It’s a scene that has replayed in Nikki Blue’s mind
over and over: the anticipation of Selection Sunday ““ sitting
around the television last season with her teammates, watching each
team get announced and experiencing the subsequent agony of not
seeing UCLA in the bracket.
“That’s been our motivation all season,” Blue
said. “The upperclassmen remember, but for the freshmen who
don’t know, we tell them over and over. It’s why
we’re all so focused and intense right now.”
Blue and company can ensure themselves an automatic bid to the
NCAA tournament by winning this weekend’s Pac-10 tournament
in San Jose, starting with Saturday’s quarterfinal matchup
with Arizona State. Failing that, if the team can come out of this
weekend with a pair of wins, its case should be stronger than a
year ago, when it was oh so close.
“We’ve talked about controlling our destiny,”
coach Kathy Olivier said. “We don’t want what happened
last year to happen again. But this conference is better than it
has been in past years, so it won’t be easy.”
Nevertheless, UCLA (16-11, 11-7 Pac-10) has been the hottest
team in the Pac-10, winning seven of its last eight games. Arizona
State (17-10, 11-7), UCLA’s first opponent, lost a pair of
games last week against the Washington schools and likely needs at
least one victory to punch its own ticket to the NCAA
tournament.
The Bruins earned a split with the Sun Devils in the regular
season with a 73-64 victory three weeks ago at Pauley Pavilion.
“This will be the third time they’ve seen us,”
Blue said. “They know our plays and our tendencies, but
because we got that last win, we know we can beat them.”
The Sun Devils could be without one of their top players, guard
Betsy Boardman, who suffered a knee injury last week. She underwent
an MRI exam Tuesday, but the school has made no announcement as to
her availability Saturday.
Should UCLA win its opener against Arizona State, its likely
second round matchup would be against top-seeded Stanford, a squad
that narrowly beat UCLA twice this season and ended the
Bruins’ run a year ago in the conference tournament. As a
result, there is a fear the team may look ahead to its biggest
rival.
“We’re just taking it game by game,” Blue
said. “We can’t disregard Arizona State because
they’re tough, too. If we take it one game at a time,
we’ll achieve our ultimate goal ““ to win the
tournament.”
One concern has been whether UCLA can keep pushing its three
stars ““Â Blue, Noelle Quinn and Lisa
Willis ““ after they played a brutal amount of
minutes in the regular season. The lack of depth could be magnified
in the tournament, where the Pac-10 champion will be required to
play three games in three days.
“Everyone says our weaknesses are our depth and our
youth,” Olivier said. “But our youth accounts for that.
We don’t play young, and because we are young, we can go
forever. I’ve seen these girls go play for hours in the
summer sun for four or five straight days.”
Regardless of what happens this weekend, the team once again
will huddle around the television to watch the bracket
announcement. But this time, Blue believes there will be a
different outcome.
Her solution is simple.
“We have to take it out of the selection committee’s
hands,” Blue said. “It’s on us. If we win all
three, we can’t be denied.”