UC Davis has become the Big West Conference’s women’s basketball behemoth, to the point that even two months of inactivity couldn’t slow the Aggies down.
Davis is going to back-to-back NCAA Tournaments – sort of – after a 61-42 victory over UC Irvine in Saturday evening’s conference tournament final at the Mandalay Bay resort in Las Vegas. The Aggies, who outscored UCI 21-8 in the fourth quarter to break open a reasonably close game, visited the NCAAs in 2019 after winning the Big West Tournament in Anaheim. As for 2020 … well, we know what happened there.
But the cancellation of last year’s conference and NCAA tournaments was just the start. Pandemic Basketball has had a lot of strange, first-of-their-kind occurrences this season, as positive COVID-19 tests and sudden cancellations have led to interesting scheduling contortions.
How do you explain not playing a game for nearly two months and still mowing down the opposition at the end?
UC Davis opened its season on Nov. 25, beating San Francisco at home. The Aggies’ next game was Jan. 22, five weeks into the conference season, at home against UC San Diego. The record will show that they’ve won 13 of their 15 games, losing only at Oregon in an added game on Feb. 6 and at Hawaii in the last weekend of the regular season.
The record doesn’t show how the stay-at-home order in Yolo County prevented them from even practicing together for a full month, how not knowing when they might be able to play again wore on players, and how joyous it must have been when they finally were able to get back on the court.
In fact, when Coach Jennifer Gross assembled her players on a Zoom meeting to inform them the stay-at-home order had been lifted and they’d be able to play again, she was taken aback at first.
“They were all on mute,” she recalled. “I looked around like, ‘What’s going on?’ And then I said, ‘Please, unmute,’ and then they unmuted and it was like a huge celebration.”
For a full month, the players were shut out of their own gym, couldn’t use anyone else’s, and were limited to individual work as well as trying to keep each other sane.
“It was really, you know, banding together,” said Cierra Hall, the senior forward from Anaheim’s Fairmont Prep who was this year’s Big West Player of the Year. “We had a team meeting (to ask), ‘Is this what we want to do?’ And everybody was 100 percent all in that when we were able to move forward, we’re going to put 100 percent effort into this and we’re going to work our way to get to where we are now.
“And so it was definitely tough, you know, in that time when we could only play against each other. We couldn’t even have practice players this year. It was a lot of just day in, day out against each other. And it would have been easy for us to just be like, ‘OK, you know, this is getting hard.’ But it was really amazing to see everybody come forward and say, ‘No, we’re trying to win a championship this year. We’re going to come in every single day and put in the hard work and the effort that it takes to get to where we are now.’”
The pandemic had an effect on everyone, without a doubt. UCI head coach Tamara Inoue, who shared regular-season Coach of the Year honors with Gross, noted that in addition to the normal leadership displayed by the Anteaters’ seniors – who were part of her first recruiting class as UCI coach – there were also accomplishments peculiar to Pandemic Basketball.
“We went through a full season with not one positive case,” she said. “You know, we isolated. We’ve done everything we’re supposed to do here. Not every team does that, you know? And I think that’s a big testament right there. That’s not the coaches. Those are the players making sure off the court we’re doing what we’re supposed to be doing.”
As has been noted before, by other players in other sports, the definition of a good teammate has expanded in the last 12 months. Now, unselfishness not only means just passing the ball. It also means living your life to keep yourself and your teammates safe, and it means being mentally tough under conditions that few would have dreamed of before these last 12 months.
“It was tough to get here,” Hall said. “It was not easy.
“Normally when we’re in March you’re playing your best basketball because you’ve worked all the kinks out. But for us, it was like, ‘OK, we’re still learning how to play together. But our chemistry was amazing and it was just so great to see every single person 100 percent committed, no matter what the role was to winning a championship.”
Sophomore Evanne Turner, the pride of Etiwanda High, added: that one “of the other things we learned was just that we’re willing to play for each other. We’re going out there to put it all out for our staff and our teammates; no matter what the outcome is, we’re going out and putting it all out there on the court. And that’s just a beautiful thing to see. Knowing that my teammates have my back like I have theirs is just an amazing feeling.”
They were in a bubble in Las Vegas. Now they’ll be in a bubble in San Antonio, where the entire 64-team NCAA women’s tournament will be held. After dealing with two months off, you think they mind?
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