DALLAS – What do you tell yourself, when you have to play the colossus known as UConn? You start with your last double-digit butt whipping at their hands, and you watch the film on it over and over again, the lowlights and the highlights, not once or twice, but enough times that it becomes grooved in your mortified psyche. Then you tell yourself that at least you don’t have to live through that one again. You tell yourself you’ve grown from it, and now that you’ve seen their standard up close, their unrelenting headlong speed on every possession, their habitual purposefulness on every single play, maybe you can meet it.
Maybe it will all be different next time. Maybe this UConn team (36-0) will be the vulnerable or complacent ones, after piling up record 111 straight victories, and maybe you’ll be ones who finally knock them off in the big one. At least, that’s the approach Mississippi State (33-4) is taking on the eve of the women’s NCAA Final Four, and why not? It’s better than telling themselves they’re going to lose by 60 again. Which is what happened in last year’s Sweet 16: a beat-up and stage-frightened Bulldogs team lost by 98-38.
“We see it every day,” guard Victoria Vivians said. “It didn’t leave our heads at all.”
You tell yourself not to look at all of UConn’s weighty numbers, the 10 straight Final Fours, the 863 days since their last loss. Or the way the Huskies lost last year’s top three players, Breanna Stewart, Moriah Jefferson and Morgan Tuck, to the WNBA draft, only for it to turn out that among their understudies were three more budding all-Americans in Napheesa Collier, Katie Lou Samuelson and Gabby Williams. If you worry about that, you’ll get “so consumed with everything about our opponent that it can get overwhelming, frankly,” Bulldogs Coach Vic Schaefer said. Instead, you just put one foot in front of another, and try to focus on doing all the little things as well as they do. “Win the minute, win the hour, win the day,” Schaefer said.
You tell yourself that you’re a whole new team this year – and just maybe that’s true. Last year, the Bulldogs’ point guard, Morgan William, had a cracked tibia that required her to wear a support and she often couldn’t practice at full speed, or sometimes at all. This season, she is fully healthy and a 5-foot-5 little giant who had 41 points and seven assists in taking down Baylor to get to Friday’s meeting with Goliath. You tell yourself that you’ve scored in the 90s twice so far in the tournament, and you can do some business against UConn, too.
“I feel like we’re in better condition to go out there and compete,” William said. “Last year, I feel like we were a little timid to go out there, and it showed. This year, I feel a different vibe in the locker room, practice, that we can go out there and compete with them.”
“I just think we learned that we cannot be all tied up,” Dominique Dillingham said. “Came out, they had us down by 20-to-something already.”
You tell yourself that this time you’ve been there before, and so has your coach. Schaefer, 56, is a 32-year veteran who has clawed his way up from the bargain basement of the sport. He started out at Sam Houston State, where he swears he recruited his first class “out of a newspaper.” By his fifth season, he was coach of the year in the Southland Conference, but he was so poor that he was willing to give up his head coaching job for one as an assistant to Gary Blair at Arkansas. He and his wife had year-old twins and were $25,000 in debt, and he was making only $35,000 a year. “I had to do it for my family,” he says. Blair offered to double his salary and give him a courtesy car, plus $1,000 worth of apparel. He followed Blair to Texas A&M where they and the Aggies won the national championship in 2011. The next year, he moved to Mississippi State, a head coach again after 15 years.
You tell yourself that a coach with that much hard experience knows what he’s doing – and what he didn’t know, he decided to study in the offseason, picking Geno Auriemma’s brain one morning when he ran into him on the road recruiting.
“Kind of like being around somebody that’s 100,” Schaefer said. “If you’re 100 years old, I want to know what you’re eating for breakfast. I want to know what time you’re eating breakfast, what you’re eating for lunch.”
You tell yourself that as painful as it was to watch all that film of UConn’s 60-point beatdown on you last season, it was worth it because you mean to compete with them this time. The Bulldogs watched the film when they got home after getting bounced, and then Schaefer showed it to them again at the start of this season, “Just to remind you how fast the game can get away from you,” Dillingham said.
Then there was the daily reminder their strength coach posted in the weight room: a large sign that said “60.” Schaefer showed them some pieces of that horrible game film yet again just the other day, for good measure. To remind them that the inconsequential possession doesn’t exist for UConn, they do nothing casually, ever, and they take advantage of every lackadaisical moment by their opponent.
You tell yourself that this time you’ll know what to do better. How to handle the pressure of the moment, the pressure they bring every time up the court, and pressure of that name across their chests. You tell yourself it’s not something to dread; rather, it’s an opportunity: “We get a chance at redeeming ourselves from what we went through last year,” sophomore center Teaira McCowan said.
“I think it’s motivation knowing where we are from, and how far we came,” guard Roshunda Johnson said.
“We have a chance just like everybody else has a chance,” Vivians said.
That’s what you tell yourself, anyway.