This was a nice article that was in the Ruston Newspaper. It certainly gives us lots of hope for the future:
Techsters tough it out
Can the program regain its dominance?
O.K. "Buddy" Davis, buddy@rustonleader.com
03-09-2008
If head coach Chris Long didn’t know any better, he might think a player named Murphy was on the roster for Louisiana Tech University’s Lady Techsters.
Because in this 2007-08 season, the Murphy’s Law concept has been prevalent: If anything can go wrong, it probably will.
For a once-dominating program that could practically walk out on the floor and scare the sneakers off their opponents, it’s been one obstacle or mishap after another since the season tipped off back in November.
Or one turnover, missed shot or mishandled rebound.
Or an injury.
Or an overload of youth and inexperience.
All of which has added up to a stress-inducing, baffling and — yes — disappointing season for Long, his players and loyal fan base.
‘Toughest year’
”This has been the toughest year of my professional life,” said Long, who is winding down his third season at the helm. “I know I’ve worked harder and looked at more film than at any other time in my career. It’s all about weathering the storm. I really feel that with the recruits we’ve got coming in, this program can get back to where it belongs.”
Going into a Western Athletic Conference series this week at Hawaii and San Jose State, the Techsters were facing a once unthinkable situation: The possibility of a losing record for the regular season.
The 13 losses that Tech carried into this week matched last year’s total for the most ever suffered in a single campaign — regular or overall — since the program began in 1974.
Accentuating a rare double-digit defeat total for the Techsters have been six setbacks at home, including a rough stretch in December at the Thomas Assembly Center when four consecutive L’s were registered, one of them being against I-20 nemesis Louisiana-Monroe.
Usually accustomed to being at the top of the standings in conference play, the Techsters have found themselves this season in the middle of the WAC pack and being one of the pursuers, rather than the pursued.
National top 25 rankings?
No longer.
Save for winning the championship of this week’s WAC postseason tournament, the Techsters could be sitting out the NCAA playoffs for the second year in a row. Had that possibility been mentioned only five years ago, it would have been cause for puzzled looks and a “yea, right” reply.
At times, this season has been unsettling enough to make the most avid and loyal Lady Techsters fan want to mumble some unprintable words to the red and blue banner he or she might be waving for the team.
“It’s been tough, very tough,” said Monroe’s David Creed, who has followed the program religiously since 1981. “Sometimes this year, it’s been difficult to watch a game. But I’m not about to give up on them. I am going to keep supporting them and I’m going to keep renewing my season tickets.”
High expectations
Given the incredible milestone and record-setting success the Lady Techsters have enjoyed through the years, the vast majority of programs in the nation would gladly swap places and endure their current struggles.
It’s just that with the Techsters, winning and winning often has come to be expected.
Remember, we’re talking about a program that won the last Association of Intercollegiate Athletics for Women national title, the first NCAA national championship, totaled the third most wins (65) in NCAA tourney history and made it to 13 Final Fours.
Anything less than winning conference championships and reaching the NCAA tourney is considered by many as a season gone awry for the Lady Techsters.
“The expectations have always been very high here,” said long-time Techsters fan Carolyn Ashley of Delhi. “I understand that, and it’s part of being the great program that Tech always has been. But I also think that, when your team is going through some tough times, that’s when you need to support them even more. I really have more of a problem with fans who might quit coming to games because they’re not winning as much as I do with how our team might be playing.”
Even with that first-ever “no show” in last year’s NCAA tournament, the Techsters entered this season with high hopes. After a sluggish start in 2006-07, where they lost nine of their first nine games, they rallied back to take 15 wins in their last 21 games and went on to share their 15th regular season conference title.
The respect was still there, too, in the preseason polls. Despite not having a single starter back from the 17-13 club of last year and with seven underclassmen on the roster, Tech was a consensus runner-up choice in the WAC race.
“You always go into a season believing you can have success and that’s how we felt, even though so many of us were new to each other and we were so young,” said Techsters senior guard Nastassja Levingston. “Once the season began, we saw that the inexperience and youth that we had could make it tougher for us to achieve some of the things we wanted.”
Youth will be served
Of the 338 NCAA Division I programs fielding women’s basketball, Tech went into the season as the most inexperienced. There were only four career starts by roster members.
In the category of using underclassmen, the Techsters have ranked in the nation’s top 28 for most minutes played by first- and second-year players, further accentuating the plight that accompanies the reliance on youth.
Combine that with injuries suffered by two projected starters within less than two months of each other, and it quickly decreased any high aspirations the Techsters might have envisioned when preseason workouts began in October.
“On the second day of our preseason practice, Sidney Stewart suffers a knee injury,” Long recalled about the highly touted freshman from DeMascus, Ark., who was scheduled as a starting guard. “She misses all of our preseason.”
On Dec. 8, as the final seconds tick down on a home loss against the University of Southern Mississippi, Baylor University transfer and former West Monroe High all-stater Whitney Jones suffers a season-ending knee injury that further depletes an already decimated guard position.
“You’re talking about a player who had scored 16 points in the second half against Tennessee, then the No. 1 team in the nation,” Long said. “That’s the caliber of player we lost when Whitney was hurt and had to sit out the remainder of the season.”
The injuries also made an immediate impact on minutes played per game.
“We’ve had to play some freshmen and sophomores 30 or more minutes a game, whereas they would have normally played probably around 15 or 20, at the most,” Long said. “Again, it figures into the inexperience factor of this year’s team.”
Frustrating losses
It would be understandable if Long, the WAC Coach of the Year award winner in 2006, thought somebody had placed a black cat in the team’s locker room after the near-coinciding events regarding Stewart and Jones.
It would seem to be a bad omen for what would transpire over the next several months, among them a disappointing, uninspiring defeat to the University of Louisiana-Monroe at the Thomas Assembly Center in mid-December. The Warhawks out-hustled their I-20 nemesis much of that night. The loss was in the middle part of a four-game home stretch in which other defeats were administered by USM, Mississippi State and LSU.
Shortly afterward, a road defeat occurred against the University of Arkansas-Little Rock.
“Those were frustrating losses against ULM and UALR, because our fans have come to expect us beating those teams,” Levingston said. “It hurt us to lose because usually we’re winning those games.
“But I think a lot of what happened to us earlier in the season was because we were young and still learning how to play together and as one team. It’s taken a while for so many new players, so many young players especially, to get used to each other and what needs to be done in order to get better.”
Teammate and WAC Player of the Year candidate Jo Sneed agreed.
“This season has not only been frustrating, it’s also been a big learning experience for all of us. I know some of the fans might not understand it at times, but it takes a while for players to get used to each other, know what we are going to do in certain situations and how to react to certain things. I think, overall, we’ve made some progress and that we’re playing better basketball now because of having learned about each other.”
Late season surge?
The Techsters went into this week with a streak of three straight wins and four out of their last five, two of the victories having boosted the team to an 8-6 mark against WAC opponents.
Said Jim Oakes, the university’s athletic director: “Successful teams are remembered for how they finish, not how they start. Our team appears to be peaking at the right time as we head into the final weeks of the season.”
Rather than dwell on what happened earlier in the season, Levingston is more concerned about making the best of what remains this season.
“We’re always thinking about what’s ahead of us and down the road,” said the former Ruston High School star. “I know it’s been very disappointing, some of the games we’ve lost and how this season has come along, but you can’t dwell on the past. For whatever reason — youth or inexperience or injuries — we’ve got to move on and keep trying. As a team, we all realize that our fans expect a lot out of the program and want the best. So do we. It’s been tough on us and very frustrating, but we’ve got to keep pushing forward.”
At the same time the Techsters have been going through some down times, the rest of the women’s hoops world has continued its upgrading process. Where once the sport was resigned to a handful of consistently viable contenders for a Final Four trip, now the landscape ranges from not only well-known schools such as Tennessee and Connecticut, but also to the likes of Marist and Texas-El Paso.
According to a national survey conducted after the 2006-07 season, Tech ranked No. 198 in the country for women’s basketball budgets.
Improved conference
When Tech entered the WAC in 2001, the consensus among head coaches and other athletic officials at the time was that the addition of the perennial powerhouse would make everybody else better.
Advance the video to 2008 and, sure enough, that is exactly what has happened. The playing field has continued to level out in the WAC.
“I’ve seen it with several teams we’ve played,” Sneed said. “Boise State has gotten better ever year, and New Mexico State has improved. This year’s San Jose State team is better than last year’s. Every team in the WAC, it seems, is getting better. I think Tech has helped make everybody better.”
And while his team has been in the top two slots of the weekly standings since the league battles tipped off in January, Fresno State head coach Adrien Wiggins believes that “you’ve got any one of several teams who have the potential to win our tournament.
“You put Tech in there and several others, and it could go to any one of them. That’s the type of balanced conference that we’ve become.”
Long can attest to the improvement, having first landed at Tech in the very year (2001) the university entered the conference.
“From top to bottom, the league as a whole has gotten better,” he said. “The athleticism, overall, has really improved.”
And to keep improving, of course, one of the major keys is recruiting.
Talented recruits
Tech’s talent pool has been overall weak from the recruiting classes stretching from 2003 to 2005 — only one player signed during that time would have been a potential roster member this season, while four others transferred. But, an upgrade is on the horizon.
Five recruits in the Long era have won Most Valuable Player awards in their states and four in the 2008 class are set to arrive on campus with gaudy credentials, the foremost being five-star point guard Jasmine Bendolph.
At a position that has been arguably the weakest for the Techsters this season, Bendolph could be the very recipe for success.
The 5’7” playmaker from Mobile’s Davidson High led her team to the Class 6-A title game as a freshman and sophomore, was named as the state’s Player of the Year during her third season and has been labeled as an All-American by several national publications.
“She’s an unbelievable point guard,” Long said. “She’s an amazing ball handler, the type who, I guarantee you, is going to have fans ooh and ahhing when they see her play. She can make us instantly better at the position the minute she steps on campus.”
Tech has also signed up two other Alabama prep standouts in Kiara Young of Rogersville and DeAngela Sword of Montgomery.
Both of those recruits should also bring relief to the backcourt area, where inconsistency with outside shooting has been one of the major reasons for Tech’s offensive struggles this season.
“You put those types of players in with Adrienne Johnson, Whitney Jones, Tarkeisha Wysinger and others we will have coming back, and it makes for a bright future,” Long said.
And while that future could be bright for the Techsters, their head coach also knows that “we’ve got a lot of work to do.
“With what we’ve got coming in, the talent that we’ve signed, I feel confident that the program can get back to where it should be.”
Whether that means another return to the Final Four or a national title remains to be seen.
“I understand that maybe we can’t always be in the top 10 or whatever, but we can do better,” Creed said. “I’m sure not giving up yet on us getting back to another Final Four, either.”
And however difficult any season might become for a team, be it the Lady Techsters or whoever, Ashley believes “the fans need to share some of the responsibility.
“This is the time when these players need our support the most. We need to show that we’re behind them, even in the toughest of times.”