This is the final part of a three-part series revisiting the 2002-2003 Boston University women’s basketball season.
George Washington once said, ‘Ninety-nine percent of the failures come from people who have the habit of making excuses.’
It’s no wonder then that the Boston University women’s basketball team enjoyed one of the most successful seasons in the program’s history this year, ending with a first-ever trip to the NCAA Tournament.
It would have been easy for the team to complain about the wave of injuries that decimated Coach Margaret McKeon’s roster. They hardly would have been the first team to mail it in after a poor 2-8 start. And when Terriers trailed by 14 points with six minutes left in their conference tournament matchup with Northeastern University, they could have thought what everyone else in the arena thought the game was over.
But the Terriers didn’t.
Instead, they chose to view each game simply as a step in a season-long journey, each setback as a reason to work harder, and each critic as someone to add to their list of I-told-you-so’s. When a Terrier went down with an injury there was always somebody ready to step up, whether it was losing freshman guard Katie Meinhardt for the first four games of the season due to an elbow injury, freshman guard Rachael Vanderwal for six weeks to a stress-fracture in her ankle, or season ending injuries to junior guards Lashaunda Mitchell and Courtney Jones just to name a few.
The Terriers are going to enter next season as the defending America East Champions, returning one of the conference’s top players (junior guard Katie Terhune), the top rookie (Meinhardt), and one of the best defensive players (junior forward Marisa Moseley). Throw into the mix the healthy return of Jones, Mitchell and freshman forward Shannon Petranoff coupled with the addition of junior Becky Bonner, who transferred to BU from national powerhouse Stanford University, and the Terriers should begin next season as the favorite to win their second consecutive conference championship.
The Terriers are losing two seniors who played pivotal roles in the team’s success this season: Alison Argentieri and Rachel Werner. Argentieri was outstanding during the Terriers’ run through the conference tournament, but her departure makes room in the starting five for Meinhardt, who has already made a name for herself as one of the top guards in the America East. Werner gave McKeon valuable minutes throughout the second half of the season when Amparo Lopez was hindered by injuries, and her departure gives Bonner a spot in the Terriers’ lineup.
Already the Terriers look better on paper, and this is without next year’s freshman class. If the past three classes are any indication, then the Terriers can expect McKeon to bring in one or two players ready to make an impact during their rookie year. This season it was Meinhardt and Vanderwal, last year Larissa Parr and Adrienne Norris, and Terhune and Moseley the year before that, in what was McKeon’s first recruiting class at BU.
Next year’s team will be in a position that no recent Terrier team has, which begs one question. How will the Terriers respond when the odds are in their favor for a change, when there are no excuses to be made?
The answer to that is yet to be seen, but it’s a position the Terriers will have to start getting used to. McKeon has brought in talented athletes and has instilled a winning attitude, and so far everything has gone according to plan the Terriers made the NCAA tournament in her fourth year, the exact timeframe McKeon set upon arriving in Boston.
With that goal accomplished, the Terriers will now turn their attention to not only winning the conference, but receiving a 12 or 13 seed in next year’s NCAA Tournament, a seed that will yield a far more favorable first round matchup than this year’s with defending champion University of Connecticut.
The Terriers enter the off-season with their heads held high after a historic season of firsts during which they never gave up or made excuses, despite all the bad luck that befell the team. After this year’s roller-coaster ride of a season, Terrier fans have good reason for optimism entering next year and they should have learned never to count out McKeon’s resilient bunch.
With all the questions that circled the Terriers this season, there is only one buzzing around Babcock Street these days.
What will they do for an encore?
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