Blue White Illustrated

April 2022

Penn State Sports Magazine

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5 2 A P R I L 2 0 2 2 W W W . B L U E W H I T E O N L I N E . C O M E D I T O R I A L MATT HERB matt@bluewhiteonline.com W hen Penn State announced in March 2019 that Coquese Wash- ington would be stepping down as women's basketball coach, athletics di- rector Sandy Barbour explained that "our history and tradition say that we should expect more, that we can do better." It was hard to argue the point. Penn State had reached the national tourna- ment in 22 of Rene Portland's 27 seasons as head coach but made the NCAA field only four times in Washington's 12 sea- sons and appeared to be trending in the wrong direction, with only one winning season in Washington's last five years at the helm. The following month, Penn State hired Carolyn Kieger away from her alma ma- ter, Marquette, hoping that she could turn the program around. Barbour had every reason to believe that Kieger was the right person for the job. While with the Golden Eagles, she had accomplished exactly what Barbour wanted done at Penn State, taking over a program that had been in the doldrums and leading it into the NCAA Tourna- ment in just her third season. But Penn State's rebuild has turned out to be a bigger challenge. At Mar- quette, Kieger didn't have a perennial women's hoops powerhouse just over the border as Penn State does in Big Ten foe Maryland. She didn't have to leapfrog a contingent of frequent NCAA Tourna- ment participants like Ohio State, Iowa, Rutgers, Michigan State and Purdue. And, of course, she didn't have a pan- demic to contend with when she tried to get prospects to visit her campus. After three seasons at Penn State, Kieger is 27-56 overall and 12-43 in the Big Ten. A certain amount of difficulty was inevitable given how far the program had slipped in the final years of Washington's tenure. With Kieger vowing to change not just the team's on-court approach but its culture, too, any realistic assess- ment of PSU's future had to account for the likelihood that things would get worse before they got better. But when they bowed out of the Big Ten Tournament in March with a 25-point loss to 13th-seeded Rutgers, it appeared as though the Lady Lions were still in the things-getting-worse phase of their rebuild. Maybe that's why Kieger sounded so disheartened afterward. "We've got to get better, and the first area for me is toughness," she said. "We've got to recruit toughness. We've got to recruit a lionheart mentality and play the way that Penn State deserves — diving on the floor for loose balls, being the first one to 50-50 balls, not letting someone play harder than you. "That's all stuff that we need to fix, that I need to fix. I need to put a team out there that is not going to back down from anyone and can play through adversity and just thrive when they need their best. "We talk about competitive greatness all the time, being at your best when your best is needed. We did not do that this year." Asked after the game how she would grade her team's performance following an 11-18 finish in which it lost 11 of its last 13 games, Kieger said bluntly, "Not very well." "I'm a competitor and I want to win, and I want to win at the highest level," she said. "I want to be playing in March. That's what I came here to do. This pro- gram needs to be in that NCAA Tourna- ment." The Lady Lions ended up as one of six Big Ten teams that sat out both the NCAA Tournament and WNIT. It has been a good year for Big Ten women's basketball, with five conference teams ranked in the Associated Press top 15 heading into the postseason and six teams making the NCAA Tournament field. In addition to the traditional pow- ers, programs at Michigan and Indiana have been on the rise. While the turnarounds in Ann Arbor and Bloomington have made Kieger's job harder, they at least offer proof that it can be done. Michigan had been to the NCAAs only five times before Kim Barnes Arico took over the program in 2012; Indiana made only six appearances and had never advanced past the second round before sprinting to the Elite Eight last year. Penn State, meanwhile, has done the opposite. It reached the tournament in 21 of the first 24 seasons in which it was held but has now been to the NCAAs only four times since 2006. If you take the long view — the ap- proach that Sandy Barbour took three years ago when she decided a change was needed — then yes, Penn State's history does suggest that the program has been underachieving. But to the high school players that Kieger needs to sign in order to change its trajectory, Penn State hasn't been to the national tournament since they were in elementary school. Those players hadn't even been born when the Lady Lions played in the Final Four in 2000. That's the tricky thing about history. No matter how much comfort it might bring, it's difficult to hold onto as it re- cedes ever deeper into the past. A little regression here, a little backsliding there, and suddenly your history may not be very comforting at all. ■ Carolyn Kieger's third season as Penn State's coach ended with a 75-50 loss to Rutgers in the first round of the Big Ten Tournament. PHOTO COURTESY PENN STATE ATHLETICS Lady Lions Still Working To Change Trajectory VARSITY VIEWS

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