Lack of toughness exposed
AUSTIN — On paper, Monday night’s TexasLouisville matchup promised fireworks.
And we got them. From one team. Texas coach Vic Schaefer didn’t see it this way, but something about his comments leading up to the NCAA Tournament felt prescient. He kept talking about toughness, how his interior players often enjoyed a size advantage but still sometimes allowed themselves to get pushed around by smaller competition.
Monday night’s 73-51 loss was as embarrassing as the score indicated.
Louisville had its way with the Longhorns. Alpha guard Hailey Van Lith, who has made no secret of her displeasure with being left off the Associated Press’ AllAmerica Team — she was third on the “others receiving votes” list — took out her frustration UT guards Rori Harmon, Shay Holle and any others who dared try and lock her up.
She had a couple of words with Texas’ Sonya Morris in the handshake line. I’m no lip reader, but I’m not the only one who swore Morris mouthed the words “honorable mention” to Van Lith, who brushed past her and walked over the Louisville broadcast team muttering words that went a bit past the PG-13 rating.
“I don’t really want to
speak on what happened at the end because I don’t want it to dip down the fact that we played really, really well,” Van Lith said. “I have all the respect in the world for Texas. No hard feelings. You know that sports can get to be in the moment you play in the heat. And at the end of the day, I’m gonna let it go, you know?”
Van Lith finished with 21 points on 8-of-15 shooting and had plenty of help from her teammates. After a 16-16 tie in the first quarter, Louisville outscored the Horns 57-35 the rest of the way. Texas looked hurried, harassed and not anything like a team that won a share of the Big 12 regular-season title.
It was Louisville that dictated the pace. It was Louisville converting
tough buckets inside. It was Louisville being the boss. Texas missed 15 layups on a night its opponent held a 38-20 advantage on the interior.
Schaefer apologized for the product he placed on the floor. Two nights after an easy first-round romp over East Carolina, he was left rubbing his scalp and shaking his head while he read over the final stat sheet with Harmon, who went down in the final couple of minutes with a leg injury, shaking her head in obvious disappointment.
“It’s my responsibility to make sure that we play a lot better than that, but this university deserves better than that,” Schaefer said. “And I’m accountable for that. So I’m certainly disappointed and disheartened, and at the same time, it’s again, my responsibility.”
Toughness isn’t something one acquires overnight, and it should never be selective. Some players are born that way and others have be conditioned through discipline, repetition and sheer-old fashioned hard coaching to find that edge.
“If somebody describes your team as a tough, physical, aggressive team, I don’t care if it’s Sark, I don’t care if it’s (baseball coach David) Pierce, I don’t care who it is,” Schaefer said. “I don’t care if it’s (soccer coach Angela Kelly). You’re going to like that. By the way, that doesn’t say anything about your skill set.”
It’s a mentality, a lifestyle.
“The plan was to be the aggressor,” Harmon said. “We knew they were probably going to be the most aggressive team we played all season. It’s just going to be a battle, and they battled a lot harder than us.”