By VIC DORR JR.
Times-Dispatch Staff Writer

How do opponents view Old Dominion University’s streak of 15 consecutive Colonial Athletic Association women’s basketball championships? With envy? With irritation?

How about with admiration? That was the response offered by William and Mary coach Debbie Taylor. The 15-year streak and 44-0 tournament record constructed by ODU and coach Wendy Larry, Taylor said, are ever so praiseworthy.

Taylor says she has “a tremendous amount of respect for Wendy and those kids and what they’ve been able to do.” A decade and a half of dominance, Taylor said, “really, when you stop to think about it, is nothing short of remarkable.”

The argument typically used to devalue ODU’s accomplishment—that the Lady Monarchs’ talent is far superior to that of other CAA teams—isn’t altogether valid, Taylor said.

“That’s what people don’t understand. Go back to 1997 and 1998, when they had (players such as Ticha Penicheiro and Clarisse Machanguana and Mery Andrade), and sure—they were just a lot better than the rest of us.

“But over the last five or so years, I think everyone has gotten a lot closer” in terms of physical weaponry. “That’s what makes it so remarkable. They’re still finding ways to win, even when maybe they shouldn’t, even when they’re injured—which they have been a lot—and don’t have all of their best people. Their will to win and their determination are so strong. I think it says so much about how great a coach Wendy is.”

By VIC DORR JR.
Times-Dispatch Staff Writer

Big numbers aren’t necessarily an indication of a big impact on a team.

Take, for example, University of Richmond women’s basketball player DeUnna Hendrix. The Spiders’ 5-9 wing guard is averaging but 3.8 points and 3.1 rebounds. But she has started 24 of 28 games for coach Michael Shafer’s still-congealing club.

Hendrix, the only senior on Richmond’s roster, “is starting for a reason,” Shafer said. “She’s our energizer. She’s our vocal leader. We’ve got (five) freshmen and a lot of quiet kids on this team, and (Hendrix) is our source of energy and enthusiasm.

“You can’t put a value on the importance of what she gives us—on the floor, yes, but also in the locker room. Her presence, her experience, her position as a vocal leader and a source of positive reinforcement—she’s been superb at all of that.”

Hendrix’ influence will be tested when the Spiders (6-7 in the Atlantic 10, 12-16) play host to Dayton tomorrow (Sunday) at 2 p.m. This Senior Day game is a contest the Spiders must win to avoid far down the seeding ladder for next weekend’s A-10 tournament in Cincinnati.

UR could have put itself in line for a No. 5 seed had it defeated St. Louis in Thursday night’s game in the Robins Center. But the Spiders, as is so often their habit when playing at home, struggled visibly and absorbed a 78-70 defeat. On that night, at least, Hendrix’ enthusiasm was not contagious. The defeat was Richmond’s 10th in 13 home games this season.

“I know we’re capable of playing hard and consistently because I’ve seen us do it,” Shafer said. “Now—if you’re asking if we can get this thing corrected” before the conference tournament convenes, “That’s a hard answer to give right now. With five freshmen, we might just have to play it out and see if we can grow and learn.”

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…

BLACKSBURG—Britney Anderson waited too long to pick herself up.

Anderson, Virginia Tech’s dependable senior forward, recovered from a slow start to score 15 of her team-high 21 points in Thursday night’s 79-76 homecourt loss to the University of Virginia. But she said she could have, and should have, done more.

“I’ll take the blame” for a first half in which the Hokies went more than nine minutes without a field goal, said Anderson, a former standout player at Meadowbrook High School in Richmond. “Whenever someone else isn’t playing well, I try to pick them up and get them back on track. If I can do it for someone else, you’d think I could do it for myself. But I couldn’t. That first half was...”

She paused to search for the proper description. “...a nightmare.”

Anderson, the state Group AAA Player of the Year in 2001, scored six first-half points on 2-of-3 shooting. She was far more active thereafter. She made 7 of 12 second-half shots, in the process helping her team erase all but two points of a double-digit deficit. During one juncture she dominated the game in a manner that awakened memories of her commanding play at Meadowbrook. She scored on three consecutive Tech possessions. The last of those possessions produced a 3-pointer from the top of the free-throw circle.

Said Virginia coach Debbie Ryan: “Once she got going, she was very hard to We tried everyone on her. We tried post players. We tried guards. We tried everyone.”

Anderson, 6-0, said she “felt I owed it to my team to try to pick things up in the second half. One of her coaches, she said, advised her at intermission “to just let the first half go. So that’s what I decided to do. I played so bad in the first half. I just made up my mind that, ‘You know what? If I’m going to go out tonight, at least I’m going to go out fighting and shooting.’”

Anderson has scored nearly as many points this season (301) as in her previous three seasons combined (312).

Cause for pride? Yes. Cause for celebration? Not yet.

James Madison women’s basketball coach Kenny Brooks says his club’s No. 25 ranking in this week’s Associated Press poll—the Dukes’ first such ranking since 1988 and the first AP ranking by any Colonial Athletic Association women’s team since 2002—does not, by itself, identify his deep, seasoned team as successful.

“Yes, this was one of our goals—to reach the Top 25 and be recognized as one of the elite programs in the country,” said Brooks, whose Dukes are undefeated in the CAA (9-0) and 17-2 overall. “I told the players to enjoy it for a day and then come to practice (Tuesday) ready to get back to work.”

Brooks, whose club will carry a nine-game winning streak and a 22-game home-court streak into Thursday’s showdown with CAA rival Old Dominion, said he “would obviously rather be ranked at the end of the season than at the end of January. But you take it when you can get it.”

He said the Dukes, whose starting lineup includes four seniors, “understand that (their ranking) is a nice achievement but I don’t think it’s something they’re really satisfied about. This is not their ultimate goal. Their ultimate goal is to win the CAA championship” and with it an invitation to the NCAA tournament.

Brooks said his players—his veterans, particularly—are savvy enough to realize that “what we’ve done could very possibly put a bullseye on our backs. They know that if they don’t come to play every night, they’re going to slip up somewhere and get beat. So no, I don’t think I’m going to have any trouble getting their attention” when the players report for practice today. He described Thursday’s date with the Lady Monarchs with a single word: “huge.”

No argument there. Old Dominion, which has won each of the past 15 CAA tournaments, is 8-0, 12-7. The Lady Monarchs, like James Madison, are riding a nine-game winning streak.