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Expect the unexpected
Posted: Saturday January 22, 2000 12:13 PM
Sylvia Hatchell coached North Carolina to a national championship in 1994. The Tar Heels finished the 1998-99 regular season 24-6 and advanced to the NCAA Tournament Sweet 16. North Carolina is currently 10-7. Check out Hatchell's diary every other week on CNNSI.com.
Jan. 21, 2000
After five losses, it sure was a relief to finally get a win last night (77-67 against Florida State). More than anything, the last two weeks have taught me not to take winning for granted. I've been in this sport 25 years, and I know anything can happen. The only thing you can expect is the unexpected. We've been through a lot in the last couple of weeks, but we feel like we're learning from it. Our younger players are getting a lot of experience, and we hope our team will be better off down the road because of what we're going through now. You've got to have those bad times to appreciate the good times. The last few weeks have made us appreciate even more the ACC Championships we've won and the qualities that it takes to be a champion. I felt like in our game with Florida State, especially in the second half, we just dug deeper and moved to another level. We had to if we wanted to win that game. We feel good about what we're doing now and we know we're going to get better. There are going to be some more W's down the road. As anyone who follows women's basketball knows, junior guard Nikki Teasley is on an indefinite leave of absence from the team. She did not make the trip with us to Virginia for our game on Jan. 6 and has been away from our team since that time. That's a major dent in our offense and our team when Nikki, who is our point guard, isn't out there. It's like with a football team. You can have four or five great receivers, but if you don't have the quarterback it doesn't matter how great those receivers are. That's what we've been going through, not having the quarterback out there to distribute the ball. Our timing has been off and we've had to make a lot of adjustments. Some of our players have really been pressing, trying too hard to step up and do more. We've taken a few losses, but we've also learned a lot from this situation. We're optimistic that Nikki will be back and when she does come back, I think we're going to be a lot better team because of what we've gone through. We leave tomorrow morning at 8 a.m. to travel out to Ames, Iowa, where we'll play Iowa State on Sunday. The game is going to be a tremendous challenge. They're one of the top teams in the country, and we know they have some outstanding players. Actually, on film they remind us a lot of Duke. They're very solid fundamentally, a tremendous offensive team with a lot of people who can score. They run some of Dean Smith's old offenses, so those are some things they do that we're familiar with. Actually it's kind of nice to get out of the ACC and play somebody different this time of year. In the conference, every team knows every other team so well. Going up against someone who doesn't know every little thing about us will be a nice change.
-- Coach Hatchell
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