Boston College Athletics
Victory in Raleigh!
January 05, 2023 | Women's Basketball, #ForBoston Files
Down 10 early, the Eagles outpaced and outplayed the No. 10 team in the nation to erase a 12-year drought.
Life was very different on March 5, 2010 than it was on Thursday night. Joanna Bernabei-McNamee was a stay-at-home mother after choosing to put her career on hold. Dontavia Waggoner was in grade school as a nine-year old girl. Taina Mair hadn't even reached kindergarten yet.
Barack Obama wasn't even 50 years old, and the newly-minted President of the United States hadn't endured his first midterm election cycle. The New England Patriots were three years removed from their 16-0 regular season, and fans and analysts questioned if Tom Brady would ever win a fourth Super Bowl after a blowout loss to Baltimore in the Wild Card Playoffs two months earlier. The Boston Celtics were rolling through teams, and the Boston Bruins hadn't yet advanced to a favored playoffs where they'd lose a 3-0 lead to the Philadelphia Flyers.
Deval Patrick was governor of Massachusetts and on the verge of defeating a Republican challenger named Charlie Baker for re-election, but upstart unknown Scott Brown had defeated Martha Coakley to flip the political party sitting in the Senate seat once occupied by the recently-departed Ted Kennedy.
At the Greensboro Coliseum in Greensboro, North Carolina, the Boston College women's basketball program defeated second-seeded Florida State in the ACC Tournament for the last of its 17 wins that season. Led by head coach Sylvia Crawley, the roster that went to the WNIT one year earlier defeated a top-10 team to advance into the semifinals of the conference tournament, and a team that previously defeated top-10 Duke found itself on the doorstep of a possible rematch with the Blue Devils in the championship finals.
Over the next 12-plus years, Boston College played against top-10 teams without victories. An Eagle program that surged into the WNIT in 2011 faded out of the ACC spotlight by the middle of the decade, and devoid of those signature victories, a long drought dragged into the 2020s. 4,689 days passed between March 5, 2010 and January 5, 2023, and until Thursday, BC failed to defeat any team ranked inside the top-10.
Until Thursday and a 79-71 win over No. 10 NC State that unquestionably shattered the glass ceiling and mystique of an ACC long built to deny entry into its upper tier.
"This is why we go through the tough parts of our job," said Bernabei-McNamee, now in her fifth year as head coach of the Eagles. "There are a lot of really tough parts about being a student-athlete, but this is why we put up with all the toughness. It's to have this feeling and to get to be together to celebrate this win makes it all worth it."
BC hadn't beaten the Wolfpack since an overtime victory at home, but the Eagles bludgeoned the two-time defending conference champions before a raucous home crowd on a court named after the legendary Kay Yow. They led for 24 minutes and ran the floor in transition against an off-balance NC State defense, and they worked the inside-out game to perfection by scoring 40 of their 79 points in the paint opposite a 50 percent three-point shooting spree.
Dontavia Waggoner, the NC State transfer who left Raleigh after appearing in 16 games as a freshman, completed the transition from defensive specialist to all-around threat by scoring a game-high 23 points on 10-for-17 shooting. She was one of two players to record a double-double after grabbing 10 rebounds, and her four offensive boards accounted for a full third of BC's work on the attacking window. She added three assists and a steal while limiting her turnovers, and she recorded several of the Eagles' best analytical performances by drawing the toughest defensive assignments against a team ranked 26th in the nation with 78.6 points per game.
She was complemented perfectly by teammates who filled their roles with an unmatched success and ease. Maria Gakdeng shook off some early shooting woes to finish with 17 points and four rebounds, and JoJo Lacey went 3-for-6 from outside en route to 12 points, three boards and a steal. Andrea Daley hit 5-of-8 from the free throw line to earn a yeoman's seven points, but her 11 rebounds bookended Waggoner with eight on the defensive window.
Daley's two steals tied for the team high with Taina Mair, the local product who scintillated and froze NC State with 15 points and 10 assists. She nearly broke into the triple-double category by adding six rebounds of her own, never coming off the floor with a 40-minute explosion that saw her move squarely into the ACC's Freshman of the Year race.
"We were reading [the defense]," Mair said. "There was a play where we were running in transition and I hit [Lacey] for a three, and we went down again and I hit her again for back-to-back threes. She was feeling it, and I could tell in her body language that she was hyped. I knew I was going to get her back again, and just putting that confidence in my teammates, if they make a shot, you have to play for them and give it to them again, so if they keep making [shots], it keeps building confidence."
"Because we play so well together, when people are dishing off passes and hitting shots, it's not a shock," Waggoner said. "It definitely pushed us to keep trying harder to get that win."
Beating NC State upended a national picture literally days after Notre Dame blew the Eagles off the Joyce Center floor. A game that started 2023 on New Year's Day ended with the fourth-ranked Fighting Irish winning by 37 after building a 34-point halftime lead, and the result generated the kind of shock value that had many expecting a similar performance in Raleigh. BC had only played three games on the road, and two had ended with losses after the second game of the season saw Harvard defeat an ACC opponent with a seven-point victory. The team had barely squeaked by Northeastern six days later, and the program's only two wins at NC State occurred within BC's first five years in the ACC
The Wolfpack were a No. 4 seed in the most recent version of Charlie Creme's Bracketology on ESPN.com, and though they'd barely beaten Syracuse on Sunday, the loss to Duke was almost excusable because it came against a ranked opponent. They were still a team that had been to the Elite Eight last season after winning the conference tournament for the second consecutive year, and the roster returned virtually everyone, including All-ACC Tournament First Team and former Sixth Player of the Year Jada Boyd and last year's Sixth Player of the Year Diamond Johnson.
"When we played Notre Dame, we were weird about our transition game," Waggoner emphasized. "We like to get out in transition, but in the Notre Dame game, we just weren't there. In this game, [Bernabei-McNamee] stressed to get out in transition because she knew that we could run the whole game and eventually [NC State] would get tired, but we also got back to prevent transition points because in the last game, we'd given up so many."
"From a coach's standpoint, the day we got back after [Notre Dame], the next day was an off day," Bernabei-McNamee said. "To this team's credit, every single player got in the gym, and every single player watched film. Those are things they did, and they weren't forced to do it. They knew that game wasn't us, and we wanted a good bounce-back game. They took it upon themselves to make sure that they would control what they could control. I had been a little worried that I went a little too crazy with the film session, but I think what they saw on film, Notre Dame is a really good team, but we made them look good by not playing like us. That was something we really wanted to focus on in this game, regardless of what the score was."
The score wound up as the game's biggest story. BC battled the Wolfpack from the opening jump, but after clearing the 10-point deficit in the second quarter, the Eagles never allowed a national powerhouse to sneak in a backdoor win. They bent, but never breaking meant NC State couldn't complete its own comeback from a double-digit deficit because BC tapped into its trademark grit and mental toughness to erase a decade-long drought with the next stage of the next phase of the program's reimagining.
"This is the goal," Bernabei-McNamee said. "We are always going to take [the season] one game at a time, but the goal is that this game sets a standard for how we want to play together and how we want to communicate on the court with the tempo and pace that we want to play. I hope it sets that standard for the rest of the season."
BC returns to the court on Sunday when the Eagles host Florida State on the Conte Forum hardwood. The game tips off at 12 p.m. and can be seen on national television via the ACC Network with streaming options available on the ESPN platform for cable subscribers with access to the station.
Barack Obama wasn't even 50 years old, and the newly-minted President of the United States hadn't endured his first midterm election cycle. The New England Patriots were three years removed from their 16-0 regular season, and fans and analysts questioned if Tom Brady would ever win a fourth Super Bowl after a blowout loss to Baltimore in the Wild Card Playoffs two months earlier. The Boston Celtics were rolling through teams, and the Boston Bruins hadn't yet advanced to a favored playoffs where they'd lose a 3-0 lead to the Philadelphia Flyers.
Deval Patrick was governor of Massachusetts and on the verge of defeating a Republican challenger named Charlie Baker for re-election, but upstart unknown Scott Brown had defeated Martha Coakley to flip the political party sitting in the Senate seat once occupied by the recently-departed Ted Kennedy.
At the Greensboro Coliseum in Greensboro, North Carolina, the Boston College women's basketball program defeated second-seeded Florida State in the ACC Tournament for the last of its 17 wins that season. Led by head coach Sylvia Crawley, the roster that went to the WNIT one year earlier defeated a top-10 team to advance into the semifinals of the conference tournament, and a team that previously defeated top-10 Duke found itself on the doorstep of a possible rematch with the Blue Devils in the championship finals.
Over the next 12-plus years, Boston College played against top-10 teams without victories. An Eagle program that surged into the WNIT in 2011 faded out of the ACC spotlight by the middle of the decade, and devoid of those signature victories, a long drought dragged into the 2020s. 4,689 days passed between March 5, 2010 and January 5, 2023, and until Thursday, BC failed to defeat any team ranked inside the top-10.
Until Thursday and a 79-71 win over No. 10 NC State that unquestionably shattered the glass ceiling and mystique of an ACC long built to deny entry into its upper tier.
"This is why we go through the tough parts of our job," said Bernabei-McNamee, now in her fifth year as head coach of the Eagles. "There are a lot of really tough parts about being a student-athlete, but this is why we put up with all the toughness. It's to have this feeling and to get to be together to celebrate this win makes it all worth it."
BC hadn't beaten the Wolfpack since an overtime victory at home, but the Eagles bludgeoned the two-time defending conference champions before a raucous home crowd on a court named after the legendary Kay Yow. They led for 24 minutes and ran the floor in transition against an off-balance NC State defense, and they worked the inside-out game to perfection by scoring 40 of their 79 points in the paint opposite a 50 percent three-point shooting spree.
Dontavia Waggoner, the NC State transfer who left Raleigh after appearing in 16 games as a freshman, completed the transition from defensive specialist to all-around threat by scoring a game-high 23 points on 10-for-17 shooting. She was one of two players to record a double-double after grabbing 10 rebounds, and her four offensive boards accounted for a full third of BC's work on the attacking window. She added three assists and a steal while limiting her turnovers, and she recorded several of the Eagles' best analytical performances by drawing the toughest defensive assignments against a team ranked 26th in the nation with 78.6 points per game.
She was complemented perfectly by teammates who filled their roles with an unmatched success and ease. Maria Gakdeng shook off some early shooting woes to finish with 17 points and four rebounds, and JoJo Lacey went 3-for-6 from outside en route to 12 points, three boards and a steal. Andrea Daley hit 5-of-8 from the free throw line to earn a yeoman's seven points, but her 11 rebounds bookended Waggoner with eight on the defensive window.
Daley's two steals tied for the team high with Taina Mair, the local product who scintillated and froze NC State with 15 points and 10 assists. She nearly broke into the triple-double category by adding six rebounds of her own, never coming off the floor with a 40-minute explosion that saw her move squarely into the ACC's Freshman of the Year race.
"We were reading [the defense]," Mair said. "There was a play where we were running in transition and I hit [Lacey] for a three, and we went down again and I hit her again for back-to-back threes. She was feeling it, and I could tell in her body language that she was hyped. I knew I was going to get her back again, and just putting that confidence in my teammates, if they make a shot, you have to play for them and give it to them again, so if they keep making [shots], it keeps building confidence."
"Because we play so well together, when people are dishing off passes and hitting shots, it's not a shock," Waggoner said. "It definitely pushed us to keep trying harder to get that win."
Beating NC State upended a national picture literally days after Notre Dame blew the Eagles off the Joyce Center floor. A game that started 2023 on New Year's Day ended with the fourth-ranked Fighting Irish winning by 37 after building a 34-point halftime lead, and the result generated the kind of shock value that had many expecting a similar performance in Raleigh. BC had only played three games on the road, and two had ended with losses after the second game of the season saw Harvard defeat an ACC opponent with a seven-point victory. The team had barely squeaked by Northeastern six days later, and the program's only two wins at NC State occurred within BC's first five years in the ACC
The Wolfpack were a No. 4 seed in the most recent version of Charlie Creme's Bracketology on ESPN.com, and though they'd barely beaten Syracuse on Sunday, the loss to Duke was almost excusable because it came against a ranked opponent. They were still a team that had been to the Elite Eight last season after winning the conference tournament for the second consecutive year, and the roster returned virtually everyone, including All-ACC Tournament First Team and former Sixth Player of the Year Jada Boyd and last year's Sixth Player of the Year Diamond Johnson.
"When we played Notre Dame, we were weird about our transition game," Waggoner emphasized. "We like to get out in transition, but in the Notre Dame game, we just weren't there. In this game, [Bernabei-McNamee] stressed to get out in transition because she knew that we could run the whole game and eventually [NC State] would get tired, but we also got back to prevent transition points because in the last game, we'd given up so many."
"From a coach's standpoint, the day we got back after [Notre Dame], the next day was an off day," Bernabei-McNamee said. "To this team's credit, every single player got in the gym, and every single player watched film. Those are things they did, and they weren't forced to do it. They knew that game wasn't us, and we wanted a good bounce-back game. They took it upon themselves to make sure that they would control what they could control. I had been a little worried that I went a little too crazy with the film session, but I think what they saw on film, Notre Dame is a really good team, but we made them look good by not playing like us. That was something we really wanted to focus on in this game, regardless of what the score was."
The score wound up as the game's biggest story. BC battled the Wolfpack from the opening jump, but after clearing the 10-point deficit in the second quarter, the Eagles never allowed a national powerhouse to sneak in a backdoor win. They bent, but never breaking meant NC State couldn't complete its own comeback from a double-digit deficit because BC tapped into its trademark grit and mental toughness to erase a decade-long drought with the next stage of the next phase of the program's reimagining.
"This is the goal," Bernabei-McNamee said. "We are always going to take [the season] one game at a time, but the goal is that this game sets a standard for how we want to play together and how we want to communicate on the court with the tempo and pace that we want to play. I hope it sets that standard for the rest of the season."
BC returns to the court on Sunday when the Eagles host Florida State on the Conte Forum hardwood. The game tips off at 12 p.m. and can be seen on national television via the ACC Network with streaming options available on the ESPN platform for cable subscribers with access to the station.
Players Mentioned
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