'We get down eight times, but we get up nine.': MSU women's basketball found way amid adversity
Kamaria McDaniel and the Michigan State women’s basketball team had just built some momentum.
As the Spartans forged on two weeks following coach Suzy Merchant’s absence due to a medical incident, they started to piece things together and won consecutive games for the first time in just over a month.
A day following a home win over Penn State, tragedy struck the university with a mass on-campus shooting that killed three students and injured five. A trip a few days later to Purdue was cancelled and players tried to cope with their emotions the best they could.
With all that had transpired in less than three weeks, McDaniel said the Spartans needed a theme.
And ahead of their Feb. 18 game with Maryland, which marked the first on-campus home event following the shooting, they decided on unity of purpose.
“We’re a unit and we have the same purpose and we just go with that every day,” McDaniel said after last week’s Big Ten tournament loss to regular season champ Indiana. “We’ve seen every piece of adversity you could possibly see — the unthinkable, the unfathomable. We’ve seen it all.
“A lot of things have happened that’s out of our control, When stuff is out of your control, you put your focus towards the things you can control. I think we have been a master of the controllables. That’s why coaches (are) and we’re all proud because we could have folded a long time ago.”
Instead of folding, the Spartans finished strong and put themselves in the NCAA tournament conversation. MSU won five of their final seven games with the lone setbacks coming against top-10 ranked opponents Maryland and Indiana. Three of those wins came in games decided by six points or less, which had been an area where the Spartans had struggled earlier.
Spartans await what's next
The recent success and the strength of the Big Ten helped MSU get on the bubble. The Spartans own one of best wins in the nation this season with their late December victory over Indiana. ESPN bracketologist Charlie Crème has MSU among the first eight teams just outside the NCAA tourney field in his latest projections. The NCAA tourney field will be revealed 8 p.m. Sunday.
No matter what happens as they await what's next, MSU (16-14) is proud of what it has become.
“We get down eight times, but we get up nine,” McDaniel said. “It’s the intangible things for this team. Think about where we could have been and look where we ended up. We don’t stop fighting and we really are just now scratching the surface of our potential. We had to work through so many things that I feel like a lot of other teams didn’t have to.”
MSU acting coach Dean Lockwood, who has led the program since Jan. 28, believes the Spartans can make a good showing should they receive an invite to the NCAA tourney or elsewhere. Lockwood has praised the Spartans’ growth while competing in a conference he believes is the nation’s best this season.
“This team is so good,” Lockwood said. “We’ve been very close against top tier teams — Indiana, Iowa in an overtime game, on and on I could go.
“I just really believe this team is worthy and could make a good showing, but that’s going to be out of our hands.”
Contact Brian Calloway at bcalloway@lsj.com. Follow him on Twitter @brian_calloway.
This article originally appeared on Lansing State Journal: MSU women's basketball changed its course with unity of purpose
