Vanderbilt women hoping to keep winning streak alive
CHATTANOOGA (AP) — Vanderbilt turned around its season after losing to Tennessee a month ago and hasn’t looked back.
The 13th-ranked Commodores (24-7) have won eight games in a row, including the last four en route to the Southeastern Conference tournament championship.
The title helped earned them a No. 2 seed in the Midwest Regional of the NCAA tournament and they will face 15th-seeded Lipscomb on Saturday at McKenzie Arena.
Host school Chattanooga (28-2), the Southern Conference champion and 10th seed, will play No. 7 seed Rutgers (21-11) in the first game at 11 a.m. EST. The winners will play on Monday in the second round.
Vanderbilt started the season 10-0, but the Commodores unraveled in February. They capped a four-game losing streak with a 94-88 loss to archrival Tennessee.
Coach Melanie Balcomb, in her second year, was breaking in freshman Dee Davis at point guard and integrating her recruits with the players left over from former coach Jim Foster’s tenure.
Balcomb decided to let the seniors get more involved and give the team some time off.
Instead of practice one day, Balcomb took the team to see the movie “Miracle,” about the 1980 U.S. Olympic hockey team that beat the Soviet Union and went on to win the gold medal.
“I wanted to just kill them, and I did the opposite,” Balcomb said. “I met with the captains and did some of the things we thought would benefit such a young team that was struggling at the time.”
It worked, and Vanderbilt started winning again, culminating in a run through the SEC tournament.
“A month ago we had no idea what was going to happen,” Vanderbilt senior Jenni Benningfield said. “Then we turned it on the last eight games.”
Not only were the Commodores given a No. 2 seed, they were shipped here, about 120 miles south of their campus in Nashville.
Tournament organizers in Chattanooga had hoped to host No. 1 seed Tennessee because of the draw for fans.
Instead, the site got three Tennessee teams.
In fact, Vanderbilt’s opponent, Lipscomb (20-11), is also in Nashville, and the players on both teams have played each other in summer pickup games.
“They have seen us play and we have seen them play so there is some mutual respect there,” Lipscomb’s Katie Beth Pate said.
The Lady Bison, formerly in the NAIA, earned their first tournament berth in their first year of eligibility by winning the Atlantic Sun Conference tournament championship. Lipscomb’s resume also includes a 74-72 win over Mississippi in December.
Vanderbilt’s winning streak is good, but Chattanooga has the longest in the nation at 26 games. The Lady Mocs also beat Ole Miss.
Chattanooga coach Wes Moore hasn’t put too much emphasis on the streak.
“We took it one game at a time and have not talked a whole lot about it,” Moore said. “This is another new season. Everybody is zero and zero again.”
Rutgers didn’t seem too impressed by their opponent’s streak when the brackets were announced.
“Who plays in the Southern Conference?” Scarlet Knights’ point guard Cappie Pondexter asked Sunday. “Who did (Chattanooga) really play? We played the Tennessees, Connecticuts and Boston Colleges, which made us a stronger team I think.”
Both Rutgers and Chattanooga lost at Tennessee, and Connecticut beat Rutgers.
On Friday, Pondexter said: “They have a balanced attack. They are able to go inside and outside. They have good shooters. They kind of remind me of Villanova.”
The Scarlet Knights lost to Boston College in the final of the Big East Conference tournament.
They reached the championship game despite having only seven scholarship players available to dress out. Guard Dawn McCullough, who was averaging 10.2 points a game, hurt her knee the day before.
Rutgers will get back Chelsea Newton, who suffered a concussion in a collision with Pondexter and was out two weeks. Newton was averaging 10.7 points a game, second-best on the team behind Pondexter’s 18.2 average.