Landmark victory for UA women
We have several worthy choices for the most unlikely sports story of the weekend. On a given Saturday or Sunday, any one could win.
• The New York NFL teams come oh, so close to their first sweep of the season, the Giants winning at Seattle and the winless Jets going down to the Raiders on a long pass late.
• Kentucky basketball, losing to Georgia Tech, doesn’t cheer up Big Blue Nation right away. Which begs the question: When does UK ask of John Calipari why, with all this NBA-bound talent, does he not have more than one national championship on his record?
• Kansas, which beat Kentucky in basketball last week, nearly wins a football game. The Jayhawks fall 16-13 to Texas Tech. Halfway expected Kansas athletic director Jeff Long to extend coach Les Miles’ contract and grant him a bonus.
• Speaking of Long, an Arkansas basketball team that he left in rubble has people excited again.
The artists formerly known as Lady Razorbacks dropped an 83-78 upset on fourthranked Baylor. It’s the biggest Arkansas win for coach Mike Neighbors, who replaced Long’s unfortunate choice of an ESPN announcer (but one with Arkansas ties) after he canned Tom Collen.
UA women’s basketball once carried a strong Hot Springs connection. The head coach, whether it be Gary Blair, Susie Gardner or Collen, made recruiting visits here. At one time, two former Hot Springs High Lady Trojans were Lady Razorbacks. Shameka Christon, a high-school and college teammate of Joy Oakley, was the Southeastern Conference’s best women’s player in her senior year, 2003-04, and went on to a WNBA career.
For a spell, the Lady Razorbacks played a game in Hot Springs, at what is now Bank OZK Arena. I knew that couldn’t last when on one occasion, I was the only sportswriter present. Former Sentinel-Record executive editor Melinda Gassaway tirelessly promoted the women’s program and let Blair, then the head coach, know about it in print when Tiffany Wait, a star player at Lake Hamilton, slipped away to Kentucky.
Blair, who could sell a program as well as coach it, took Arkansas to an NCAA Final Four (Tennessee, winning everything then under Pat Summitt, was waiting) and the school’s second WNIT championship. Bev Lewis, the UA women’s athletic director, outbid Wisconsin for the right to host the 1999 WNIT final. Walton Arena wasn’t packed and jumping, as for a men’s game, but Arkansas enjoyed enough of a home-court advantage to prevail on a Tuesday night in Fayetteville.
Arkansas later merged its men’s and women’s athletic departments and Lewis, who did many good things for UA, erred one year in not ponying up the money to arrange a WNIT home game with Arkansas State. The Gardner-coached Arkansas women never had a chance before a vengeful crowd in Jonesboro that came to hoot Frank Broyles, the godfather of Razorback athletics, for dismissing Arkansas State as a future UA rival all those years.
Now, we have Razorback men’s basketball coach Eric Musselman extending an open-door policy in scheduling. “We would love to play an in-state team this week to fill our open date,” Musselman tweeted Monday. “We reached out to every D1 team in state and could not get it to work out for this midweek opening. We are still actively looking for an opponent.”
For years, it was hoped in this space that someone with fresh eyes would consider an Arkansas-ASU football game or Arkansas-UALR (excuse me, Little Rock) basketball game. Hunter Yurachek, the man who
hired Sam Pittman to coach UA football, appears not to be bound by past UA policies. This can only result in a feeling of good will between the schools. Arkansas is too small for any of its fans to develop an elitist attitude toward any school in any sport.
Arkansas could correct its War Memorial Stadium problem with an annual football game against Arkansas State. That makes more sense than dipping into the Southwestern Athletic Conference (Alcorn State) for a Little Rock opponent or repeatedly ignoring Arkansas State among Sun Belt Conference teams.
On the women’s side, Neighbors can use the Baylor game to galvanize interest in his program beyond northwest Arkansas. Chelsea Dungee, from Sapulpa, Okla., and Amber Ramirez (San Antonio) made favorable impressions on TV Sunday. The quality of Arkansas high- school talent improves every year and it is hoped that UA will be in the running for the next Christyn Williams ( Central Arkansas Christian, Connecticut) who comes along. Nothing stamped Arkansas as a wanna-be women’s program more than the two greatest coaches in the women’s game, Geno Auriemma and Summitt (with Morrilton’s Shekinna Stricklen), scouting a player in Hot Springs without a response from Arkansas.
The Baylor game gives Neighbors a major selling point. Short of beating Connecticut, knocking off a Kim Mulkey-coached Baylor squad is good as it gets in women’s basketball these days. Mulkey played at Louisiana Tech when it was the gold standard of the women’s game, and has coached Baylor to three national championships, including the last (2019) that was played.
Arkansas women hadn’t beaten a top- five opponent since an 82-72 takedown of LSU in 2003 (Christon’s junior season at UA, Blair vs. the late Sue Gunter on the sidelines).
“It’s validation for all those kids who believed in us,” said Neighbors, in his fourth season at Arkansas after taking Washington to a Final Four. His early recruits, he said, heard the hoots of, ‘Hey, why are you going to Arkansas? They haven’t done anything.’
“It’s validation for those people in our locker room who buy into what we do. That gives us validation any time somebody’s got defending national champion behind their name.”
They announced the Walton Arena crowd at 2,633, though hundreds more are likely to say they were there.
Mulkey tipped her hat to UA, which made five 3-pointers and 30 of 39 free- throw attempts. “I’m disappointed but not surprised,” she said. “They want to shoot threes, get to the foul line and score layups. And they did two out of three against us well tonight.’
Come to think of it, this is bigger than beating Tennessee and the Mississippi schools in football.