UNCA Women's Basketball Goes Dancing!

Some of you know that for two years, I was the Sports Information Director for women's athletics at UNC Asheville. It was a really hard, but very rewarding job. My main beef with the job was that the pay stunk and I had to work every weekend (in addition to a five-day work week) from August until mid-May. It was wonderful that I had a month off in the summer (paid), but it got really old to not have a single Saturday to do what I wanted the whole day.

But one of the most interesting aspects of the job was to travel with women's basketball. When I first got the job, they had just replaced the women's basketball coaching staff because they hadn't won a single game in the previous year. Not one game. So, this new coaching staff brought in only one player and still had the team from the previous coaches. It was quite a challenge. Coach Betsy Blose and her staff went 3-25 that year. Three wins in four months is a bitter pill to swallow. It was so painful. Every single game was frustrating. We would get back on the bus after the games and it would be dead quiet. As a former college athlete, I was used to this. When you lose tough games, you are not allowed to talk for several hours or else coach would go APE on you for not thinking about your role in the loss.

But as an SID, who had NO role in anything except to report to the media that you lost again; this was not exactly a good time.

But you could tell that Coach Blose was doing the right things. She was starting at the ground floor and began instilling confidence in these women. She believed in them and by the end of the season, they began to believe in themselves. And then, UNCA was blown out by Liberty by 47 points in the final game of the season at the conference tournament. I was exhausted by this point and wanted nothing to do with basketball for a long time. Of course, then the UNCA men make an amazing run in their tournament we end up at the NCAA tournament by a miracle shot. And basketball season continued for another month (but that was great fun!)

The next year, the Bulldogs rebounded and made history by being the best turnaround in the nation by going from 3-25 to 19-9 just one year later. I have to say, that was a fun season to be around and you could tell that everyone just believed in Betsy and her staff. I have never seen people so dedicated and work so hard. I just knew that good things were going to come. I quit that job later on that summer because I just couldn't make such a personal sacrifice of my time and energy any longer. Having been a student athlete for years in high school, college and then as a professional in the collegiate environment, I was just burnt out on having no personal time. I loved my job and the people I worked for and with and I loved the college athletes. It just got to be too much. So I left and got a job at Big Bridge Advertising. But I still followed all of the teams at UNCA and cheered them on.

This week was the Big South Women's Basketball Conference Tournament that was held here in Asheville. Coach Blose's team did everything that they were supposed to do and the teams on the opposite side of the bracket helped UNCA out by Winthrop knocking out High Point and Radford taking down the perennial conference champ, Libery University. So yesterday, UNCA beat Radford, 67-57 to punch their card for the Big Dance. I could not be happier for UNCA and for Coach Blose in particular who really deserved this. She left a job that she was very successful at, Shepard College in West Virginia to take a risk on a team that didn't win a game. She has so completely turned things around by working hard, recruiting well and being a great basketball coach. I know that this probably means she won't be sticking around Asheville for long, but I am so glad that I got to work for her and her staff for the time that I did. Perseverance pays off!

Congrats to UNCA and Coach Betsy Blose!