Stanford snapped a 29-year title drought to end a season
that at points seemed uncertain to be completed during the coronavirus
pandemic, claiming the NCAA women’s basketball championship with a tight win
Sunday over Arizona 54-53.
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Stanford led for much of the game and started the fourth
quarter up 3 points. But Arizona guard Aari McDonald, who had scored the most
points by any player in the tournament before Sunday’s game, started beating
Stanford’s defenses and closed Arizona’s deficit to 1 on a step-back jumper
with 3 minutes, 35 seconds left.
Stanford’s Haley Jones, whose game-winning shot helped the
Cardinal defeat top-seeded South Carolina in the Final Four and who led them
with 17 points Sunday, added a free throw to offer the Cardinal a cushion, but
McDonald was hot. She got closer with a free throw, then had a final
opportunity after Stanford turned it over on a shot clock violation with less
than 6 seconds left.
Her last-second jumper, a turnaround heave as she was
swarmed by three Cardinal defenders, bounced off the back of the rim as time
expired, delivering the Cardinal their third title in program history.
The battle between the teams that topped the Pac-12
Conference, then outlasted 62 others in the NCAA Tournament echoed the unusual
circumstances of the tournament itself. Traditional powers like No. 1-seeded
UConn and South Carolina and No. 2-seeded Baylor found themselves watching the
title game from afar, and the field of 64 carried more teams that had a
legitimate chance to win it all. They played against the backdrop of the public
health crisis and questions about the stature of women’s basketball in an
embattled college sports industry. But through it all, Stanford was considered
one of the sport’s top teams and solidified that claim with its championship.
“We’re excited to win the COVID championship,” Stanford
coach Tara VanDerveer said in an interview on ESPN after the game.
The title game brought together Pac-12 rivals for the first
time. It also featured one of the few Black coaches ever to reach the title
game in a sport where more than 40 percent of its players are Black. The
tournament itself, a three-week bonanza running concurrently with the NCAA
men’s tournament that was scheduled to conclude Monday night, became a forum
for conversation about the inequities between men’s and women’s college sports.
It all played in front of a crowd that was equal parts
cardboard cutouts and mask-wearing humans amid a pandemic that shuttered most
large-scale in-person events over the last year.
The win was Stanford’s first national title since 1992 — all
have been won with VanDerveer, who started coaching the Cardinal in 1985 and
became the winningest coach in women’s college basketball history this season.
In accordance with the pandemic’s ambience, she celebrated passing longtime
Tennessee coach Pat Summitt on the career wins list with just her team and
staff in a practically barren stadium 80 miles northeast of Stanford’s campus
while local health restrictions prohibited them from playing at home.
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