ASU women will have to wait for another SoCon title chance
Neither Appalachian State nor Samford had their best game Monday in the Southern Conference championship game.
But, in the end, the team that had been there before cut down the nets and picked up the trophy.
Samford, still stinging from a five-point loss to Chattanooga in the SoCon final a year earlier, found a way to win this time.
Coach Darcie Vincent’s Appalachian State program, which hadn’t played in a game with an NCAA Tournament berth on the line since 1999, couldn’t get over the hump and didn’t find a way.
“Something I truly believe in is sometimes you’ve got to play in a game to learn how to win it,” Vincent said.
The Mountaineers failed to score in the final 2:35, going 0 for 3 from the field and 0 for 2 from the free-throw line. They led by as many as nine points, but lost by three.
Vincent recalled a game with a similar outcome when she was coach at California (Pa.) and her team was in the Division II Final Four for the first time.
“We blew it the same way,” Vincent said. “We had probably six open looks at layups, down by a point, we held them and then we couldn’t score six times. We saw that tonight. We had a ton of opportunities to win it, even free throws at the end, and we couldn’t pull it out.
“Hopefully, this is a feeling and experience that these kids will hold onto.”
For the record, Vincent’s California team came back the next season and won a national title.
“Samford has had a couple of years of being in this game and that experience,” Vincent said. “(Emily) London and (Savannah) Hill are very seasoned players…and when things needed to get done, they got it done.”
Hill said that last year’s loss – knowing how it felt to come so close and lose – helped Samford win this time.
“We didn’t want to feel that again,” Hill said. “We said at halftime we didn’t want to feel that again. We didn’t want to have to go through that. So we left it all out on the floor, played our hearts out, and came out with the win.”
Coach Mike Morris of Samford said: “I think we’ve been good enough to win (a title) for five or six years maybe…but I do think you’ve almost got to get here, to the finals, and then come back and I think that experience really paid off.”
ASU, a team with only one senior, will enter next season with a sense of something left undone.
“These kids can go out of this season – and I know we still have a game left, hopefully two or three (in the WNIT) – being satisfied with what we’ve accomplished or they can go and realize, ‘Hey, we worked hard but we were four points shy of winning this whole thing and being in the NCAA Tournament,’” Vincent said. “That’s going to define our team right now.
“That was our national championship team (at California). We won that national championship starting 11 months and 29 days before, from the day we lost that Final Four game, because that’s when those kids began to realize that one thing, that extra thing they needed, that extra hard work, that extra mentality that you bring to the court.
“With such a young team, it’s going to be how long does it sit in the pit of their stomach, how long does it stay in their mind. Are they going to say, ‘We thought we worked hard, but we still wound up short?’ or are they going to sit back and say, ‘Hey, this is good enough, winning the regular-season title, having 20-plus wins again.’ If that happens, I won’t be a happy person next season. But I don’t think that’s the character of these young ladies.”
Until the next NCAA Tournament opportunity comes, a team that went from nine wins two years ago to 23 and a Women’s Basketball Invitational title last season, will continue to build with an opportunity in the WNIT.
“The groundwork we’ve laid with these kids and the quick movement up, you can’t lose sight of that,” Vincent said. “It’s been amazing. It’s hard to imagine that you go from nothing to what we did last year to ‘Boom, you’re in the NCAA Tournament.’
“Now it’s going to come down to if they’re satisified or not, and how they deal with this thing (heading into next year’s SoCon Tournament). If they want it, it’s going to be theirs for the taking. If they don’t, they’re going to have a lot more disappointment.”