The last time women’s basketball coach Kellie Harper was in the same gym with the Duke Blue Devils was 1999.
The gym was Greensboro Coliseum and the stage was an Elite Eight matchup with the winner heading to the Final Four in San Jose, Calif. Harper was the senior point guard on a Tennessee Volunteer squad which had won the NCAA championship the previous three years.
“Stupid Duke,” Harper said in a press conference Sunday when reminded of the team that ended her collegiate playing career, before excusing herself by adding “That was a player talking.”
“Every time I think of Duke I do think of the team that ended my career,” Harper said. “I can’t help it. It’s not the same coach, it’s obviously not the same players, but its still the blue team that says Duke.”
After defeating the Lady Vols 69-63, the Devils advanced to the championship game where they lost to Purdue by 17, but the damage was done as Harper left Tennessee with only three national championships. Yes, only.
“It was probably a ridiculous goal to start with,” Harper said of her freshman plan to win a national crown in every year of her undergraduate career. “We didn’t reach that goal, but because we lost that, I can now appreciate the first three championships we won. I would have no sense of reality now if we had won four national championships. It really put things into perspective and that’s something hard to admit and something I didn’t learn until about a year after that loss.”
A title won’t be on the line when she takes her team into Cameron Indoor Stadium, but with the Devils sitting atop the conference standings a win by the Wolfpack could give State a shot in the arm heading into the home stretch of ACC play.
“I know they’re sitting at the top of the ACC, and we’ve been inconsistent, but we will go there to win,” Harper said. “And we will expect it.”
But to win the game she said the team will need a better effort at running the floor on defense than what it showed Sunday against Virginia Tech.
“Our transition defense was not good,” Harper said. “We would score. They would score.”
Redshirt junior Amber White said the Devils play an up-tempo style of basketball similar to how State likes to run, but they have certain accolades that make them the cream of the ACC crop.
“They’re good. They’re big. They like to run the floor. They look to push it in transition,” White said. “I feel like a lot of teams in the ACC do that, so I think it’s a very similar style.”
But, as is the case in the men’s ACC standings, no one is immune to the upset.
“Everybody in the ACC is beatable,” freshman Marissa Kastanek said. “We can’t go in scared or thinking about everything that they’re going to do. We really have to focus on what we’re going to do and how we can execute our game plan.”
And the game plan will be centered on defensive intensity, as it was in State’s win against the Hokies, which is another aspect White said her team has in common with the Devils.
“They get up in people’s faces, and they deny a lot,” White said, echoing Kastanek’s sentiments that the team needed to focus on playing its game. “We need to focus on N.C. State. We need to come out and focus on our defensive intensity.”
While the Pack is hoping its defensive tenacity will key it to victory, there’s one intangible that won’t be lacking on the visitor’s end of the court: intensity from the coach’s box as Harper coaches against the team that thwarted her four-peat more than a decade ago.
“Obviously it’s completely different, but I think any kind of competitor and somebody that loves basketball and loved their career like I did would remember that last one,” Harper said.
