Twenty-eight wins, a No. 5 national ranking and a stud All-American at center. Indeed, the University of Mary Washington will present the women's basketball team with a challenge unlike any other the Jumbos have faced this year.
Tufts will take on the powerhouse Eagles in the Div. III Sweet Sixteen tomorrow evening with a spot in Saturday's Messiah College regional final on the line. Already the winningest basketball team Tufts has ever fielded, this year's Jumbos will join the 2005-06 men's squad as the only teams in school history to have appeared in the Sweet Sixteen.
"It's a great feeling," coach Carla Berube said. "It surpasses what I thought the season would be like. It's incredible. It's not over, and it's hard for me to reflect just yet, but we're happy, and we're proud to be heading into the weekend with at least one - but hopefully a couple more - games ahead of us."
But to become the first Tufts team to reach the Elite Eight, the Jumbos will have to overcome a Mary Washington squad that easily represents Tufts' most formidable foe of the season. The Eagles are in the midst of a meteoric rise to one of the nation's elite that began with the arrival of fifth-year coach Deena Applebury. Last season, the team posted a Div. III-best 31 wins - one of which came in an upset victory over nationally-ranked No. 1 Bowdoin in the Elite Eight - before bowing out in the Final Four.
This season, Mary Washington picked up right where it left off, garnering the preseason No. 1 ranking in the D3hoops.com poll before rattling off a 28-2 season that included its second consecutive Capital Athletic Conference championship.
At this juncture, any opponent will present a daunting task, but Tufts is up for the challenge.
"If you want to get to the Elite Eight, you want to get to the Final Four, you've got to take on the best," Berube said. "It's exciting that we're in the Sweet Sixteen and that we are playing some of the best teams in the country because this is where we want to be. Hopefully for years to come now, we can keep getting back here and become like a Mary Washington. It's exciting to be able to take on a team like this."
"We're really excited because we haven't seen a team like them," sophomore forward Julia Baily added. "We haven't played any top-10 teams before. We're really just excited to see how we stack up against other national competition. I think it's just going to be a really fun game no matter what happens."
All season long, the Jumbos' bread and butter has been their post play. Buoyed by the breakout season of NESCAC Player of the Year Khalilah Ummah, the addition of junior transfer Katie Tausanovitch and the contributions of key reserve Baily, Tufts established an often-dominant interior presence that registered at least 30 points in the paint 13 times this year.
But for the first time, the Jumbos will have to contend with a team that will seek to beat it at its own game. Mary Washington boasts one of the nation's top low-post talents in senior center Liz Hickey, who has averaged 14.6 points, 8.7 rebounds and 4.4 blocks per game this season. The NCAA's career leader with 508 blocked shots, the 6-foot-3 Hickey was named a finalist for the Jostens Trophy, awarded to the best player in Div. III.
But the Eagles may have been dealt a critical setback when 6-foot-1 junior forward Ashton Mitchell, the team's second-leading scorer and rebounder behind Hickey, suffered a knee injury in Mary Washington's NCAA opener against Baruch. Mitchell sat out the Eagles' second-round win over The College of New Jersey, and according to a March 8 report in the Fredericksburg, Va. Free Lance-Star, she could be out for the season. Missing half of its strong frontcourt tandem, Mary Washington saw Hickey limited to five rebounds and 3-of-9 shooting against TCNJ.
Still, the Jumbos insist they are not getting caught up in the hype surrounding Mitchell's availability.
"We're not going to change anything up," Berube said. "If one of them is not playing, I'm sure they have some other post players that can fill in. We're not really thinking about them too much ... It's going to be up to us to bring to the floor the same things we talk about all the time: the energy, the defense, the composure, the execution, the transition defense. It shouldn't really matter who's in the other uniform."
Even if Mitchell doesn't suit up, Tufts will still have to find a way to slow down a diverse attack that was the 10th-best scoring offense in Div. III, averaging 76.9 points per game. The Jumbos enter the game on the heels of their best defensive performance of the season, in which they held a potent Mt. St. Mary offense to 33.5 points below its season average in their second-round victory last Saturday.
"All our offense, all our good play comes from our defense," Baily said. "Against Mt. St. Mary, we got them on their heels early and ultimately cruised through the second half. If we just have that same mentality and get out early and play good defense from the beginning, I think it's going to set a really good tone for the entire game."
Owning the edge in tournament experience and in the national polls, the Eagles are the favorite to move on to Saturday's Elite Eight against the winner of the matchup between regional host Messiah and unranked Rochester. The matchup puts Tufts in a role it has rarely experienced this season, namely that of the underdog.
"I definitely don't think we have any pressure on us," Berube said. "This is all new to us. But it doesn't mean that this is just icing on the cake. We obviously want to keep on winning. We'd love to make it to the Final Four, to win a national championship. But this is definitely fun for us because we've never been in an NCAA Tournament. It's all exciting and new, and with no pressure on us, we can just go and play basketball."
