Entering the final weekend of the regular season, it’s safe to say the balance of power in the Bay Area women’s basketball landscape has shifted.
In Berkeley, they’re making preparations for their Selection Sunday set-up for the first time in six years.
In Palo Alto, almighty Stanford finds itself in a position it hasn’t known in nearly four decades, on the verge of missing the NCAA Tournament.
“I don’t think coming into the season anybody expected us to be where we’re at now,” Cal guard Kayla Williams said. “For us to have shocked our conference, shocked the Bay, being looked at as the best team in the Bay … it’s just allowed my last season to be fun.”
When Williams, a graduate transfer from USC, decided to spend her final season at Cal, she knew she was signing up for a program that hadn’t made the NCAA Tournament in five seasons under coach Charmin Smith. Their new peers in the ACC didn’t hold them in high regard, either.
In a preseason poll, the conference’s 18 coaches and a panel of 61 other voters picked the Bears to finish 14th in their inaugural season in the ACC. They were more favorable to the Cardinal, predicting a seventh-place finish and even handing down one first-place vote.
With two games to play, Cal (22-7, 10-6) sits in seventh place and should be a shoo-in for an at-large bid barring a disaster in the ACC tournament next week in Greensboro, North Carolina. Stanford (14-13, 6-10), tied with three teams for 10th place, would probably need to capture an unlikely tournament title to avoid missing out on March Madness for the first time since 1987, two years into Tara VanDerveer’s 38-year run that came to an end last spring.
In ESPN’s most recent bracketology projection, Stanford is not among the eight bubble teams that were left out of the tournament.
“We’re not happy,” said first-year coach Kate Paye, who took over for VanDerveer after spending the previous 17 seasons on her staff. “We expect to win more. We want to win more. But at the same time, we know that we’ve made a lot of progress and the future is very bright.”
Between the complications that came with moving conferences, the black hole left by VanDerveer’s departure and a roster besieged by losses to the transfer portal, injury and graduation, Paye chalked up the program’s rare down year to “kind of a perfect storm.”
Paye played for VanDerveer and has spent the bulk of her basketball life at Stanford, so she is well aware of the expectations from fans, donors and administrators alike.
But without the star power of Cameron Brink (the second overall pick in the WNBA draft) or Kiki Iriafen (averaging 18.2 points and 8.2 rebounds after transferring to USC), and the absence of their veteran court general (Talana Lepolo, limited to five games after undergoing knee surgery last spring), Paye said it was evident by the end of their non-conference slate that it might not be a typical Stanford season.
“I think we all felt it earlier. I think our team, around Christmas or New Year’s, I felt like our team was playing stressed,” Paye said. “I think they felt a lot of pressure to meet outside expectations. We had a lot of conversations about, ‘Hey, we just have to be the best we can be and just focus on improving.’ … Everybody knows that this is a very different situation that our team has been in this year.”
It’s been a different story on the other side of the Bay, where a senior-laden group swept its regional rivals this season for the first time since 1985-86.
From 2005-06 to 2018-19, Cal appeared in the NCAA Tournament in 11 of 14 seasons, advancing to the Final Four in 2013 in the best season in program history. It’s been six years since they’ve been back, and never under Smith, who isn’t letting herself get too far ahead.
There has never been an NCAA Tournament that featured Cal but not Stanford.
“I’m not letting myself go there yet,” she said, before allowing that “we’ve talked about the selection show and what we want it to look like.
“Everyone is like, ‘Well, the last time we did this.’ And I’m like, ‘I do not care about the last time. This is our time.’ I want it to be different and special because this is this team’s first time and we don’t know when this will happen again. So don’t tell me about the last time in 2019. Let’s make this special. That’s my mindset and that’s been my mindset with this team.”
While Williams, averaging 11.4 points and 4.3 assists, has acted as the missing piece, it was the existing group of starters — seniors Ionna Krimili, Marta Suarez, Michelle Onyiah and sophomore Lulu Twidale — that Smith said spearheaded a culture change within the program.
“It’s been the best leadership group that I’ve had since I’ve been head coach,” Smith said. “I give a lot of credit to the players who decided that they wanted things to be different this year. They wanted things to be better. They wanted to hold each other accountable and have a certain standard for what Cal basketball should look like.”
The challenge will be maintaining the standard next season, when Twidale (13.1 ppg) will be their only returning starter. The Bears brought in Williams and two other role players in the transfer portal last spring and plan to be active again because, Smith said, “if you’re not using the portal, you’re really behind.”
It’s a different philosophy than at Stanford, where Paye said, “We’re not able to do it that way.” The Cardinal closed their overtime win at Virginia Tech last weekend with a group that featured two freshmen and three sophomores, whom Paye believes will be the foundation of Stanford’s next tournament team.
This year, though, belongs to the Bears.
“I personally think Cal basketball is on the rise,” Williams said. “I think this season was the start of that. I think next season they’ll continue to do great things. I think they will continue to strive to be the best team in the Bay. The rivalry with Stanford will always be there, but now that we’ve got that sweep under our belt it gives us the utmost confidence going into next season with the belief that we can do it again.”