University of North Carolina Athletics
Brownlow: Sense of Urgency
March 6, 2009 | Women's Basketball
March 6, 2009
By Lauren Brownlow
In both the men's and women's ACC basketball season, it has been the year of parity. The leagues have been better than they have been in many years as teams begin to come into their own and talent levels even out.
Certainly Coach Hatchell's team has seen quite a bit of it. There was floor-rushing in Atlanta and in Tallahassee as Carolina was beaten on the road. Her team also faced quite a bit of scrappiness from an NC State team whose coach was fighting for her life. Despite the dominance of Duke, North Carolina and Maryland in recent years, it was Florida State that took the Terps to the brink and nearly won the ACC title outright.
Carolina has cruised through the previous four straight ACC Tournaments, sometimes facing fights from unexpected places (NC State again two seasons ago in the title game, for instance) and sometimes not facing much fight at all.
More often than not, though, teams try to fight and claw to stay with Carolina for about a half or a little more and then simply have no more left. Clemson is a team that likes to run up and down and even though the Tigers became the first 12-seed in ACC history to win a game after a win over No. 5 Georgia Tech (a team that beat Carolina), they didn't have enough.
"When I'm on the bench, it kind of amazes me how fast we go and how tired the other team gets eventually," Rashanda McCants said. "They'll hang in at first, but we're so athletic and our guards are super quick, it's kind of difficult to stay with us the whole time."
But that's the issue Carolina, and other top seeds, face in the ACC Tournament - they are getting all that is left in the tank for these teams. These are teams who have had good, solid seasons and might have cruised to an NCAA bid in other leagues, but are on the proverbial bubble and run the risk of playing in their last collegiate basketball games.
No. 9 Wake Forest, a team fighting for its NCAA Tournament lives, sent a tearful NC State team home early, a team that has lost its coach and now its last distraction because it will not make a postseason tournament.
So Clemson stayed in it, nabbing eight steals on 15 Carolina turnovers and converting those into 15 points. The Tigers were within two, 31-29, at the half. But within 5 ½ minutes, Carolina had outscored them 16-2.
But Clemson kept fighting and got a boost from playing in front of a more energetic crowd than they were used to seeing. Many schools in the Greensboro area decided to take the kind of field trip that would seem unimaginable to most of us - a day at the ACC Tournament.
"It was pretty cool. They had lot of intensity and energy," Clemson guard Bryelle Smith said. "That helped us a lot because we didn't have that many people that traveled with us. So the kids were really on our side."
Some were on the side of the Tigers (odd how they were wearing Duke paraphernalia), but in the second half their attention waned and was mostly concentrated on the guy with the T-shirt gun during official timeouts. That old crowd favorite "the wave" seemed to energize both teams. The children helped set a record for attendance at an ACC session - 13,599.
It's a natural instinct, even for children, to root for the underdog, though. Hatchell even admitted it was natural for her when she was watching Clemson beat Georgia Tech on Thursday night. It's odd to think about Carolina as an underdog, but let's face it - this year, they are. They're an underdog nationally (as is everyone not named "UConn") and an underdog in their league. They will be an underdog tomorrow and if they get past Maryland, they will likely be one again.
Hatchell wants her team to think more like underdogs, so she popped in the movie `Rudy' for a little inspiration. Only hearts made of stone aren't affected by that story. But Rudy didn't just make that team by wishing and hoping for it to happen. He made it happen.
To be an effective underdog, teams have to have enough talent, of course. But they also have to play hard, smart basketball and be able to maintain its poise through the ups and downs of any given game. Just like Rudy.
"Anybody can win. Teams get new life. Their attitude and their energy level come up. That's what makes tournament time so much fun," Hatchell said. "I've seen things happen in my coaching career that most people will say were impossible. We talk about this all of the time with the team: if you believe things can happen, they can happen.
"Yesterday, on the way over and last night we watched Rudy, and we talked about the movie and what we learned from it, about always follow your dreams and don't let anyone tell you can't do something and what it takes to do what he did. ... Sometimes it's just sort of natural that you pull for the underdog. We have that happen a lot against us. You like to see kids do great things and things that they haven't, that people don't expect, and maybe they haven't been doing. That's what sports are all about."
