Trailing 30-15 to Pitt-Greensburg at halftime of the ECAC Tournament finals, the Hopkins women's basketball team received some motivational locker room wisdom from their veteran assistant coach, Wanda Richardson.
"She said to us, `We don't want to leave like a bunch of punks,'" junior forward Julie Miller said. "We knew it was going to be a long bus ride back from Pittsburgh, so we wanted to do something positive with the situation we were in."
Sure, it wasn't as inspiring as "Win one for the Gipper," but to some degree, Richardson's speech had an effect. The Jays came back firing in the second half, clearly showing they had adjusted to Pitt-Greensburg's quick, guard-oriented style of play.
"Our team went through a lot of adversity this season -- we lost three players to injury, and after the heartbreak of not getting into NCAAs, we wanted to win the ECAC tournament more than anything," freshman guard Caitlin Sloane, who led the Blue Jays in scoring with 14 points, said. "We really wanted to end the season on a good note."
The Jays weren't able to pull off a win in their final game of the season, but they weren't completely unsatisfied by their performance either. They managed an incredible comeback, reducing Pitt-Greensburg's lead to just three points with 11 seconds left in the game.
The Bobcats hit two late free throws to put the Jays out of reach and won, 59-54.
"People were really down and were pretty much stunned going into the locker room at halftime. But the defining thing about this team -- more than any other I've ever been on -- is we never quit," senior guard Katie Kimball said. "It would have been easy to give up, but we battled our way back, and I'm so proud of the way we responded to that. I had enough faith in my team to know that we weren't going to give up."
Thus the Jays provided an emotional finish to an emotional week. On Sunday, Feb. 26, Hopkins lost a close game to Muhlenberg in the Centennial Conference Tournament finals. Soon after the loss, the Jays found out they weren't getting a bid to the NCAA Tournament.
But only three days after the Muhlenberg loss, the Jays rebounded agaist Frostburg State in the first round of the ECAC Tournament, cruising to a 56-38 victory.
"I've seen teams just collapse because they see [ECACs] as a loser's tournament," Kimball said. "I didn't see that this year at all for our team."
After a comfortable 66-52 win over Dickinson, Hopkins was slated to play against Pitt-Greensburg in the tournament finals. The first challenge for the Jays was making sure that their expectations didn't get the best of them. Kimball said that the Bobcats' tallest player was 5'8" (in comparison, the Jays' shortest player is 5'7").
"They were a lot smaller than us, so we probably underestimated them," she said. "They were very well coached, and they were very patient. They used every player to the best of their ability."
Senior forward/center Amanda Leese, one of Hopkins' top post players, said that at the beginning of the game, the Jays had trouble capitalizing on their height advantage.
"I was settling for jump shots when I should have been taking it in to the basket," she said. "We didn't really play to our advantages until the second half."
Hopkins was also playing with a limited bench, as three injuries left the Jays with just ten players in their final tournament. Junior guard Whitney Davis tore her ACL in late December, and freshman guard Jenna Berninger had reconstructive ACL surgery around the same time. The Jays were also without freshman forward Kristin Phillips, who suffered a stress fracture in her foot shortly before the Centennial Tournament.
"I think our legs just weren't with us in the final," Miller said.
Fortunately for the Jays, some of their younger players were able to endure the rigors of a long season and ended up coming through for their team. Leese said teams often use the ECAC Tournament as an opportunity to give their underclassmen some postseason experience, and that in this regard the final game was an auspicious showing for the Jays.
Sloane came off the bench to score 14 points in just 24 minutes, and her classmate Jonay Foster, also a guard, chipped in five points and an assist in 13 minutes of play. Hopkins' two starting guards, Kimball and senior Katie O'Malley, will graduate this spring, but as the Pitt-Greensburg game showed, the Jays will be able to fill their spots in the backcourt.
"Our freshmen played with such amazing heart in the second half, and that speaks volumes for what next season will be like," Leese said. "As a senior leaving, that's great to see."
