March 18, 2007
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First Round Recap – Vanderbilt 62 Delaware State 47
By Will Matthews
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EAST LANSING, Mich. – It was anything but easy.
After working hard to convince themselves of the benefits of enduring a two-week long layoff after capturing the Southeastern Conference Tournament championship March 4, the Vanderbilt women’s basketball team took the court Sunday in the NCAA Tournament for the first time since their crowning in Duluth, Ga. and quickly discovered their break wasn’t all it was cracked up to be.
The No. 2 seeded Commodores were nervous, hesitant and, faced with an aggressive and physical Delaware State defense that came into the game ranked fifth in the country in points per game allowed, found themselves in the kind of dogfight that has earned the month of March its reputation for being so very mad.
But after sleepwalking through a first half that saw Vanderbilt attempt just 15 total shots and not make a single three-point bucket until freshman guard Jessica Mooney hit one just before intermission, the Commodores successfully shook off the rust and used an 18-4 run midway through the second half to stave off the upset bid and vault them to a 62-47 victory.
Vanderbilt will play seventh-seeded Bowling Green Tuesday in the second round of the tournament’s Greensboro Region.
“I think there was a lot of anxiety,” Vanderbilt Head Coach Melanie Balcomb said. “Our kids mentally and physically were prepared and ready to play, but they didn’t have that confidence and swagger that they have come out and started games with recently. They hadn’t played in a long time so we didn’t come out strong with that swagger and that confidence that we were looking for and that we have had in the past. You just lose that from not playing games.”
Yet despite not claiming the kind of blowout that pundits might expect from a first round match-up between a champion of one of the nation’s elite conferences – the SEC – and another from one of its most obscure – the Mid-Eastern Athletic Conference – to a person the Commodores said they wouldn’t have had it any other way.
In the end, they said Sunday they believe being tested early will serve them well later as they move forward in the tournament.
“We will turn this into a positive,” Balcomb said. “I have resilient kids that are positive and what they’ll say and what we’ll tell them as a staff is that, `yeah, this is good for us and it is good that we were pushed.’ This game is very mental, especially when you get to March and hopefully to April. It is 75 percent mental. So we will definitely talk about how that this team pushing us will help us.”
Balcomb was quick to commend Delaware State’s effort against a Vanderbilt team that was clearly superior athletically. The Hornets used their physicality to take the Commodores out of their offensive rhythm and they pressured the ball well on defense.
“But our timing was off,” Balcomb said. “It wasn’t where it was fourteen or fifteen days ago.”
Perhaps no one exemplified that more than the usually-reliable Caroline Williams. The senior guard who entered the game as the nation’s second most accurate three-point shooter, missed all four of her first half attempts from long range, shot just 1 for 6 for the game overall and scored only three points.
But she wasn’t fazed at all in the post game locker room.
“First game jitters,” Williams said. “That and trying to come back after fifteen days of being off. But I think this will kind of open our eyes and remind us that this is the NCAA Tournament and that anybody can win at any time. So maybe it is a big benefit for us. You can sit back and relax now that we have won our first game, but we have to understand now that we do have to focus and that it is going to be tougher from here on out.”
Fellow senior Dee Davis finished with four points and six assists and also said the Commodores’ early struggles will leave them battle-tested.
“It gets us ready because we know nobody wants to go home early,” Davis said. “We want to play until the end, until the final game, and we have to do what it takes to get there. And teams are going to push us and they are going to challenge us and that’s all we need. We love a challenge. We love to play with teams that challenge us because it makes us better.”
Will Matthews spent three years as an investigative reporter with the Los Angeles Newspaper Group in Southern California. He is currently in this third year at Vanderbilt Divinity School.
