Team to root for? Drexel is easy choice
For the Drexel women's basketball team, earning the program's first NCAA tournament appearance was a little like bushwhacking a path to the top of Mt. Everest.
Getting into the field of 64 is enough of a challenge with the basketball equivalent of Sherpas, ropes and ladders on your side. Doing it in Old Dominion's league?
That's reaching college basketball's summit the hard way.
Not that Drexel got to this point by looking for many helping hands. And in putting the official seal on the end of Old Dominion's reign by beating James Madison 64-58 on Sunday in the CAA championship game -- on James Madison's home court -- the Dragons lived up to a résumé that ought to make them the team you're pulling for next week.
Just consider some of what went into winning the Colonial's automatic bid against the Dukes after ending Old Dominion's streak of 17 consecutive NCAA tournament appearances with a 62-41 win against the Monarchs in the semifinals.
• Coming off a 1-2 start to the season that included losses to American and La Salle, Drexel found itself tied 20-20 at the half against Bucknell on Nov. 25. The Dragons eventually sweated out a 44-36 win on the road against the Bison, but only after Gabriela Marginean scored 33 points. Going out on a limb, it seems safe to suggest that's the highest percentage of a winning team's total points scored by any one player this season.
In fact, entering the championship game, Marginean had scored 38.1 percent of her team's points and ranked third in the country in points per game at nearly 24 per contest. Compare that to the rest of the nation's top 10 in scoring:
Alysha Clark, Middle Tennessee State: 27.3 ppg (35.5 percent)
Dawn Evans, James Madison: 23.8 ppg (30.7 percent)
Angel McCoughtry, Louisville: 23.5 ppg (32.4 percent)
Andrea Riley, Oklahoma State: 23.1 ppg (31.7 percent)
Ashley Nicole Hayes, Murray St.: 23.0 ppg (29.6 percent)
Shavonte Zellous, Pittsburgh: 22.5 ppg (30.3 percent)
Jantel Lavender, Ohio State: 21.1 ppg (30.5 percent)
Amber Guffey, Murray State: 21.0 ppg (27.1 percent)
DeWanna Bonner, Auburn: 21.0 ppg (27.3 percent)
So, of course, the Dragons spent a good chunk of the first 30 minutes of Sunday's championship game with Marginean on the bench in foul trouble, building a double-digit lead before she returned to ice the game at the free throw line down the stretch.
How else would they try and win the conference title on the home court of Dawn Evans, the nation's second-leading scorer?
• South Dakota State's entire roster hails from within a day's drive of the campus in Brookings, S.D., where a day's drive doesn't necessarily put you in danger of getting stuck in too many rush-hour traffic jams around population centers. Much of Drexel's recruiting also involves a short car ride -- to the airport for an international flight.
In case the name wasn't a giveaway, Marginean isn't exactly a Philadelphia native. The junior from Cluj-Napoca, Romania (try saying that three times fast -- or one time slowly, for that matter), is one of five Europeans on the roster. And it's not like it's a single pipeline -- the five Europeans come from five different countries: Romania, Belgium, Sweden, Lithuania and Slovakia.
But there certainly wasn't a translation needed as Marginean and Swedish post Jen Stjarnstrom celebrated on the court after Sunday's win. Or when Belgian guard Jasmina Rosseel offered a succinct but apt accented assessment of Marginean's early foul trouble.
"That's a bummer," Rosseel said in her on-court interview during the broadcast. "I mean, if she gets out with foul trouble, we need to step up as a team. And today we did."
• Even some of the locals have taken the scenic route to the NCAA tournament.
Senior point guard Andrea Peterson might be the most patient player in America, which is rather remarkable considering how long she has had to wait just to get some games in. Peterson played 40 minutes against James Madison and finished with just one turnover. That isn't surprising, given that despite leading the team in assists, she has turned the ball over just 37 times in 1,136 minutes on the court this season -- or 1.3 times per 40 minutes.
A native of the Philadelphia suburbs, Peterson started her career at St. John's before transferring to Drexel in advance of the 2005-06 season. She sat out that campaign and the first month-plus of the following season due to transfer rules, but led the Dragons in assists once she became eligible. Then four games into last season, she suffered a season-ending knee injury.
Now finally, nearly five years removed from the first time she suited up for a college practice, she has started all of her team's games. No wonder she values the ball so much.
• It gets better, because Peterson doesn't even have the best case for making you feel guilty about cursing the unfairness of life when putting in that extra hour at the office.
That honor goes to senior Nicole Hester, who missed the 2006-07 season while batting Hodgkin's lymphoma and has come back to be one of the team's emotional leaders.
Since taking over as coach during the 2003-04 season after stints as an assistant at Drexel and Villanova, her alma mater, coach Denise Dillon has compiled a 101-83 record for a program that had just one winning season in the 12 preceding her ascension to first chair.
But one of the game's bright young coaches -- she came through with a terrific game plan against Evans despite the inherently short turnaround of a conference tournament -- showed even more poise dealing with a situation that even years spent learning X's and O's under Harry Perretta's tutelage couldn't prepare her for when Hester was diagnosed.
"You wanted to be strong for her, you wanted to be strong for the team, but it was just something that ate away at me all [through the 2006-07 season]," Dillon said when I talked to her before the start of last season. "Even thinking back to it, makes me want to break down. It was incredibly hard to hear. You never want anyone ever to go through that, especially someone at such a young age. And she was comfortable finally in her third year. Your junior year is a special year, because now there is just a confidence about you. You're comfortable with school, you're comfortable with the program, you understand basketball-wise what you need to do, your teammates are here."
Wherever Drexel lands in Monday's draw, the Dragons enter the NCAA tournament not only having proved they can handle a steep climb but that their team is built on them.
Graham Hays is a regular contributor to ESPN.com's women's basketball coverage. E-mail him at Graham.Hays@espn3.com.
