Of the women's basketball team's three losses this season, none have been easy to swallow.
On Jan. 18, the Jumbos saw the best start in program history come to a screeching halt as they suffered a deflating buzzer-beater loss to Amherst. Then on Feb. 9, the team was a 63-46 upset victim at Williams, a setback that eventually cost Tufts the top seed in the NESCAC Tournament.
The toughest of the three defeats came Sunday, when the Jumbos lost to the Jeffs again, this time in the conference championship game.
But in a record-breaking year that has seen the team break the program's single-season wins mark, Tufts has been at its best after losses, winning by an average of 24.5 points in the games immediately following its first two setbacks of the season. And with their first contest since the title-game loss imminent, the Jumbos are hoping for a repeat performance.
Nationally ranked No. 18 Tufts will seek to put the bitter taste of its NESCAC Tournament loss behind it tonight when it takes on familiar foe Wheaton in the first round of the Div. III NCAA Tournament in Newburgh, N.Y.
"I think there's a toughness about us," said coach Carla Berube, who was named the conference's co-Coach of the Year on Wednesday. "We don't like walking away from a game knowing it wasn't our best fight, that it wasn't our best basketball. We come away saying, 'We're better than this, and we're going to show you and ourselves the next time out.' With everything on the line now, there's an even greater significance to bouncing back."
At 22-6, the NEWMAC champion Lyons are in the midst of their best season since 1995, when they advanced all the way to the NCAA Sweet Sixteen.
But Wheaton's worst home loss of the season - a 61-36 shellacking on Jan. 22 - came at the hands of the Jumbos, who held Wheaton to just eight second-half points en route to the victory. Still, the Lyons have played 12 games since then and lost just one of them, and Tufts knows it will be facing a much-improved squad this time around.
"Things change during tournament time," senior co-captain Khalilah Ummah said. "NCAAs is a huge thing for any team who makes it, so you can't go in thinking you're going to beat a team by 30 points. They've had a lot of time to play with each other, and they just won their conference championship game, so they're going to come in with a lot of confidence. It's going to be a good battle, but we have to expect it's going to be closer this time."
"We watched and saw what worked against them and what worked for them against us; other than that, we're not looking at that score whatsoever," Berube added. "They're a different team, and it was weeks ago. They're playing the best basketball of their season. We've got to come out with even more aggressiveness and take it to them from the start."
One of the keys for the Jumbos during their regular-season win over the Lyons was their balanced offensive attack, in which four players - Ummah, junior forward Katie Tausanovitch, freshman point guard Colleen Hart and sophomore forward Julia Baily - reached double figures in scoring. Tausanovitch is also an assistant layout editor for the Daily.
It was a stark contrast to the team's performance last Sunday against Amherst, when the team relied almost exclusively on Ummah on the offensive end. The NESCAC Player of the Year responded, delivering a career-high 25 points, but it wasn't enough, as the rest of the team combined to shoot 11-of-48 from the floor for the losing cause. This weekend, the Jumbos will need to get production from across the board if they want their historic season to continue.
"I'm not sure everybody did their part on Sunday, so I think there are some people that are ready to step up and do what they can for the team this coming game," Berube said. "It's going to be very important. Wheaton's a tough team. We have good matchups, but we need contributions from all five of our starters and from our bench. Everybody just needs to do their job to the best of their ability."
"During our season, our points have been spread throughout the whole team," Ummah added. "There was just a lack of confidence in the Amherst game. People got down. If we just trust in ourselves, we'll get the points distributed throughout the team and win our games."
With a victory, Tufts would move on to tomorrow's round of 32 against the winner of the matchup between Albright and host Mt. St. Mary.
"They're two tough teams," Berube said. "Albright got an at-large big, so that means they've had a very good season. The other, Mt. St. Mary, won their conference pretty handily and had only a couple losses. So they're talented ... Everybody you play now in the NCAA Tournament is good, so we're just going to take it one game at a time."
Making the first NCAA Tournament appearance in program history, the Jumbos are slated to make a deep run, as D3hoops.com projects Tufts will reach the Elite Eight. The team has embraced the high expectations and isn't content with just a tourney appearance.
"We want to get in there and win as many games as possible," Berube said. "I want us to be excited about this experience because you never know when you're going to have this opportunity again.
"But we're not happy with just making it," she continued. "We also have some work to do, and we're going in wanting to win as many games as we possibly can while playing our best basketball. I want us to leave the floor after every game believing that we gave it everything we had."
