Articles to read to fill the time until tip off:
From Curt Rallo at the South Bend Tribune: Notre Dame women’s basketball: Irish not afraid to cut loose
Notre Dame coach Muffet McGraw said that she has allowed their team to develop its own identity, and that its looseness is an asset.
“I really have adjusted well to them,” McGraw said. “I just try to stay out of their way. I really try to stay away from them as much as possible game day, pregame. They’re loose, they’re singing, they’re dancing, and I want them to have their own personality. I don’t want to try to impose my will on them. So I’ve really let them pretty much dictate how things are going to be. And if it gets loud, that’s great, because that’s when they’re most comfortable.
Cheryl Coward at Hoop Feed has a little Video: Texas A&M’s Sydney Colson talks about facing the Ogwumike sisters
Happy Birthday, NCAA tournament: Women’s basketball Final Four turns 30 – Women’s basketball had large obstacles on the way to its current stature
“I don’t want to say they’re lucky,” said Debbie Oing, who will be watching on ESPN, “but they are.”
Oing played in the 1973 Final Four, conducted by the Association for Intercollegiate Athletics for Women (AIAW), and became Indiana University’s first women’s basketball All-American two years later. She played for a graduate assistant coach. She bought her own gym shoes. She paid her own way. Her Hoosiers backcourt mate, Tara VanDerveer, now coach of Stanford, did the same.
IU, like most schools, provided no women’s scholarships.
Stacy Clardie at the Journal Gazette asks: Great, or the greatest? Moore in conversation as best women’s player ever
Yet when Moore was asked what she makes of this conversation and where she ranks among the game’s greats, she responded in typical modest Moore fashion.
“I don’t get to hear it a whole lot,” she said with a glance over at coach Geno Auriemma, which drew laughter from reporters. “So I really don’t have an opinion about it.”
From Aggie Sports: Texas A&M women’s basketball notebook
Texas A&M head women’s basketball coach Gary Blair, feeding off the underdog role, went Hoosiers on the Aggies at the end of practice Saturday at Conseco Fieldhouse.
From Vickie Fulkerson at The Day: Huskies’ point guard guarding against freshman moments
For a good part of the season, UConn coach Geno Auriemma busied himself haranguing his 18-year-old freshman point guard, Bria Hartley. He reminded Hartley on more than one occasion that she was about to become the program’s first point guard since Jen Rizzotti (1993) to commit more turnovers than she had assists.
Now comes the Final Four.
Jere’ at the NY Times has: UConn’s Kelly Faris Has Been There Before
When Faris arrived at UConn last season as a freshman, Auriemma told her, “My goal is to see whether or not kids from Plainfield, Ind., have teeth because I’ve never seen yours and I’ve known you for three years.”
She is as stoic on the court as he is animated, playing with a solemn determination, betraying no more emotion than a Politburo member at a May Day parade.
If this were a team of gymnasts instead of basketball players, Faris would be the spotter, quietly and dutifully making sure that all landings were soft and controlled. She guards the opponent’s best player, leads UConn in minutes played, and ranks second to Maya Moore with 6.7 rebounds per game, 137 assists and 68 steals.
The ESPN crew has:
A tutorial of Texas A&M traditions
Maybe you’ve never seen the joyous zealotry that goes with Texas A&M athletics. Or maybe you have but weren’t sure exactly what it was you were seeing.
I really didn’t know until the Big 12 began 15 years ago, although I’d been a sports fan all my life. But once the Texas schools merged with those of the conference I had grown up with, the Big Eight, we Midwesterners had to catch up on a lot of Lone Star State traditions.
And no school has more of those than Texas A&M, home of the “12th Man” in football, the Corps of Cadets, yell leaders and the phrase “Gig ’em!” — among other things.
Notre Dame forward Devereaux Peters is excited to be on familiar footing as Sunday’s national semifinal against Connecticut approaches. But before anyone starts making space on the bulletin board, it’s neither the fourth meeting with a rival nor Conseco Fieldhouse’s Indiana ZIP code that has the Big East Defensive Player of the Year smiling.
Forget the surroundings. After suffering a torn ACL in her left knee twice in the span of 10 months in 2008 and trekking the long road back to full health, Peters is just happy to once again be familiar with the player inhabiting her own jersey.
