TITLE FOES FRIENDLY AS CAN BE
Brittney Sykes
I NDIANAPOLIS didn’t care if she was technically supposed to consider Breanna Stewart some kind of enemy for the next 24 hours. It was not going to happen.
Monday morning, Sykes checked Instagram and noticed that the SportsCenter account had posted a side-by-side photo of her and Stewart to set up Tuesday’s title-game matchup between Syracuse and Connecticut. So she had to break whatever do-nottalk-to-the-opponent code that exists and text Stewart.
They are close friends and former teammates, after all.
“She immediately texted me back and told me that she was gonna post it on Instagram as her game-day picture,” Sykes said. “I thought it was pretty cool.”
Sykes and Stewart have been friends since ninth grade. They grew up 240 miles apart, Stewart from North Syracuse, N.Y., and Sykes from Newark. But they played on the prominent AAU team the Philadelphia Belles. They talk regularly. One game — even for the national title — isn’t going to halt communication.
“We’re not gonna black out each other,” Sykes said. “We understand inside those four lines, I guess the cliché word is ‘enemies.’ But we know we’re just playing a game.”
UConn is trying to win its fourth consecutive title and NCAA-record 11th, while Syracuse is looking for its first. The friends have played against each other twice, when they were freshmen in the 2012-13 season when their teams were still part of the Big East. The Huskies won both matchups by double digits.
Stewart isn’t one for longwinded answers, especially if she’s the topic. But Monday when asked about her relationship with Sykes, she went on for several minutes. Two years ago, Sykes tore an anterior cruciate ligament in a second-round game in the NCAA tournament. And as soon as she recovered and was cleared to play in the beginning of 2015, she tore it again. She missed all of last season, and Stewart was there for her.
“My relationship with Brittney Sykes is like no other,” Stewart said. “We’re in constant contact. When she went through what she went through, I was there. You don’t wish that on anyone, and I knew she was gonna come back and really fight and push through that. And I think the way she’s come back, she didn’t let it dictate what was going to happen to her. It took a lot of courage, and the fact that she’s helped bring her team to the national championship game when just last year she wasn’t playing shows a lot about her and her willingness to not give up.”
Sykes said she didn’t want to talk to a lot of people during those injuries. But she picked up the phone for Stewart.
“She would text me almost every day to make sure that I was OK, if I needed anything,” Sykes said. “Her parents are like my parents away from home. They made sure they checked on me and asked if I needed anything or if I needed to just get away to just give them a call and help me understand that it’s going to be OK. I really appreciated that from her and her family.”