Archdeacon
final buzzer sounded.
The Dayton women had just extended their wondrous NCAA Tournament run, upsetting No. 3 seed Louisville, 82-66, and pushing their way straight into Monday night’s Elite Eight game with powerful Connecticut, the two-time defending national champion and the undisputed top-rated team in all of women’s college basketball again this year.
The emotion of the moment — the Flyers had never been to the Sweet 16 before, much less gotten to a game away from the Final Four — overflowed when Hoover finally spied UD assistant athletics director Mike Kelly.
She hustled up, promptly turned herself into Floyd Mayweather and treated him like he was a red-sweatered speed bag. She fired off a volley of air punches aimed in the direction of Kelly’s face and they both laughed.
Six days earlier it had been a little different.
When the Flyers stunned No. 2 seed Kentucky on the Wildcats’ home floor last Sunday — a court where UK had won 54 straight home games — Hoover, who had fouled out early, was so overjoyed that she tried celebrating with Kelly.
“He raised his hand up for a high five, but I was so excited that I swung and missed and actually punched him in the face,” she admitted. “So that’s why this time I acted like I was punching him in the face.”
There was a rumor that the AD got a bit of a black eye out of it.
“It was the only shot she missed,” Kelly said with a laugh Saturday.
He was referring more to a big part of Hoover’s effort against Louisville. And because of it, she left the Cardinals with more than a black eye. She was the biggest reason they got knocked out cold Saturday in Albany.
The box score tells only part of Hoover’s story in this one.
She was the only player on either team to play all 40 minutes. She finished with a game-high 26 points, a game-high five assists and was a perfect 15-for-15 from the free throw line.
More than that, she set the tone for Dayton in the second half.
The Flyers — who shot poorly from long range in the first half and turned the ball over 14 times — managed to hold a 30-29 edge at the break.
In the first three minutes of the second half, Hoover was especially aggressive, scrapping for rebounds against the taller Louisville players, driving to the basket and forcing one Cardinal after another to foul her.
She had six of UD’s first eight points and after that the Flyers began to separate themselves from Louisville. Eighteen of her points came in the second half.
Fellow senior Ally Malott knows Hoover the best of any Flyer:
“Hoover is the definition of grit. Whenever the ball is in her hands, we have so much trust in her. She’s gonna make positive things happen. She never gives up on herself or her teammates. “She wills us to win.” Certainly other Flyers played a big part in this historic victory: Center Jodie Cornelie-Sigmundova had her best game ever with 12 points, 11 rebounds and four blocked shots. Guard Amber Deane came off the bench and scored all 15 of her points in the second half. Kelley Austria added 10 points.
But Hoover was the linchpin.
Interestingly, as she was starring at little Spring Valley Academy outside of Dayton, she was never recruited by the Cardinals. Not by Kentucky either, she said.
“I got recruited by small mid-major schools and I committed to Dayton early,” she said. “I did have a good AAU season after my junior year and people started to come out of the woodwork, but I was signed to Dayton. This was where I wanted to be and it was for this very reason right here today.
“When I was like a sophomore or junior, I remember (Dayton) went to the NCAA Tournament for the first time and they were excited. When Ally and I got here as freshmen, the seniors had set the foundation of going to the tournament every year and we just adopted it.
“Then our goal was to make the next step and go to the Sweet 16. The Kentucky win got us over the hump and we showed we weren’t going to back down from anybody. We have that confidence.
“And now, when you get this far, you just want to keep winning.”
Of course she and everybody else knows it will take the utmost of herculean efforts for the Flyers to just hold their own against UConn.
The Huskies (35-1) have won their games by an average of more than 42 points this season.
They ran roughshod over Texas, 105-54, in the other regional semifinal Saturday in Albany. In their other two NCAA tournament games this year, they routed Rutgers by 36 and St. Francis by 56.
In all, UConn has decimated 11 opponents by 56 or more points this season.
After his game, St, Francis coach John Thurston compared the Huskies to the UCLA men’s teams that won seven titles in the 1960s and 1970s. In the past 22 years, UConn has been to 15 Final Fours, won nine national titles and had five perfect seasons.
The Flyers played at UConn in one of the first games of Hoover’ freshman season at UD. They lost by 40.
“I still remember getting blasted on a screen,” she said. “They were a great team then and they are a great team now. They’re the type team every NCAA team wants to be. I have the utmost respect for them, but we’re gonna go play our butts off against them.
“This is an honor, a privilege to be in this game and it says something about us, too.
“In women’s basketball, only a select few schools get to the Elite Eight. The same ones are there every year, just like the Final Four. You don’t really have schools like Dayton in there that haven’t been on the map.
“And truthfully, I don’t think a lot of people believed we could do this except for people in our community and our coaches and us as players. Those are the only people that really know the kind of fight we have.”
Well, and Mike Kelly, too.
He’s felt the Flyers’ punch.