Northwestern University Athletics
The Morning After...NU's Heartbreaking Loss to Alabama
3/21/2011 12:00:00 AM | Women's Basketball
March 21, 2011
NUsports.com special contributor Skip Myslenski takes a look back at Northwestern's second-round WNIT loss to Alabama Sunday afternoon.
There had been scratching and clawing, banging and bruising, air-borne bodies and contact enough for the Ultimate Fighting ring, and now this second-round game of the WNIT between the Wildcats and Alabama was tied at 70 and rushing toward its conclusion. This had been a perfervid affair, one of those games where the pitch of the hill traveled by the players just kept getting steeper, and now here was Kaneisha Horn, a `Bama forward, going up in a forest of bodies for a layup that missed.
There was a scramble now and Horn corralled the ball and up again she went, and this time she was blocked by 'Cat center Amy Jaeschke. Again the ball was free and here it was grabbed by Tierney Jenkins, another `Bama forward, and she would not miss, she would instead put in the layup that pushed her team up two with 7.2 seconds remaining. "Rebounding's what my team expects out of me," she would later say.
"One thing we say about Tierney, and the reason she is a good rebounder, is she goes after the ball," said her coach, Wendell Hudson. "She's relentless going after the ball, especially those offensive rebounds."
"We did a good job of forcing them to take a hard shot. They miss. But we couldn't rebound," said 'Cat coach Joe McKeown. "That was the killer."
Still his team had a chance and, without a timeout left, guard Tailor Jones quickly pushed the ball up the left side and crossed half court and then suddenly, as had happened often in this affair, she found herself trapped. She did not panic. She instead found senior guard Meisha Reed, and now here was Reed driving hard down the left side of the lane.
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Back in 1994, when he was the head coach of Arkansas, Nolan Richardson led his Razorbacks to the national title behind a style he called "40 Minutes Of Hell." It demanded constant pressing and inordinate pressure and vats filled with sweat, and this is just the way Alabama played Sunday at Welsh-Ryan Arena. There was nothing pretty here. This was instead hand-to-hand combat, a back-alley brawl, barely-controlled mayhem, borderline recklessness, a contest that promised even the survivors would walk away with swollen lips and battered bodies.
"We always want to play this way," Hudson, its coach, will later explain. He was, back in 1969, the first African-American to be given an athletic scholarship by Alabama and, later, he was a second-round draft choice of the Bulls and a teammate of Jerry Sloan. He, then, has a royal pedigree, but here he continued, "I'm one of those people who likes the game to get a little sloppy. I don't need it as organized as some other people.
"I think basketball is the most over-coached sport in the world. We like to go up and down the floor, and we like to press, and we like to get easy baskets. What we really like to do, and what we've been doing this year, is coach 'em in practice and they get to play the game. That's the way we've approached it. We haven't put anything new in, we haven't devised a new scheme for the next team we're going to play. We know what we would like to do and now we'll just make little adjustments for what the other team is going to do. What we hope is other people aren't going up and down the floor as much as we are and that they're not comfortable doing that. I think that has worked well for us."
And does he, like Richardson, have a name for his style?
"We don't have any fancy names," he said with a chuckle. "Just basketball. It's just playing basketball."
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Hudson got his wish. This game was sloppy from the start and without a touch of elegance right to its end. The 'Cats committed four turnovers in its first three minutes and quickly fell behind by seven, but here they composed themselves and went up one just over eight minutes in. Now they committed four turnovers in the next 2:45 to again fall behind by seven, and from here they clawed back to within two by halftime.
"I think they definitely got rattled," 'Bama's Jenkins would later say. "Starting off, we got that run, and I don't think they were used to it, how we play. That happens in every game we play."
"It was hard to recreate what Alabama was going to do in practice," said Wildcat point guard, Beth Marshall. "But we focused a lot on their full court pressure, and I think that's what really hurt us during the game. We're pressured in the Big Ten. But they're very athletic and you have to give them credit. They did a great job pressuring us in the backcourt and making it hard for us to get in our offense."
"We worked for two days against their press. I thought we were ready for it," said McKeown. "But it's just hard to recreate that and their quickness going to the offensive glass. Speed and quickness is hard to recreate in a day-and-a-half practice."
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The 'Cats would finish with 24 turnovers. 'Bama would finish with 19 steals. Still, as the second half unwound, the 'Cats did adjust, and now this one would be tied at 38, at 40, at 42 and 48 and 50. 'Bama's Jenkins, going for a ball that is flying out-of-bounds, climbs Marshall's back and floors her, but Marshall pops up and brushes herself off. 'Bama's Horn, looking to get through a Jaeschke screen, drives her to the ground, but Jaeschke pops up and brushes herself off. Horn, this time going for a steal, clips (in the football sense) Tailor Jones into a crumpled heap, but Jones pops up and brushes herself off.
"It's the way it should be. Basketball is very competitive. It's what we live for," Meisha Reed would later say of this game's physical nature, and so the Wildcats simply played on, played on even after falling behind by seven at 7:17. There was no quit in them this day, no hesitation to join the fray. They instead absorbed every flurry 'Bama threw at them, absorbed them and shook them off and responded with some snake licks of their own, and now here was Reed, her team down three, kissing in a lay up at 3:43 to bring it back to within one; and here was Marshall, her team down five, dropping a three at 2:51 to bring it back to within two; and here was Jaeschke, her team down four, hitting a baby jumper at 2:06 to bring it back to within two; and, finally, here was Marshall again, her team down two, cold-bloodedly burying a right baseline jumper at :27 to tie this one up at 70.
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Now Meisha Reed, her team back down two, is driving the left side of the lane, and in front of her loom any number of 'Bama bodies. She does not hesitate, she simply drives on, and she offers up a lay up and it catches the bottom of the backboard and it bounces away and the buzzer sounds and she drops into a deep knee bend and her head, like some rag doll's, limply falls forward.
"There was a little bit of contact," she will later say, "but this is a contact sport. With that, I still need to make the shot. That's something Coach McKeown preaches every day. 'Score when you get fouled.'"
"Meisha got to the basket, looked to me she got hit," says McKeown himself. "But there were a lot of plays during the game that could have gone the other way."
"I thought it was a hard fought basketball game between two teams who were really hungry and trying to continue their season," says Bama's Hudson. "I thought both teams played real hard ... Nobody gave up ... Both teams weren't ready for their season to be over."
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Long minutes later, their season abruptly over, Amy Jaeschke and Beth Marshall and Meisha Reed are seated behind a small table. They are their team's only seniors and they had, under McKeown, helped transform their 'Cat program from perennial bottom-feeders into one that has now appeared in consecutive post-season tournaments. It is natural, then, to ask their feelings now, now that their work is complete and their careers are behind them.
"I'm proud of what we've done, and of my teammates," says Marshall, their fire, their soul, their heartbeat. "There's no one else I'd like taking that last second shot than Meisha Reed. You know, it's tough that it's over. But I'll look back and smile."
"It's kind of shock, disbelief, to look up at the scoreboard and see you're not on top," says Jaeschke, their most-acclaimed performer. "It's kind of weird knowing that you don't have to worry about what time practice is tomorrow and stuff like that. It's kind of hard."
"Me taking the last shot, it was kind of like, 'Wow, this is it,'" says Reed, their slasher, their dasher, their grit. "But like B said, we had a great run and we did a great job of helping turn this program around. And I can guarantee you, next year you will see this team in the NCAAs."
Then they are gone and McKeown is in their place and his eyes are vacant and his complexion is wan. "It's just unbelievable to end your season like that. It's heartbreaking for our seniors, for our team," he is then saying, and his tones recall those of a preacher eulogizing at a funeral. "Right after the game, as a coach, you have a lot of emotions you're going through, so it's hard for me to look at the big picture. But the big picture, what those three did for this program, is just incredible. For us to win 37 games the last two years, to win three post-season games, just to do things that had not been done, win a Big Ten tournament game, be competitive every night with some of the best teams in the country.
"But more important is what they did in the locker room everyday, what they did when things were tough, how they brought young people into the program and showed them this is how Northwestern should work. I just can't say enough about those three."
