BC Enters 2024-2025 With Hopes For Next Big Breakout

It's hard to turn on the television without running into a women's basketball story. The sport once relegated to its few well-known dynasties now owns the full-fledged front page of a pop culture society that's turned its players into international icons. The storm encompassing the on-court drama developed into a made-for-television debate surrounding the Caitlin Clark or Angel Reese-type superstar rivalries, to which a spillover effect now encompasses and envelops student-athletes who once operated in relative obscurity.

For Boston College's women's basketball program, the double-edged discussion placed its players in a strange subgroup between their fandom and their own budding prominence. Like so many others, the Eagles sat and watched New York vanquish Minnesota before the sold-out crowds embedded within the incredible five-game WNBA Finals, but two weeks after Jonquel Jones won MVP honors, the team dreaming of reaching its own heights takes the court for its own journey within the ultra-competitive and flourishing Atlantic Coast Conference.

"I definitely feel the buzz," said head coach Joanna Bernabei-McNamee ahead of her seventh season on BC's sideline. "I don't go anywhere now and not [see] people talking about the WNBA [or] talking about women's basketball. That's never been the case ever [because] a lot of people didn't even know that the WNBA played over the summer. I think the new fans bring new attention to our game, and we need to filter that in because I think our brand of basketball at Boston College is so entertaining. It's easy to watch, and since I've been here, my goal has always been to fill that lower bowl [in Conte Forum]. With the surge of women's basketball and everybody being open and gravitating towards it, this could be the year."

Growth hasn't always been easy in an ACC stocked with some of the nation's best women's college basketball programs, but Bernabei-McNamee's understanding of how to capitalize on the sport's overall perception isn't happenstance. Last year's 14-19 record marked the worst overall winning percentage of her non-Covid seasons at BC, but it produced the same number of wins as her first season in 2018-2019.

Both of those seasons carried more overall victories than any season over the decade ahead of Bernabei-McNamee's arrival, and last year specifically ended the ACC slate with five wins after a mini-winning streak included victories over North Carolina and Pittsburgh. A first round ACC Tournament victory over Clemson sealed BC's advancement to a fourth consecutive Second Round appearance, all of which provided the upwing to a second consecutive season under .500.

"We were a little bit disappointing last year," Bernabei-McNamee admitted, "but we were happy with the way that we ended the season on a high note. We talked a lot as a team about how we lost close games, and we wanted to change that this year. Something that we've stuck to changing was our pace of practice, and we put some things [into the scheme] earlier that we wouldn't have put in [last year]. We have the ability to do that with a mature team, but we really took to heart that we wanted to be the most in-shape team [on the floor]. When the fourth quarter rolls around, we can really put our best foot, mentally and physically, forward, which we missed at times last year."

The good vibes were needed, but it didn't change the uphill battle BC faced after it lost five ACC games by ten points or less. Missed upsets over nationally-ranked Louisville and Virginia Tech paired with a separate, two-point loss to Kentucky after the Wildcats outscored the Eagles by five points in the fourth quarter, and three separate losses to Harvard, Wisconsin and Marquette altered the standing of a team that likely would have aligned with a second postseason berth ovr a three-year span.

Yet that was the duality of the season in Chestnut Hill, and while it's easy to look at the team's woes with a gripping fear of needing to "fix" or "alter" its roster, it's equally simple to see how the coaches transitioned the roster for the upcoming year. The style didn't necessarily change, but maintaining the axioms and roots of the team was simplistically easier with a lineup that lost one regular rotation player but didn't otherwise suffer any significant turnover.

"I think one advantage is that you have seniority and leadership," Bernabei-McNamee said. "The second advantage is just the sheer basketball IQ that came back and is running the same style of offense and defense that we did last year. Veteran players know what to do, and the third thing is that their chemistry off the court, they know each other, and they're well-bonded. They're all friends, and with all of those things, it gives us the opportunity to look like a more mature team out on the floor, and we haven't had that in a while."

To BC, that's long been one of the assets most associated with Bernabei-McNamee's tenure, and each of her teams that returned the majority of its firepower found itself producing postseason bona fides. In 2019-2020, a core built around Emma Guy, Georgia Pineau and Taylor Ortlepp played well enough to imbue younger players like Taylor Soule and Marnelle Garraud with a postseason run ahead of COVID's shutdown, and Soule, Garraud, and others formed the nucleus of the WNIT team that likewise deserved a chance to dance in 2022.

Two years later, younger players from that era - players like Kaylah Ivey, Andrea Daley and Dontavia Waggoner - lead an ultra-talented recruiting class augmented by newcomer and Charleston Southern transfer Kennedi Jackson - who advanced to the NCAA Tournament while playing for Oklahoma State - one year after Teya Sidberry joined the program from an NCAA Tournament-caliber program at Utah.

"It was one of our Achilles' heels that we didn't have a true [center]," Bernabei-McNamee said. "So now we add Kennedi Jackson, who is going to get in and play our five while working on her grit. She will tell you, even right now, that she's probably in better shape than she's ever been, but she has a little ways to go, so we're working on getting her ready to play the pace that we play, which is different from the pace of places where she's come from."

Settling into a rotational core with positional alignments puts BC on a trajectory that's ready to surprise much of the national media. The ACC is, by its nature, one of the best women's college basketball conferences in the country, and a league with Louisville, Notre Dame, NC State, Florida State, Duke, North Carolina and others added the legendary Stanford program once coached by the recently-retired Tara VanDerveer. The road to the ACC Tournament no longer includes space for every team in the conference, and the unrelenting non-conference schedule isn't designed for the faint of heart.

But that's fine for Bernabei-McNamee, who enters the 2024-2025 season with a near-guarantee of becoming the third BC head coach with 100 wins at the school. Her career numbers at Conte Forum rival those of Sylvia Crawley and put her on pace to match matriarch Margo Plotzke before entering the pantheon occupied solely by the legendary Cathy Inglese. Staying on that path requires the coaching staff and players to find the right path forward, but the optimism is oozing that maybe, just maybe, this team is ready to break the mold and find its own piece of pop culture.

"It's hard," Bernabei-McNamee said, "but they have to trust the process and be willing to go hard without knowing sometimes what their role might be. [I want them to think], 'I have to make [someone] the best player that I can, and in the process, it's going to get me better, so I'm going to stay ready.' That's the kind of mentality I want everybody to have on this team, and I hope there are games where we can rotate everybody in and out, because I think the competition for that playing time is going to be there with this team."

BC opens up the 2024-2025 season on Monday afternoon when it hosts Lafayette at 5 p.m. Television coverage is available through the ACC Network Extra and can be streamed via ESPN's family of online Internet and mobile device apps.

BC Enters 2024-2025 With Hopes For Next Big Breakout

Players Mentioned

Andrea Daley

Kaylah Ivey

Kennedi Jackson

Teya Sidberry

Dontavia Waggoner

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