounds (69) and most assists (38).

“It could have been a lot worse,” UConn coach Geno Auriemma said.

That wasn’t a taunt. Kia Nurse was the only one to play more than 25 minutes. Napheesa Collier had 25 points in 17 minutes. Azurá Stevens had 26 points in 15 minutes. It was 94-31 at halftime, and the way St. Francis decided to play, the Huskies could have scored 200.

I only wish it was hyperbole.

“That was different from anything I’ve experienced in either regular season or the NCAA Tournament,” Auriemma said. “Fiftyseven 3s, I’ve never seen that in my life.”

Sacramento State did set an NCAA regular-season record of 80, hitting 20, in 2015, but 57 in March? And it was much more than that record tournament number. With obviously less-athletic players, the Red Flash had tried to run with UConn. They pushed the pace. They hoisted stuff from all over. A miss. Boom. Transition. Boom, a UConn basket. Over and over.

Virginia scored 54 points in its epic loss to UMBC. UConn scored 55 in the first quarter. No team had ever gone splat so quickly.

“The biggest thing you worry about in a game like this is you can’t get anything going offensively,” Auriemma said. “That kind of went away in the first

five possessions. There was a point where Lou [Samuelson] said, ‘Coach, I’m exhausted.’ It was only the first quarter.

“It looked like one of those Loyola Marymount games from the Paul Westhead days.”

Haigh said the game plan was to leave open the UConn players who don’t shoot the 3. Let players like Gabby Williams, Stevens and Collier stand at the free throw line and shoot 15-footers.

“We wanted to trade 3s for 2s,” he said.

Instead he traded nothing for 2s.

A No. 16 team had beaten a No. 1 seed before in the women’s game. Injury-savaged Stanford was upset by Harvard in 1998. But the truth is, in terms of competitiveness, the No. 16 seed in the men’s game is closer to a 12 seed in the women’s.

This isn’t meant to demean the women’s game at all. That gap has closed. It used to be closer to a 9 or 10 seed. While a 48-team tournament probably would be closer to what it should be in terms of competitiveness at this point, I’m not for eliminating automatic bids from smaller conferences. The game is growing into a 64-team model.

Yet I’m also not going to play the card played by the staunchest, sometimes blindest supporters of the women’s game. If you don’t like it, don’t watch.

UConn has punched out frightening early-round NCAA Tournament scores with ease over the years. Wins of 50, 60, even 70 are on the menu. The Huskies, so efficient in their execution, also are in a separate compartment when it comes to these grotesque first-round blowouts.

What bothers me — and certainly did not seem to bother Haigh — is that a game plan like his following the wondrous Friday night gives the cynics and cheap-shot artists a chance to demean the sport. Like it or not, he played into their hands.

“As for commentary outside of people here, I hope it doesn’t reflect on our players,” Haigh said. “It can reflect more on a crazy coach trying something different. There’ve been a lot better teams than us lose to them by 50 and 60. We didn’t play keep-away. We weren’t hiding from them. We competed. We were overmatched, but I’m proud of the way we played.”

Only the 117-20 victory over Quinnipiac on Dec. 27, 1998 — 97 points — was larger in UConn history than this one. The Bobcats under Tricia Fabbri are such a different program than 20 years ago. And, now, after pulling away from No. 8 seed Miami 86-72 in the second game at Gampel Pavilion, the No. 9 seed Bobcats play UConn on Monday night. It will be a significant night for basketball in our state.

Fabbri said her staff is looking forward to matching wits with Auriemma. We trust they will not lose their wits like Joe Haigh did.

“I was flabbergasted,” Auriemma said when he awoke Saturday to find out about the UMBC upset of Virginia. “It’s not that anything can’t happen. It just hadn’t happened before.”

And neither had 140 points in a women’s NCAA Tournament game.