Magical.
That’s what Dawn Staley called the GW women’s team’s season. Junior Kim Beck’s play exemplified that late in the team’s game against Temple Sunday night.
With 25 seconds left Sunday against Temple, GW had a three-point lead with history on the line. A win would mean GW’s first undefeated Atlantic 10 run since Bill Clinton was president. Kim Beck wanted this game and she wasn’t going to let anyone, including the defending conference champions, get in her way.
Beck took the ball up court and looked Temple senior Kamesha Hairston in the eyes. With one swift move, she spun and launched a floater just south of the free throw line. It landed square in the middle of the net. She said there was nothing going through her mind, just putting an “oomph” at the end of this season.
“The shot clock was running down, I had to get the shot off,” Beck said.
But, you missed it. Almost all of you missed it. And you should feel guilty because you aren’t a GW fan if you only show up when the men’s team is doing well. This team, led by Joe McKeown, is good. Really good.
You will probably see them march through the A-10 tournament next week in Cincinnati and go deep into the NCAA tournament in March. When your friends ask if you ever watched them, when they are showing up in the Elite Eight, you’ll have to say “no” and live with the fact that one of the best teams this school has seen in a while went largely unnoticed throughout much of the regular season.
“This team is special because it’s the ultimate team,” McKeown said. “It’s a very balanced team and there’s great chemistry. There’s no one player out there averaging 20 points a game.”
On one hand you have Kenan Cole, the team’s lone senior who has spent four years battling for McKeown. When it was all over Sunday, she walked off the court to chants of her name and will go down of the hardest workers this women’s program has ever seen. In the media room, she sat down with tears in her eyes.
When healthy, the Adair twins – Jessica and Jazmine – make a huge difference. The rebounding disparity today (48-27 in favor of Temple) shows one of the weaknesses of this team. With the sophomore sisters in the game, it shouldn’t be a problem.
McKeown, as he often does, reminisced after the game Sunday. He remembered 1997 – the last time the GW women’s team went undefeated in the A-10. That year they beat North Carolina, the number one team in the NCAA tournament, before losing to Notre Dame in Columbia, S.C.
This year, they could take that step to greatness. After a great season and a 15-game winning streak, it looks like this team could go to the Final Four in Cleveland.
