This weekend’s Pac-10 women’s basketball tournament will be all about consistency.
The four-day tournament begins Friday at the HP Pavilion in San Jose.
The regular season champion, No. 6 Stanford, has won 16 straight and is hoping for a top seed in the NCAA tournament. Runner-up Cal and third-place Arizona State also need solid showings to improve their NCAA seeding.
The second-tier teams will need a consistent weekend just to clinch an NCAA tournament berth.
Fifth-seeded UCLA is very much in that category. The mercurial Bruins have shown flashes of excellence in what has been a mediocre season. Their weekend begins Saturday night when they face USC. The winner of that game will likely face Stanford on Sunday.
“We’ve battled with the best in the country,” coach Kathy Olivier said. “We just have to do it consistently, and that takes time. We’re literally playing with all six of our freshman.”
Recently, the one thing the Bruins have done consistently is lose to rival Trojans. UCLA has lost to Mark Trakh’s USC team twice already this season, and seven consecutive times overall.
But this UCLA-USC matchup will be very different from the two the Bruins have lost this year ““ a close 56-64 battle at the Galen Center and a 36-49 contest at Pauley that featured a paucity of Bruin shots going through the hoop.
This time the Trojan’s 6-foot-3-inch center, Nadia Parker, won’t be dominating the interior.
Parker, who led the team in points and rebounds this season, tore her MCL at Arizona and will not play again this season.
“She’s one of the only kids that rebounds on our team, and we’re not a very good rebounding team,” Trakh said. “She’s played great against UCLA this year, so we have a big hole to fill.”
Trakh added that either freshman Kari LaPlante or sophomore Morghan Medlock will step in for Parker.
There is a lot riding on the first-round game for both the Trojans and Bruins. UCLA needs to win the title to get the league’s automatic bid or it will miss the NCAA tournament for a second straight season. The Trojans are on the bubble and a loss to UCLA could eliminate them from NCAA tournament contention.
The league’s top teams all want to enter the NCAA tournament on a high note.
For the Golden Bears that means rebounding from a heartbreaking end to their regular season. California lost by just two points to Stanford in a game that would have given them a shot at the conference title. Then they slipped on the road to Washington, 66-74. The Golden Bears defeated the Huskies by 26 points in December.
“I think it goes back to “˜you can’t do anything about it,'” coach Joanne Boyle said about her team’s two tough losses. “You have to move on, it’s the nature of sport in general. You have to look back and learn … but you can’t dwell on it.”
Boyle’s team is hardly down for the count. With the leadership of junior Ashley Walker, the team’s leading scorer and rebounder, the Golden Bears could challenge Stanford for the title this weekend.
“The kids usually respond pretty well,” Boyle said. “I’m looking forward to telling them that it’s one and done at this point.”
While most of the conference enters the weekend with the pressure of reaching the tournament or, in California’s case, regaining momentum, Stanford is poised to make a run for a national title in the NCAA Tournament.
But even Stanford realizes that the stakes are higher now, and that consistency is more important than ever.
“We know that now it’s a different type of challenge,” coach Tara VanDerveer said.