Guru’s WBB Report: Three Days From the Delayed Liftoff to the Season Nationally, There’s No Established Normal in the New Normal

By Mel Greenberg @womhoopsguru

 

From the end of which your Guru operates, it is quickly becoming apparent that the normal of the new normal in terms of navigating the 2020-21 collegiate basketball season, in this case more likely the women’s side, is not going to settle in anytime soon.

 

For a few days it seemed that a solid readjustment was occurring, schedules, though not complete, began showing up in email press releases and at websites, and even tipoff times were starting to drop.

 

Thus the pieces to play catch-up were at hand to the long-running national/local composite grids yours truly and others build to have the clues as to what is happening every day through the championship game of the NCAA tournament so we can begin preparing how to cover the scene for all of you.

 

By late Saturday morning, short of waiting on the Big Ten composite to have a local handle on Penn State and Rutgers along with their teams in the national mix, and likewise the Atlantic Coast Conference to have their day-to-day, I felt I had at least a solid start with the national and two weeks delayed tipoff on the immediate horizon ahead for Wednesday.

 

Bragging about it to my good friend and Inquirer colleague Mike Jensen, who operates more on the men’s side but is well-versed on the women’s world, he quickly replied, the schedules are going to change daily thru this Covid-19 pandemic.

 

Sure enough, within the hour came word out of Saint Joseph’s, which, like La Salle here in Philadelphia, had just gotten their game days from the Atlantic 10, that a Tier 1 designate had tested positive, the team would would be going into quarantine, and the first four non-conference games for now, that was to begin with a traditional local rivalry Hawks/Villanova to open Wednesday, were going off the books.

 

Because for the most part once conference play kicks in, Nova on the Big East side, and Saint Joseph’s in the the A-10 world, will play their league games on weekends, an opportunity exists to attempt a reschedule, especially since the two schools are a few miles apart.

 

Meanwhile, Rider lost its first two games, an opener Wednesday at Seton Hall, within two hours of each other, and a game here on Hawk Hill that had been set for Saturday.

 

Also blown to smithereens on the women’s side is the normal war within the war, the Big Five round-robin.

 

The first hit came several weeks ago with the news that the Ivy League was cancelling the winter sports schedule, sadly taking Penn here and Princeton up the road out of the Guru local group. The Tigers are not Big Five but long ago became part of the local mix with their rise under Courtney Banghart, who is quickly stocking a roster to make North Carolina a national relevant factor again.

 

At the time, the Guru had a quick fix in terms of the alternative Philly 6 when Drexel is in the conversation, that since the Dragons were playing everyone else just have them replace Penn and add Temple.

 

Except that it was quickly learned in two successive conversations, that Nova went by the boards with the Owls when the season had a delayed start and then that Temple was playing no one in the Big Five off the expansion of the American Athletic Conference expansion to 20 games and the non-conference inclusion of the recently created national rivalry with top-ranked South Carolina and a return game with Florida Gulf Coast University both on the road.

 

Then there are the arena specs. 

 

Here in Philadelphia there are new local restrictions so some schools will allow media with no fans and some will hold back on that. Villanova is outside the city so we’ve been waiting for that determination.

 

Every school has all kinds of limitations on media but the one blessing is many of us trained for remote as it now evolves having covered the entire WNBA, housed in Florida, over the summer.

 

But in terms of the entire league, you’re talking just 12 teams, not a myriad of conferences with different nuances.

And as schedules and rosters keep getting impacted off test results, there’s a lot of improvising in play.

“I can’t believe I was on twitter looking for a couple of games,” Arizona coach Adia Barnes said recently.

Louisville is the checking point for local organizing of coaches who lose a game on short notice to see if someone else lost one and they can plug each other in to make up for the vacancies.

 

On Friday, yours truly was the New Haven Register’s Doug Bonjour’s guest on his podcast. He is one of the still large multi-member group covering the nationally prominent UConn women, who return to the Big East this season.

 

Here’s a link — https://www.nhregister.com/uconn/article/Longtime-women-s-college-basketball-writer-Mel-15742752.php

 

I noted near the end of the show that 90 percent of what we were discussing would not even be part of the conversation had not not the world-wide pandemic hit hard last March closing down the NCAA tournament, among every other sport, and has lasted to impact the start of a new season.

 

Otherwise, locally, in Philadelphia, we’d primarily be talking, among lots of items, of the return home of former Villanova star Denise Dillon from Drexel to succeed longtime Wildcats mentor Harry Perretta, and her being replaced on the Dragons by longtime associate head coach Amy Mallon.

 

On Penn, we’d be looking, among others, at senior Eleah Parker’s WNBA prospects after Princeton sent Bella Alarie as a first-round pick to the pros last spring.

 

We’d be speculating on Temple’s prospects of winning the AAC with dominant UConn gone, and the pro prospects of Mia Davis, who is on several watch lists.

 

At Rider, it’s the year after the super season with Stella Johnson, now a member of the WNBA Washington Mystics, who was the nation’s leading scorer.

 

And nationally, the focus is on a reshuffle at the top under South Carolina but not far away.

 

Even there, though, there is a new consideration.

 

Recently, the NCAA announced the entire men’s tournament was going to switch its normal format and play the entire event in pseudo bubble style in Indianapolis, which gave joy to many United States Basketball Writers Association members on the East Coast in that the area is a not arduous drive away to travel either alone or by carpool.

 

Soon thereafter, the attention turned to what would the women do, in that the first weekend is usually groups of four at the what becomes determined to be the home courts of the top 16 seeds.

 

So it was suggested that there was time to wait until it was learned, not fast, all kind of contingencies for the women are under consideration.

 

“I’m on the (NCAA women’s) oversight committee and we usually meet (via teleconference) two or three times a season and now we’ve been meeting twice a week, many times with the men’s group, looking at all sorts of contingencies, and I have a greater appreciation for their work,” said UCLA coach Cori Close, who along with South Carolina’s Dawn Staley, Louisville’s Jeff Walz, and Michigan’s Kim Arico Barnes were part of Associated Press national women’s writer Doug Feinberg’s national zoom call on Friday.

 

“Whatever ideas they come up with, we’re all ears,” Staley said with a smile.

 

San Antonio, as of now set to host the Women’s Final Four, has stated they could handle the whole tournament in Texas, while some thought is being given to the long-championed idea of national broadcaster Debbie Antonelli to house most or all of the tourney in Las Vegas.

 

So that’s where we are, three days from liftoff so to speak in the jargon of NASA.

 

To close, with this thought, by the way we are now under way with year 45 of the AP women’s poll, to amend an old saying — The more things change, the more they will continue to keep changing.

 

To be continued.