By VIC DORR JR.
Times-Dispatch Staff Writer
Debbie Ryan spent the first 20-plus years of her career as the head women’s basketball coach at the University of Virginia in an ‘attack’ mode. She has spent the past seven or so years—and appears destined to spend the rest of her career—in an ‘under attack’ mode.
And that is unfortunate. Is it unfair? Not entirely. Is it unfortunate? Absolutely.
Simply put: Her team’s recent struggles notwithstanding, Ryan deserves better than to be flayed on a regular basis by grumpy Virginia partisans who hide behind the anonymity of chatroom nicknames—and not merely because she is a 647-game winner who has taken the Cavaliers to 21 NCAA tournaments. She is so much more than that. Ryan is an icon, a human link between her sport’s threadbare past and its prime-time future. Her office was little more than a glorified coat closet, tucked under a University Hall staircase, when Virginia was routinely visiting the Final Four in the early 1990s. Now she receives her mail in a posh suite in John Paul Jones Arena.
The game itself has traveled a similar path. Twenty years ago the Women’s Final Four wasn’t drawing 10,000 spectators. Frequently it wasn’t drawing 6,000. Next month the Final Four will play to a sold-out house in Cleveland’s Quicken Loans Arena. Ryan and others of her generation, the pre-Title IX generation of coaches and players, helped push, pull and when necessary carry the sport along the way. That is why Ryan deserves deference. That is why she deserves respect.
And yes, Virginia fans, that is why she deserves to stay on the job as long as she feels it appropriate to do so. Any other course of action is unthinkable. You don’t raze a landmark. You don’t kick a pioneer to the curb. When an individual has devoted virtually her entire adult life, more than three decades, to the construction and maintenance of one college basketball program, she has earned the right to decide when to get off.
Let’s be clear about this: Virginia has slipped. It is, and for several years has been, little more than a rank-and-file basketball team. This year’s club is not particularly entertaining, has accumulated more than its share of bad losses and will, barring a miracle of part-the-Red-Sea proportions, miss the NCAA tournament for the third time in the past four seasons.
Yes, you can make the argument that Ryan, as the head coach, can and should bear responsibility. She would agree. But you cannot make that argument without acknowledging that Ryan’s 2006-07 club appeared to have it all—talent, depth, athleticism on the perimeter, a formidable presence in the low post—in August. Then everything changed. A season-ending knee injury to 6-3 Aisha Mohammed and the November defection of two key reserves profoundly altered the Cavaliers’ depth and rotation, not to mention their destiny.
Just for a moment, let’s play ‘What if?‘ Suppose Virginia marched through the season with its August roster intact. Suppose it performed for four months the way it performed in an Opening Night blowout of Old Dominion. Suppose it finished in the top four in the ACC and on Selection Monday earned, oh, a No. 4 NCAA seed. Would Ryan’s critics have been satisfied? We’ll never know. But we can venture a guess: Only briefly would the clamor have subsided; only until a Tennessee or a Stanford bounced the Cavaliers in the Sweet 16. Then the message boards would have once again started to smolder.
Ryan, you see, has committed an unpardonable sin in our instant-gratification, use-it-up-and-throw-it-away society. She has endured. She is now closer to 60 than to 40, and at times it shows. She has stayed in Charlottesville long enough—923 games spread over 30 seasons—to be taken for granted; long enough to become living proof that familiarity does, in fact, breed contempt.
Consider this: The tone of Ryan’s chatroom assailants suggests that Virginia has been playing rancid basketball for the past five or six years. The truth is, Ryan’s next losing season will be only her third. One fan complained in a recent e-mail that the Cavaliers program has become “a joke.“ In fact, Virginia has averaged 17.6 victories per season since 2001. But 17.6 victories cease to be good enough when Maryland, currently the flavor of the month for hotshot mid-Atlantic schoolgirls, wins a national championship in only its fourth season under Brenda Frese, its slick, young coach. Go ahead. Admit it: You felt the same way about your well-worn red Saturn, dependable though it is, when your neighbor drove home last week in a hot new Lexus sports sedan.
There is sufficient irony here to fill John Paul Jones Arena from floor to ceiling. Ryan has been, from the beginning, an advocate of equal treatment for her program: Equal salaries, equal facilities, equal opportunities. Never has she been treated more equally by U.Va. fans than at this moment. Just ask George Welsh…and Jeff Jones…and Pete Gillen…and Al Groh…and…