When the Boston University women’s basketball team walked off the floor yesterday afternoon in Storrs, Conn., the scoreboard showed a 47-point drubbing by the University of Connecticut.
But the scoreboard does not tell the whole story. The Terriers have grown more in the last four years than in the previous decade. And the reason for the turnaround begins with one person: Margaret McKeon.
Since McKeon’s arrival in 1999, the Terriers have gone from perennial conference bottom feeders to continual contenders. In the three years prior to her arrival, the Terriers went 20-60 from 1996-1999. After a tough 8-21 mark in 1999-2000, McKeon has guided the Terriers to a 43-45 record in the last three years, along with two consecutive winning seasons and their first-ever NCAA Tournament berth.
Since football’s demise in 1997, almost every team on campus has picked up the slack in the winning department. And if the women’s team needs to look anywhere for a roadmap of where it can go, they need look no further than across the hall.
The men’s team has become one of those mid-major teams that none of the high profile, power-conference teams want to play. After defeating Ohio University and Florida State, getting George Washington University to come here and giving serious scares to Arizona, Stanford and St. John’s, the Terriers have done everything possible to get noticed.
McKeon has followed suit, as her team traveled to St. Joseph’s and welcomed powerhouses like Stanford and Vanderbilt to Case Gym this season. But every game paled in comparison to yesterday’s match at UConn. Forget the score for a second. For these ladies, playing in front of a national television audience and 9,000 screaming fans was a huge step forward.
Attendance problems have always plagued the women’s team, as they have every other team on Commonwealth Avenue. The Terriers averaged less than 400 fans per game this season, and most of them were players’ relatives and friends or fans of the opposing team. While the women’s team can’t expect to sell out every game, students should support a team that has made every effort to put BU on the national stage and in the NCAA spotlight. McKeon has recruited harder than any coach before her and has turned the program around faster than a Katie Meinhardt drive to the lane. BU is snatching players away from schools that years ago would have been way out of BU’s league. For example, Meinhardt turned down schools like Harvard, Georgetown and Cal-Berkeley to be a Terrier.
With developing rivalries with Northeastern and Vermont, and Maine’s quest for revenge next year, the Terriers are bringing excitement to ‘The Roof’ that used to be reserved for former star Tunji Awojobi or a Chaz Carr to Matt Turner alley-oop these days. For years, the BU women have been stuck sitting at the kid’s table. But with an energetic coach at the helm and a fresh batch of talented recruits coming in every year, it’s about time to let the Terriers sit with the big boys and for fans to get out and see them.
This is an account occasionally used by the Daily Free Press editors to post archived posts from previous iterations of the site or otherwise for special circumstance publications. See authorship info on the byline at the top of the page.
