ST. JOSEPH, MO. — Brandon Schneider has been here in the National championship game before. It was 1998, and Schneider was a 26-year-old assistant coach.
Schneider looks back on that team, which he would take over the next year when Cindy Stein left for Missouri, and he remembers a ton of talent.
“There were four Kodak All-Americans on that team, and two people that were future players of the year,” Schneider said.
Schneider also remembers a bad outcome, a 92-76 loss, and a 6-foot-5 center, Jenny Krause, that was the reason why.
“She’s probably one of the better centers to play at this level, and we went 6-foot, 6-foot, and we really had more forwards then we did a true center, low-post player,” he said.
Krause has never left Schneider’s memory, and after losing to a Krause-led North Dakota team again the next year in the final four, he knew when his team got back, he would be prepared to face a player like Krause.
Schneider changed the way he recruited, and as a result the Lady Hornets changed the way they played. Those teams in the late 1990s played fast, and they used a full-court press that won Stein and Schneider a lot of games. Playing that style helped get Stein the head coaching job at Missouri and helped get Schneider’s head coaching career off to a great start, but it did not win a title.
Schneider saw the need to have a center in the middle, a player who could guard the Krauses of the world and also score in the post against taller players.
It’s no coincidence that the Lady Hornets can point to 6-foot-2 center Alli Volkens as the single biggest reason they are playing tonight against Fort Lewis in a game where they should have the advantage at the center position.
Volkens has played on another level during the NCAA Tournament, averaging 19.2 points after averaging only 10.7 during the regular season.
To see her importance, take a look back at the first half on Wednesday night against Gannon. With Volkens on the bench because of foul trouble, the Lady Hornets had to depend on their guards, and they shot 23 3-pointers. They led by one at half, but they could not keep playing that way and win the game.
When they would eventually go on their 15-0 run in the second half, they did so by getting Volkens touches in the post. When they needed a basket on their last possession of regulation to force overtime, Schneider diagrammed a play for Volkens, and she delivered.
There are some basketball coaches that are going to play the way they play, and it does not matter what the other team does.
Roy Williams is like this. I remember hearing when Williams was at Kansas that he never watched any film of KU’s next opponent.
Whether it’s recruiting, in-game strategy or defensive philosophy, some insist that, “We’re going to do what we do, and if we lose, we’ll lose playing our way.”
But sometimes the only way to win is to swallow your pride and play a different way, especially in the postseason, when pride can get in the way of winning.
After playing man-to-man for all but a handful of possessions all season, Schneider saw his team in foul trouble on Wednesday night against top-ranked Gannon, and he went to a zone defense. Schneider believes in his team’s man-to-man defense, but he also believes in winning.
When the zone worked, he stuck with it and avoided the temptation to go back to what he knows best.
“We never practice zone defense,” Schneider said. “We made some mistakes in it, but I’m not so sure it didn’t win us the ballgame.”
Looking back on that ’98 runner-up team, Schneider also remembers a team that didn’t really face much adversity until the championship game.
“That’s a team in ’98 that had never been involved in a game that was less than double digits,” he said. “We were 33-0, and we hadn’t had a game that was inside of 10 points.”
There’s a lot of differences between that team and the team that will take the court tonight, but outside of Volkens, the biggest difference is what these Lady Hornets experienced late in the year.
It keeps coming up over and over again these last two weeks that the Lady Hornets lost three of five before the NCAA Tournament.
How does a team that went through that make it to the championship game?
To start, Volkens’ play. But dig deeper, and it comes back to Schneider.
Spend enough time around Emporia State’s 12th-year coach, and it’s clear he has a ton of confidence in himself. Successful people, particularly in sports, always have that confidence about them. They might not say it out loud, but they believe they are great.
Schneider’s teams play with this same confidence, and that’s what was so odd about the way the Lady Hornets played late in the season. They just didn’t play with that confidence, but Cassondra Boston said it was still there.
“We’ve always been confident in ourselves and believed in ourselves,” she said. “Even when we were struggling a little bit, we still had a lot of confidence and knew that all we had to do was pick it up and we’d be OK. We all knew that we were a good team and had a lot of faith in one another.”
The Lady Hornets regained that confidence and belief once the tournament started, and it kept them composed when they trailed by 18 with less than nine minutes left against No. 1 Gannon. Schneider said he looked into his players’ eyes and could see that they believed the whole time that they would win.
They had come back against all odds — the late-season losing — and they were prepared to do it again.
“This team has obviously had to deal with some adversity and some bumps along the way and has had to respond in some close games and some pressure situations,” Schneider said. “They’re built a little bit more for pressure situations than that (’98) team was.”
At Thursday’s press conferences, I got the impression that one team was happy to be here and one team expected to be here.
Fort Lewis coach Mark Kellogg is in a very similar situation as Stein and Schneider were when they took the Lady Hornets to the championship game in 1998.
Kellogg took over a mediocre Fort Lewis program five years ago, and he has built the Sky Hawks into one of the best teams in the country, using a full-court press much like the Lady Hornets used to run. This is the first time Fort Lewis’ players have been here.
“Honestly, I did not see this coming,” Fort Lewis senior Audrey George said. “When we came in, it was a .500 team and we were just happy to be here... I never really thought it would come to this until recently, but it’s just the most exciting thing ever.”
The current Lady Hornets had never played in an Elite Eight before, but they’ve played in the NCAA Tournament every year. Fifth-year senior Lacy Corker experienced an Elite Eight from the bench as a redshirt freshman, and Boston and fellow senior Jamie Augustyn arrived on campus following that Elite Eight appearance in 2006.
They expected to get the program back; they expected to play for championships.
And that might be the difference tonight. If not for Volkens, if not for Boston, the All-American point guard, if not for the ability to adapt to many different styles, it’s that belief that they belong, and they’re here to finally win the championship.