‘Like no other chapter’: Inside the wild WSU women’s basketball season in a pandemic
In 31 years of coaching, Keitha Adams has never had a more challenging or strange season than the one currently unfolding for the Wichita State women’s basketball team.
When the Shockers play at Houston on Wednesday, it will be their first game in 20 days — after their last three games were all postponed due to COVID-19 protocol. WSU will suit up nine players, well short of the 15 scholarship players typically available but nonetheless a season-high for the 3-2 Shockers.
WSU’s best player has been forced to quarantine three times already this season, causing her to miss more than 30 practice days. Two other players have missed time due to injuries, while two more have left the team, another has opted out, and one is still awaiting clearance from the NCAA to arrive in Wichita from overseas.
On Christmas, Adams drove to see her 84-year-old mother and spent the entire holiday visit in a separate car talking through the window to her family. Four days later, Adams and her team boarded a chartered plane with everyone wearing masks and plastic face shields for the duration of the flight.
“This has been like no other chapter in my life,” Adams said. “It’s been a struggle and it’s been challenging and it’s hard and it’s tough. I think everyone is struggling, players and coaches. Times are different and it’s been a challenge, but we’re going to get to play basketball and I’m proud of our team.”
Like many basketball coaches, Adams keeps a mental check list of when she expects her team to have certain parts of her playbook mastered. Heading into Wednesday’s game at Houston, Adams admits the Shockers are so far behind that they are only now beginning to practice things that in a typical season would have been second nature by now.
Since the team congregated back in August, WSU has rarely had enough players to practice 5-on-5 with its own players. That has forced Adams to use the team’s three managers as practice players just to be able to scrimmage. Lately, not even three extra bodies have been enough for the Shockers to get to 10.
That’s why Adams was so ecstatic to add Wichita native Mariah McKinney as a walk-on, which gave WSU a total of nine available players in its practices in preparation for Houston.
“Normally you would be going, ‘Gosh, you need at least 10,’ but I’ve been elated that we’ve had nine this whole week,” Adams said. “It feels like we’re starting to get back to some kind of normalcy. We had some practices where we only had six and when it got really tough, we had five. So to have nine people back out there, it felt great.”
The Duke women’s basketball team made national headlines last week when it decided to cancel the remainder of its season due to COVID-19 issues. On Tuesday, a team in WSU’s conference — SMU — followed suit and opted out of playing for the rest of the season.
With as much of a struggle as this season has been for WSU, Adams was asked if she had considered if possibly ending WSU’s season was the right decision.
“I’m not going to be judgmental of what any program or kids decided to do, like with Duke or SMU,” Adams said. “I think fans and people need to understand we’re in different times. Everybody has got to do what’s best for themselves. And for us, I think we have kids on our team that love the game of basketball and who want to play and we have kids on our team that need to play because the game is good for them.”
One key player who will no longer be with the Shockers is junior Rachel Johnson, who was second on the team in scoring at 11.5 points. Adams confirmed that the guard is no longer on the roster for the second semester.
“I really liked Rachel’s game and she started for us in our last game and she would have played a lot for us,” Adams said. “I hate that it didn’t work out. But she wasn’t happy and that’s unfortunate because I really like her game and I think she would have been good for us and I wish her the best.”
It’s hard to remember that before the positive tests and quarantines, WSU was poised for its best season yet in Adams’ four-year tenure. The Shockers were picked to finish sixth in the conference and Mariah McCully was the first Shocker to be named to a preseason all-conference team in the AAC.
After missing so many games, WSU is more concerned about just playing basketball again than where it is in the standings.
The Shockers might surprise and find a way to overcome all of this adversity and reach their potential. Whether that potential is the same as it was before the season is unknown, but Adams is determined to see this season through regardless.
“I think when you’ve gone through what we’ve gone through, right now our No. 1 focus is just working hard and being a family and getting better,” Adams said. “I can’t even really think about where we’re going to be in the future. I’ve got to worry about the right now.
“We’re not a well-oiled machine right now. But each day we practice, we get better and if we can practice every day for the rest of the semester, then we’re going to be a much better basketball team at the end of the season. But if we have a semester like last semester, it’s going to be really difficult to get better.”
This story was originally published December 30, 2020 at 6:00 AM.
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