Considering the web of personal connections that exists between the women’s basketball teams from Wisconsin and Arizona State, don’t be surprised to see Kevin Bacon sitting courtside when the Badgers and Sun Devils meet in the NCAA tournament this Saturday.
The game will be something of a high school reunion for both teams. For starters, when UW freshman Stephanie Rich heads home for the summer, she’ll probably call up the Sun Devils’ best point guard, Kylan Loney, who happens to be Rich’s best friend. Further back in the scrapbook, UW head coach Jane Albright remembers coaching ASU’s standout guard Amanda Levens at sixth-grade basketball camps. As for the rest of the players, they were introduced at November’s Virgin Islands Paradise Jam tournament.
The good people at Memorial Gymnasium in Nashville, Tenn. ? the court where the teams will play ? may as well dispense with the pre-game introductions, because everybody already knows everybody else.
“Stephanie’s best friend plays for them, so we got to meet a couple of the girls; hang out with them,” UW senior Tamara Moore said. “They were really nice girls, but it’s just going to be hard to beat them.”
Despite whatever ties may bind the teams, Albright has a specific plan of preparation for Saturday’s contest. Earlier in the week, the Badgers appeared to practice much lighter than normal.
According to Albright, the easier practices were meant to give the Badgers more time than usual to work on their shooting. She says she hopes the extra drills will help the team remain focused during any shooting droughts they experience against Arizona State.
“I think, really, in the Penn State game (in the Big Ten semifinals), one of our problems was that, I think, we’re a much better shooting team than we showed we were,” Albright said. “I think when you get to this week, everybody tends to kind of tighten up.”
A victory against Arizona State, however, won’t give Wisconsin much solace if it falls two days later to No. 1-seed Vanderbilt. The Badgers don’t have much karma on their side: they’ve beaten one ranked team since December, they’ve lost 10 of their last 13 games, and they’ve never advanced past the second round of the NCAA tourney.
Contrary to what Moore said Sunday ? that UW would not look past Arizona State ? Albright admits that the team has to devote some of this week’s preparation to scouting Vanderbilt. Convenient as it may sound, the cliché “one-game-at-a-time” approach doesn’t work when only one day of rest separates two games.
“I can’t prepare for Vandy, realistically, in one day,” Albright said. “Within the things we incorporate this week in practice, we’ll be preparing for two games. But, 80 percent of it would be Arizona State.”
As in many games this season, the Badgers will have a distinct height advantage when they take the floor Saturday. No member of the Sun Devils’ regular rotation measures more than 6-feet-2. By contrast, UW rotates three players ? Jessie Stomski, Emily Ashbaugh and Ebba Gebisa ? who stand at or above 6-feet-3.
Wisconsin’s inside presence should allow it to concentrate on containing Levens. The fifth-year senior averages 17 points per game, using both dribble penetration and screens to get open shots. Moore, who stayed up until 2 a.m. watching Levens and Arizona State play Stanford, will guard her. And after spending the better part of five games guarding either Minnesota’s Lindsay Whalen or Penn State’s Kelly Mazzante, the Big Ten’s premier guards, she has a simple plan to stop a player like Levens.
“Move your feet, basically,” Moore said. “Keep a hand in her face; stay low. Just basically do what I did to Lindsay Whalen.”
