Williamsburg is full of history and the William & Mary women’s basketball team finally has its own chapter.
Chalk it up to March Madness, or better yet, March Magic. The Tribe will make its first-ever appearance in the NCAA Tournament after an improbable tournament run – four victories over opponents that had beaten them six straight times during the regular season.
William & Mary will play on, a feat sophomore guard Monet Dance dubbed “amazing.”
“Insane,” agreed Cassidy Geddes, another sophomore guard, adding, “With a roommate named Dance, we knew we’d be dancing. It was already written in the book.”
“I can’t believe it happened,” senior guard Bella Nascimento admitted.
“This is something so special and something you always want,” said Erin Dickerson Davis, in her third year coaching the Tribe. “And when it’s here, it’s disbelief.”
Career efforts from Dance and Nascimento set the stage along with rebounding grit, unselfish passing to find open looks and sizzling outside shooting at a .444% clip.
Add another intangible the Tribe can’t stop talking about: Belief.
As the ninth seed in the 13-team Coastal Athletic Conference (CAA) Tournament, William & Mary had to upset the Nos. 1, 3, 4, and 8 seeds to earn an invite to the 68-team national tournament.
“We came together and you’re going to hear me talking about this word a lot – belief,” said Nascimento, whose 33 points and 11 rebounds in the championship game contributed to her being named MVP. “If one person didn’t have belief, we wouldn’t have made it.”
William & Mary looked nothing like the team that dropped seven of its final eight to close the regular season. The Tribe opened the CAA Tournament with a 76-65 defeat of Hofstra, which spoiled William & Mary’s Senior Night two weeks before with a rout.
That set up a quarterfinal with top-seeded North Carolina A&T. Eight days earlier, the Aggies had trounced the Tribe, 67-44.
“The top seed doesn’t always win,” Dickerson Davis said, and it didn’t this time.
It took overtime, a combined 53 points from Dance and Geddes and 11 of 19 from 3-point range against an Aggies team that is among the top ten in the nation in three-point defense. William & Mary held A&T to two points in the extra period to prevail 74-66.
A semifinal date with Drexel awaited, and a one-point loss there that Dickerson Davis called a heartbreaker is what started her team’s late-season spiral. This time, the Tribe left no doubt, draining 12 treys for a 76-54 victory that sent William & Mary to the championship game for the first time in 32 years.
Since joining the CAA, which was founded in 1979 as the Colonial Athletic Association, the Tribe had advanced to only one previous championship. That was in 1993.
“I was 6,” Dickerson Davis said.
A victory over Campbell was all the Tribe needed to secure the automatic bid to the national tournament. Only how could William & Mary be confident? The Camels completed a series sweep with a 73-53 drubbing to end the Tribes’ regular season.
“We wanted it to be Campbell,” Dance said. “This was the ultimate revenge tour.”
When Campbell scored the first 14 points of the game, it looked as if the moment might finally be too big. The Camels were fresher, having played one fewer game than William & Mary.
Dickerson Davis called a timeout and looked at her team full of nerves and fatigue.
“We’re playing one-on-one basketball,” she said. “You can be tired. You can be nervous, but you absolutely have to play together.”
The Camels led 20-9 at the end of one quarter, but Nascimento scored six of the Tribe’s first eight points to start the second. Right before the halftime buzzer, she banked in a 3 from the Campbell logo painted on the floor at CareFirst Arena in Washington, D.C. Instead of double digits, William & Mary went into break trailing by eight.
It wasn’t until Geddes’ 3 that came 35 minutes and 10 seconds into the game that the Tribe gained its first lead at 58-57. Campbell answered on the next possession, only to have the Tribe snatch back the advantage for good on a Nascimento tip-in.
“We were going to win that game once we flipped the score,” Geddes said.
Campbell heaved a desperation 3. Time expired. William & Mary 66, Campbell 63.
“The people who know me know that I am very stoic, almost like I don’t show much emotion,” Dickerson Davis said. “I see 1.1 seconds on the clock, and I am just starting to melt and I’m trying to hold it all together. As soon as the buzzer hits, somebody comes and gives me a hug and I just could not stop crying.”
The first time she had a moment to look at her phone, she had 516 unanswered texts.
The Tribe will face High Point in a play-in first-round game on Thursday in Austin, Texas. The victor will face the host Longhorns, the top seed in the Birmingham Region.
William & Mary (15-18) is the seventh team in this century to make the NCAA tournament with a record of at least three games under .500. It’s also the first time a basketball program from the school has reached The Big Dance. The men’s program is one of three teams in the nation that has never made the field despite being eligible every year since 1939.
Dickerson Davis, Northwestern's team captain all four years of her own college career, stressed when interviewing to become William & Mary’s sixth coach that she could build a program that finished in the top four of the league every year.
“I can’t show you what we’re going to run on offense because I just got here,” she told Geddes, Dance and Nascimento, her first recruiting class.
“But what I can tell you is I’m going to help you guys be extraordinary women leaders and basketball players and you guys are going to make history here.”
