Stanford women’s basketball title is end of many long roads

SAN ANTONIO — This title was the end result of a long, exhausting highway. Several of them, truly.

For Tara VanDerveer, it had been 29 years since she was in a position to beam with pleasure whereas watching her Stanford crew minimize down the nets. For her present gamers, it was a 90-day highway journey that appeared even longer, dwelling out of suitcases and resort rooms like nomads so the COVID-19 pandemic wouldn’t steal but one thing else.

And for everybody within the girls’s recreation, it was three weeks of countering the NCAA’s disrespect, first with phrases after which with deeds, and having to clarify to individuals who don’t get it or don’t care to why fairness and optics matter.

So if Stanford smiled somewhat brighter, reveled somewhat louder, stayed on the ground somewhat longer, the Cardinal have been entitled to all of it.

“This is the time we live in. Sometimes you just have to stick with things,” VanDerveer stated Sunday, after top-seeded Stanford had held off Pac-12 rival Arizona 54-53 for its third nationwide title, and first since 1992.

There’s a lesson there greater, even, than the trophy the Cardinal might be bringing again to Stanford.

VanDerveer talked concerning the heartache she felt for these different groups that had come shut, and the accidents that always derailed them. That wears on you, regardless of how long you’ve been in a recreation or how a lot you like being a instructor. Her gamers are like household, and after they fall quick of their dream, it cuts her simply as deeply.

To have it occur repeatedly, to observe because the hole closed between the nice applications and the nice ones, it will have been straightforward – comprehensible, actually – if she’d determined in some unspecified time in the future that her checklist of accomplishments was long sufficient.

Just as it will have been straightforward for this 12 months’s crew to crumble underneath the restrictions dictated to them by COVID.

Stanford was not allowed to play residence video games as a result of of native COVID restrictions. But the gamers nonetheless needed to play, so the Cardinal spent all the season on the highway. They went to Las Vegas and Los Angeles and Santa Cruz. They practiced on the Golden State Warriors facility and in a fitness center with picket backboards.

Even as they watched others flout protocols, not sporting masks or social distancing, they saved to their strict routine. A 14-day quarantine imposed after they’d snuck out to play pickup video games the week they returned to high school had left a deep impression on them, they usually didn’t need all of this to be for naught.

“It’s just a lot,” stated Haley Jones, who was named the Most Outstanding Player after her three-point play with 2:24 left proved to be the game-winner. “You’re on the bus, you’re on planes all the time. There’s just never really an end in sight. So it was difficult.

“But I think from that experience … we just had something extra to us this year,” she added. “I don’t think we showed our best in all the games — any of the games. I don’t think we really were like, `This is the best game we’ve ever played.’ I think we’ve had good halves, good moments, great moments.

“I think it just shows we’re going to tough it out, we’re going to stick with it, we’re resilient, we’re gritty.”

That is one thing girls, girls athletes particularly, are adept at, as a result of they haven’t any selection. From the time we’re younger, we’re instructed and proven that the world thinks much less of us, that our needs and needs usually are not the precedence.

Yet we discover methods to adapt, climbing larger and striving for extra as a result of we all know our price is larger than what the world has decreed. The uproar prompted at the beginning of March Madness by the non-existent weight room was nothing new, however that doesn’t make it any much less acceptable.

Players and coaches spoke out, expressed their disappointment and outrage and begged for change. Then they spent the following three weeks exhibiting the NCAA — to not point out company sponsors and others in decision-making roles — why it is foolhardy to not put money into girls.

Until Jalen Suggs’ half-court heave to beat the buzzer in Saturday evening’s UCLA-Gonzaga semifinal, the ladies’s event was much more charming than the lads’s occasion. The video games have been higher and extra entertaining. If you may’t see the worth in that, you by no means will.

“It was tougher being down here,” VanDerveer stated. “But we stayed in it, we discovered methods to essentially take pleasure in one another and be excited to play.”

It isn’t easy to stay the course, especially when it seems as if there is no end to the road. But when you do, and when you reach the end, it is worth it. Every bit of it.

Follow USA TODAY Sports columnist Nancy Armour on Twitter @nrarmour.

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