Before the Title Defense, an AD Defended Her Coach
One of the selfishly delicious perks about winning a national championship is the I-told-you-so moment -- that realization that everybody else was wrong and you were right.
Debbie Yow won't go into detail, but the Maryland athletic director had one soon after Brenda Frese snipped the net and her unheralded Maryland women raised the trophy last spring.
|
VIDEO | Lady Terps Unveil Title Banner |
She had hired Frese five seasons ago at age 31. For all the intensity that Frese exhibited, the woman did not yet have a big-time pedigree. So Yow had a "sister-to-sister" chat with Kay Yow, asking the legendary North Carolina State coach what the women's basketball fraternity thought.
"Kay basically said she didn't feel this way, but most people she talked to said Brenda was too young to have this opportunity and I was paying her too much."
Debbie Yow bristled. "We'll see," she said.
She related the story minutes before a banner that read "National Champions 2006" was unfurled at the Comcast Center on Sunday afternoon, the day Maryland began defense of its title at home with a rout of George Mason.
As the banner tumbled and dangled over center court and a video montage of last season played overhead, Yow got choked up and wiped a tear from her left eye. The emotion wasn't just for last season's stunning run through the NCAA tournament.
Thirty years ago, there were nine full-time Division I women's college basketball coaches, including Kay Yow. The rest had to teach physical education. For a coaching stipend and their part-time status, they'd recruit and fight for practice time on the main floor with the men's coach. Mostly, they had faith that Title IX would eventually have an impact on their program before an NCAA good ol' boy came up with Title X, which would probably begin, "Never mind."
Most big-time men's basketball and football programs still foot athletic departments' bills, including at Maryland. But the women have a budget of more than $1 million now. They take private charters to Chapel Hill, too, instead of a minor league bus ride. They also have controversy involving their coach, who is wound tightly enough to elicit a handmade placard at Comcast last season that read, "Fear the Brenda."
As Maryland was dumping the perennial powers in the sport last season, rumors spread that Frese was going above and beyond to recruit the women who would stun Duke and win the national title. Of course, these rumblings came from programs that wanted those kids. Rivals made waves about Frese's uncanny ability to get kids to come to College Park.
To date, the program is not under investigation for any NCAA violation.
"I've obviously heard numerous things of who I am and what I'm about, but at the end of the day I know who I am and what I'm about and what I can do," Frese said. "I understand a lot of people wish they're where we're at. That's where they want to be."
I asked her why, in a profession still fighting for genuine respect from men on many college campuses, there was so much fighting among themselves. Wouldn't that animosity better be directed toward the real enemies outside of women's basketball?
"We're in a fraternity that's not very old; it's the longevity of coaches who've built the game," she said. "Now you're starting to see a lot of new blood coming up. You're starting to see coaches retire. There are a lot of mes out there."
And the Brenda Freses don't bow down to the Pat Summitt-type icons; they beat them without remorse. They keep getting the kids who used to automatically make Tennessee and Connecticut their final two choices.
One of the recruiting rating services, All-Star Girls Report, ranked Maryland's newest class No. 1. Though the Terrapins women have never sold out Comcast Center, crowds of 16,000 and 17,000-plus have come out for the Duke game the past two years. Season ticket holders more than tripled this year, jumping from 2,000 to 7,000.
They still get near-pathetic support from the student body.
"We don't get a huge number of students, but this is a niche market for DND," Yow said.
DND?
"You never heard that? Internally, we use DND for dads and daughters. You know, 'What'd our DND crowd look like?' "
Sure enough, there were several hundred 10- to 12-year-old girls in pigtails, baseball caps and Maryland jerseys, sitting next to their friends and fathers. George Toliver sat next to his daughter Carli, who played four seasons at Lehigh. His younger daughter would have been there as well, but she was busy burying Mason.
Kristi Toliver is the stop-and-pop kid who squared up from the right baseline with six seconds left against Duke, knocking down the biggest shot in school history -- a three-pointer to force overtime in the championship game.
She picked up as a sophomore where she left off as a freshman, letting fly deep rainbows that settled into the netting for 16 first-half points in just 11 minutes despite nursing an injured right leg.
Her father was a longtime NBA referee who has juggled his schedule so that he could see most of Kristi's games; home and away, George has missed three in two years. Watching Kristi move the ball, how she understands the nuances of spacing and timing in just her second year, is truly impressive. She has a steadiness and unflappability belying her 19 years, much of which comes from dissecting NBA tapes with her father as a child.
"There were not that many women's basketball players to emulate at that time, so Michael [Jordan] was her favorite player," George said. "We always talked about basketball. Being a team player. Recognizing when to do certain things, the time to take over a game and the responsibility that went with it.
"I would always tell her to watch Reggie Miller and how he moves off the ball. I would tell her to watch John Stockton and watch how he set up plays in the pick-and-roll and made great passes. I wanted her to identify with people that did good basketball skills well, not just one individual."
Kristi resembles a lot of her teammates; high basketball IQ combined with an innate feel of the game and an ability to score from almost anywhere on the floor. It's a potent combination for a defending champion returning all five starters.
In warmups, the Maryland women don't just go through the routine layup line. They have a drill in which each kid curls around the arc and takes a pass on the right elbow of the free throw line. At one juncture during the drill, they made 21 straight. Ask George Toliver; most NBA teams cannot accomplish that mid-range feat in practice.
The repetition, the muscle memory that results in all those swishes, is something to behold for any basketball junkie -- whether you're a referee, a fan or the choked-up woman on Sunday, who gambled on hiring Brenda Frese and watched Maryland win it all.
