NCAA Women’s Basketball Championship : Volunteers Finally Take Coach to Summitt

Any notion that this is not your average Tennessee women’s basketball was confirmed Sunday, and the timing couldn’t have been much better.

The Volunteers are historically late risers, a Louisville-like team that opens the season slowly and is at its best in the playoffs--until the championship game, in which it was winless in three tries.

This season, though, they went against the grain, all the way to the end. With just three seniors, the Volunteers had a surprisingly good start, a down period near the end of the regular season and finally, in the best contradiction of all, a victory in the national championship game, made all the sweeter since it came against Louisiana Tech.

Tennessee’s 67-44 win over the third-ranked Techsters before an Erwin Center crowd of 9,823 was as important to the past as to the present, as much a relief as it was convincing. It was also a team triumph that will do a lot of good for an individual, Coach Pat Head Summitt, who had lost 11 of 12 previous games against Louisiana Tech--including a 12-point decision earlier this season.

“Well,” she said afterwards, “the monkey’s off my back.”

Fittingly, it would come here, the same place where the Volunteers beat No. 1 Texas, No. 4 Cal State Long Beach and No. 3 Louisiana Tech. They took care of No. 2 Auburn at a neutral site, the Southeastern Conference title game in Albany, Ga., for a very impressive grand slam of sorts.

Moreover, all three NCAA titles the school has won have come at the University of Texas--men’s track and field in 1974, women’s track and field in ’81 and now this. Hook ‘em, Vols?

Just as fittingly, Tennessee, without any players scoring more than 13 points, won with defense, which is exactly how it reached this point. The Volunteers (28-6) allowed an average of 68 points a game this season and clamped down to 59.3 in the first three playoff games, but they were never better than in the last two.

In the semifinals Friday, Long Beach, the nation’s highest-scoring team, could manage only a season-low 64 points, while shooting 38.8%. Louisiana Tech, which averaged 77.6 points a game coming in, including a 79-75 win over top-ranked Texas in the semifinals, never came that close.

The Techsters (30-3) shot 33.3% and tied the 13-year-old school record for fewest points scored while incurring their second-worst defeat ever. Tennessee made only 38.8% of its shots, but the Volunteers had 19 more attempts.

“The University of Tennessee played as good a defense as I’ve ever seen and ever played against,” Tech Coach Leon Barmore said. “If there is anyone more deserving of winning a national championship than Pat Head Summitt, I don’t know about it.

“We never had an easy shot. All the points we did score in that 44 were very hard-earned.”

Nora Lewis’ 12 points was the team high for the Techsters, while Teresa Weatherspoon, who played on the United States’ gold-medal winning team at the Goodwill Games last summer and more recently shredded Texas for 19 points and 11 assists, scored just 11.

Sophomore Bridgette Gordon did a fine defensive job against Lewis and also scored 13 points for Tennessee, as did freshman Tonya Edwards and sophomore Sheila Frost off the bench. Edwards, who stuck with Weatherspoon on defense, become the second straight first-year player to be named the outstanding player of the Final Four, following Texas’ Clarissa Davis.

Women’s Championship Notes

There were 5,792 no-shows, no doubt Texas fans who lost interest when the hometown Longhorns lost in the semifinals to Louisiana Tech. Still, two attendance marks were set Sunday: Largest crowd for the semifinals and final combined (25,126, nearly 9,000 better than the old mark at Norfolk, Va., in 1983), and largest crowd for a championship game, 292 more than when Louisiana Tech beat Cheyney State at Norfolk in 1982. . . . The Louisiana Tech band made an effort to lure some of the uncommited fans into the Techsters’ corner with a rendition of “The Eyes of Texas” moments before the game. The crowd, many dressed in burnt orange, cheered loudly and tossed the “Hook ‘em Horns” sign into the air. The Texas band tried the same thing last season at Lexington, Ky., before the Longhorns’ game with USC, but with little success. . . . The rest of the All-Final Four team, along with Bridgette Gordon: Cindy Brown of Cal State Long Beach, Tonya Edwards of Tennessee, Teresa Weatherspoon of Louisiana Tech and Clarissa Davis of Texas. . . . Katrina McClain of Georgia, a senior forward who averaged 24.9 points a game, was named Champion Player of the Year for Division I. Brown, Sue Wicks of Rutgers and Davis of Texas were the other finalists. Debra Larsen, a forward from Cal Poly Pomona, was named the top player in Division II. . . . Tennessee Coach Pat Head Summitt, who played on the United States team that won the silver medal in the 1976 Olympics and coached the 1984 winners: “Winning a medal is a great moment for a lot of reasons, certainly because you’re playing for your country. But this is just as special.”