Spider women’s basketball has a ritual after road wins: post-game ice cream. So it was on the night before the first classes of the spring semester at an ice cream shop near Davidson College in North Carolina. The team had just handily beaten the Wildcats, so the players lined up for cones and cups.
The Spiders have been eating a lot of ice cream lately. Last year, they won the program’s first A-10 championship, finished the season with a record-breaking 29 wins, and went undefeated at home. It was the most successful season in program history.
This season, they are the team everyone else in the conference is chasing, and the chase is not going well for the others. As of mid-January, the Spiders had a 15-5 record overall and 6-1 in conference. Her Hoops Stats rates them as the No. 1 mid-major team in the country. They are burying conference opponents early, averaging a 19-point lead at halftime through seven games. Four of the seven opponents were held to 20 or fewer first-half points. One had only 10 points at the break.
The Spiders are doing it with one of the best offenses in the country. As of Jan. 24, they ranked first in Division I nationally in three-point percentage and second in field goal percentage. The Spiders’ free-flowing system emphasizes ball movement (15th nationally in assists per game), setting up its lights-out shooting. Their scoring defense ranked in the top 15%, and they defend cleanly, ranking sixth for fewest fouls per game.
It’s entertaining basketball, and deliberately so. When head coach Aaron Roussell took the helm six seasons ago, he promised that his teams would be fun to watch. Winning, of course, is always fun. He wants Richmond women’s basketball to be appointment viewing—a program that captivates fans with its high pace and exciting style of play.
“I’d be lying if I said entertainment isn’t part of what we’re striving for,” Roussell said. “I say that we have to be fun to watch. And so that is something that we do talk about, how we want to play and how we want to recruit.”
“She should smell your breath. Make her life miserable.”
Fans are responding. A program that in past years counted game attendance in the hundreds is now drawing thousands. Approximately 3,500 fans came out for the VCU game Jan. 19.
“I know so many people across the city who talk about how much fun they have at games, how much they enjoy watching us play,” Roussell said. “That’s the vibe I’m getting across the city and on campus.”
The Spiders know that, as defending champions, they’ll get every other team’s best shot this season. After all, every A-10 team wants to win the championship. But only one will. As they stood eating ice cream in North Carolina, the Spiders were the best-positioned of all. Nothing about it will be easy, but no part of the task ahead is out of their control.
Bring it
The by-now cliché quote from Friedrich Nietzsche that whatever doesn’t kill you makes you stronger should be plastered across the Spiders’ practice court. At the end of November, the team began running a gauntlet, playing a stretch of games unlike any nonconference schedule in the country. Athletics staff members called it the toughest month of games in program history.
Over six games from Nov. 30 to Dec. 21, they played four teams from Power 5 conferences: Texas, Tennessee, Alabama, and Oklahoma State. Two of them ranked in the AP Top 25 when Richmond played them; all four ranked there in mid-January. For good measure, the Spiders also took on Georgetown and Columbia, nobody’s cupcakes.
“Nobody in America right now, the other 351 coaches, are looking at me saying ‘That’s good scheduling. I wish I would have done that,’” Roussell said at the start of the stretch. “Nobody would do this.”
The players bought into the challenge, come what may.
Junior Maggie Doogan (shooting) is one of the team's top scorers. She tallied 63 points in back-to-back games in early January.
Graduate student Anna Camden (No. 11) is one of several veteran transfers who add experience to the Spiders’ line-up. She came to Richmond after four years at Penn State.
“I know so many people across the city who talk about how much fun they have at games, how much they enjoy watching us play.”
Spider women's basketball associate head coach Jeanine Radice
“There’s a lot of mid-major teams out there that have had our success that would still back down from the challenges of our schedule,” said Anna Camden, a graduate student transfer from Penn State in her second year with the program. “I think that speaks volumes about our coaches and our players—and the courage we have to both fail greatly and succeed greatly.”
Practices leading up to the games were tough. Roussell is a generally quiet presence during drills and scrimmage. When he speaks up, the gym quiets. His coaching staff provides much of the chatter, encouragement, and correction to players. During practice before the Columbia win, when associate head coach Jeanine Radice wanted more from a defender, she implored, “She should smell your breath. Make her life miserable.”
The early December practices also came while the players were studying for finals. Their majors range from biology to the liberal arts to the MBA and other graduate programs. At Richmond, academics aren’t brushed off. Still, Roussell took a moment to remind the players of their basketball goals as the team eyes a repeat appearance in the NCAA tournament. “March doesn’t care if your losses came in finals,” he told them. “Let’s practice how we play.”
“March doesn’t care if your losses came in finals. Let’s practice how we play.”
The Spiders went 2-4 over the six gauntlet games, including notching a win over the Big 12’s Oklahoma State and drawing the program’s most-ever votes in the AP Top 25 poll. That win and the win against Columbia had been gritty, showcasing the team’s shooting efficiency, versatility, and suffocating defense.
Even the losses had encouraging takeaways. Against Georgetown, the Spiders fell on a freak, near-midcourt buzzer-beater but otherwise played more than well enough to win.
No. 6 Texas, a blue blood of women’s basketball, came to the Robins Center Dec. 15. Sports columnist John O’Connor, R’80, who covers the team for the Richmond Times-Dispatch, called the match-up “a barometer game, a measuring stick to see if the Spiders … can deal with top-tier competition.” The Spiders went toe-to-toe with the Longhorns, pushing them over and over in front of 2,700 fans. With five minutes to go, Richmond pulled to within 10 points, forcing a Texas timeout. The final score was 65-54. Richmond had held Texas to its lowest scoring output in almost a calendar year and drew a loud ovation from the home crowd at the buzzer.
“I think we were one stop and one score away from really putting the fear in them,” Roussell said later. “You could tell—I don’t think they were expecting the challenge we presented that day.”
No. 18 Tennessee, whom they played a mere five days after Texas, handed the team a tough 67-92 loss. Against Alabama the very next day, the Spiders were up by a point with two minutes to go until the game slipped through their fingers.
“I think we came out of that stretch a much better team, whether that’s just the confidence or whether that’s teaching some lessons of how to play and how to go against some of their styles,” Roussell said. “Hopefully you reap some rewards down the road.”
Nietzsche couldn’t have said it better himself.
Let the conference games begin
The rewards began to materialize quickly as conference play arrived in late December. After a win over Dayton and a disappointing road loss to Fordham to open A-10 play, Richmond bounced back with statement wins over UMass and then George Mason, which was tabbed to finish third in the preseason poll of coaches.
The George Mason victory showcased the team’s resilience as Richmond overcame an early 16-point deficit and stormed back for an 81-74 win. Roussell saw direct correlations to the lessons learned from the December gauntlet.
“We’ve been built for this in some ways,” he said. “You have to go in some of those timeouts and be like, ‘We’ve done this against really top-of-the-line teams in the country. There’s no reason that we can’t do this.’”
“Hungry” is how junior Maggie Doogan, the team’s second-leading scorer, defines this year’s squad. She scored 37 in the win against George Mason, the fourth-most in Spider women’s basketball history. “We’ve got nothing to lose. We already proved ourselves last year—it’s not like we have a chip on our shoulder. It’s just going out and playing every game like you have to win.”
Junior Rachel Ullstrom, the team’s top scorer, agrees. In the third week of January, the U.S. Basketball Writers Association named her National Player of the Week. As of Jan. 24, she ranked fourth nationally in three-point percentage and eighth in three-pointers made. “If anything [last year’s conference championship] motivated us even more,” she said. “We know what it feels like to win, and we want to experience that again.”
The new players are absorbing this culture of commitment. First-year player Alicia Newell has been part of an infusion of young talent that has meshed with the returning core from last year’s championship squad. As a high school senior committed to Richmond, she watched the Spiders go the distance last year. As a player this season, she’s averaging about nine minutes a game, coming in behind starting point guard sophomore Ally Sweeney.
“Coming here as a freshman, you want to keep that legacy going, winning championships year after year,” Newell said. “We’re very determined.”
“We’re still hungry.”
A high ceiling
How far this team will go is yet to be determined, but it is already certain that they will be fun for fans to watch. As Atlantic 10 play heats up, Richmond finds itself well-positioned for another title run. The conference tournament will return to the Henrico Sports and Events Center, the local venue where they won it all last season.
“We’re still hungry,” Camden said in early December shortly after the team came up short against Georgetown, its first loss in the Robins Center in nearly two years. “If anything, that loss reminded us of that hunger and that the job is nowhere near finished. We have a growth mindset, trying to get better every game and ultimately just trying to prepare ourselves for the end goal, which is a championship.”
For the players, the growing fan support and energy have been invigorating. They’ll next play at home Feb. 2 and then have a handful more games before the A-10 tournament and, hopefully, the NCAA tournament.
The Spiders have their sights set very high and at this point in the season are delivering. The rest of the season has yet to play out, but this year they just might have the tools to climb even higher on the national stage. It’s going to be fun to watch.