#HL40: Women's Basketball Success
By Joey Yashinsky, Horizon League Contributor. Follow on Twitter @OneSeatOver
The Horizon League has come to be known for many things over its first 40 years: excellence in the classroom, innovation with the delivery of sporting events to the online platform, and last but not least, a boatload of women’s basketball success.
Throughout the years, the Horizon League routinely ranks among the top mid-major conferences in the country. And the success has transferred to the postseason, as well.
The Green Bay Phoenix had a memorable trip out to Oregon in 2003 where they clashed with the Washington Huskies out of the Pac-10. The Phoenix had come up short in their five prior tries at the NCAA Tournament. This time would be different.
“Beating Washington kind of broke the ice for our program,” said Kevin Borseth, current and longtime head coach of the Phoenix. “It’s not easy winning an NCAA Tournament game, a smaller school going out and competing against Power-5 schools, but it was a really big win for our program.”
Borseth has had two separate stints of dominance at Green Bay. He first arrived in 1998-99, spending nine years along the Phoenix sidelines. His teams won the Horizon League championship each of those nine seasons, starting an almost-unfathomable run of 20 consecutive league titles that only recently came to an end. This year’s championship went to Katrina Merriweather’s Wright State Raiders.
“It is remarkable,” Borseth said. “I don’t care what level you do that at. To win 20 conference championships in a row is unheard of. It’s not easy to do. There’s a lot of moving parts in our game. I don’t care if you’re a junior high team, a high school team, I don’t care if you’re a male or female team, playing lacrosse or playing basketball, I don’t care what you’re playing. You win 20 championships in a row, that’s pretty remarkable. It’s a feather in our cap. It doesn’t guarantee you anything down the road, but the fact that we were able to do that is pretty cool.”
In 2006-07, Borseth’s bunch started the year just 3-3, but things would change pretty drastically. The Green Bay Phoenix went out and won their next 26 games, including Borseth’s first undefeated trip through Horizon League play.
As a No. 9 seed in the NCAA Tournament, Green Bay took out New Mexico, only to see Geno Auriemma’s famed Connecticut Huskies waiting for them in the next round. And to play them in Hartford, no less.
“We were ahead at halftime,” Borseth recalled. “That was pretty exciting. I don’t think we could have played better. But we forced them to play very well in order to win that game, and they did, because they are Connecticut.”
As usual, nothing in the Horizon League came easy with so many talented teams and coaching staffs. Twice in Borseth’s initial nine-year run the Phoenix were unable to follow up a regular-season crown with a tournament title.
In both instances it was Sandy Botham’s terrific Milwaukee Panther teams that captured the hardware, part of Botham’s tremendous 16-year run leading the program.
With Borseth off to the University of Michigan, Matt Bollant was hired to keep the Phoenix engine humming. He immediately understood the magnitude of the job taking over the Horizon League’s top team.
“The headline of the paper was, ‘Bollant has big shoes to fill,’” Bollant said. “And I certainly understood that pressure. I knew the heritage of the program and how good it had been. There were definitely a lot of expectations.”
“One of the first nights I was there, I went to an event with a lot of boosters. And one of them shakes my hand and says, ‘You better win.’ That was before he even introduced himself. So I knew what I was getting into.”
Bollant picked up right where Borseth left off. He coached five seasons in Green Bay and won five outright league titles. His teams lost a total of five conference games in those five years, including a pair of perfect 18-0 campaigns.
In 2009-10, the Phoenix became the first Horizon League women’s team to earn an at-large bid into the NCAA Tournament, where they took down favored Virginia as a 12-seed.
And Bollant’s Phoenix teams didn’t stop there. In three consecutive years (2010-12), Green Bay advanced in the NCAA Tournament.
The 2010-11 team won an eye-popping 34 of 36 games and reached the Sweet 16, picking up tournament wins over Little Rock and Michigan State.
“I still remember beating Michigan State,” Bollant said. “The year before, we had won an NCAA game, we had all our top players back, and we knew the expectation and the goal was to take it a step further. To go out and accomplish that was an amazing thing and I still remember hugging our players as they came to the sideline. They had worked so hard to earn that moment.”
It took a 40-point effort from Brittney Griner of Baylor, with the game taking place less than 100 miles from the Bears campus, to finally knock out Bollant’s squad. Green Bay’s Kayla Tetschlag played superbly on the big stage, scoring 27 points and directing a near-upset of top-seeded Baylor. At one point in the second half, the Phoenix trailed by just three before falling 86-76.
“I told my staff that I thought our program could be ranked Top-10 in the country and they all looked at me like I was crazy,” Bollant said. “Of course, I’m a dreamer. But we made it happen, got as high as No. 9 in the country and finished the year in the Top-10. Thankfully we were able to make it happen.”
In the present-day, the women’s hoops programs in the Horizon League are flourishing. In 2017-18, the League ranked 13th in the final NCAA conference RPI of 2017-18, the highest in League history. This season, the HL featured multiple teams in 2018-19 that were ranked (or received votes) in the Mid-Major Top-25 polls. It was the first time since 1997-98, when Butler took home the championship, that Green Bay did not win at least a share of the regular season crown.
The 16-2 Wright State Raiders earned its first outright regular season championship in program history. John Barnes and the Youngstown State Penguins had an outstanding season, going 13-5 in conference play and grabbing 22 victories overall. Austin Parkinson and IUPUI, the new face on the block in the Horizon League, clawed their way to the Motor City Madness semifinals in each of their first two years as part of the conference.
The women’s game is healthy as ever with a slew of smart tacticians on the bench and gifted student-athletes on the court.
The future is most definitely a bright one for women’s basketball in the Horizon League.
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