VCU women’s basketball team prepares for NCAA opener

PISCATAWAY, N.J. If experience is indeed the best teacher, today's NCAA women's tournament game between Virginia Commonwealth University and Rutgers will match third-graders against doctoral candidates.

VCU is appearing in the NCAA playoffs for the first time in the program's 34-year history. Rutgers has qualified for the seventh season in a row and the 20th overall. Among them, Rutgers' five starters have appeared in 44 NCAA Tournament games. VCU's have appeared in, well, none.

Rams coach Beth Cunningham, a former two-time All-American at Notre Dame, said she has shared her NCAA recollections with her athletes. But until her players experience the bright lights and the pressure and the media commotion for themselves, Cunningham said, "it's going to be hard for them to really relate to and understand what it's all about."

Cunningham said she has emphasized one theme, over and over, since the Rams arrived in Piscataway on Thursday: "Focus and intensity and preparing the same way we've prepared all year long -- that's what we've been talking about. I think it's all about sticking with what got you here."

Quanitra Hollingsworth, VCU's all-Colonial Athletic Association post player, attached scant significance to the Rams naiveté. Inexperience, she said, does not -- and should not -- imply inability.

"Yes, we're all anxious," Hollingsworth said. "We know that [today's contest] is an opportunity and a privilege, but there's an obligation, too -- to go out there and play our best basketball. We won't do anything different. We'll just go out and play the way we know how." The Rams, she said, "are prepared for a fight."

But to what extent can they be prepared if they've never performed on this stage before? Granted, the Rams collected a postseason victory in last year's WNIT. But that was a community dinner theatre. This is Broadway.

Two Scarlet Knights veterans, senior post player Kia Vaughn and junior guard Epiphanny Prince, recalled their own NCAA Tournament debuts. They said the presence of teammates who had been there and done that was an invaluable ally.

"I was a little wide-eyed in my first game," Vaughn said. "It was nice to have the upperclassmen there to shelter me."

Said Prince, who will carry a 19.2-point scoring average into tomorrow's contest: "I didn't have time to get nervous" when making her NCAA debut against East Carolina in 2007. Matee [Ajavon, a veteran guard] scored something like 11 straight points to start the game. After that, there wasn't anything to worry about."

Cunningham said even the most regal women's programs were NCAA novices at some point. She said the players on the Rams' roster have earned the right to wear their first-time distinction like a medal.

"This is why the kids on our roster came to VCU," Cunningham said. "They wanted to be part of something special. They wanted to take the program to a whole new level." She said the Rams "have been a team of firsts" over the past two years. Today's game, she said, "is just one more step in the process."