Nov. 30, 2004

By Kelli Anderson
Sports Illustrated

Santa Clara women's soccer coach Jerry Smith and his staff were in a sports bar in Chapel Hill, N.C., last Friday night watching the Santa Clara men's basketball team eviscerate Sports Illustrated's preseason No. 1 pick, North Carolina, in the Pete Newell Challenge in Oakland. The raucous cheering coming from Smith, et al., raised the eyebrows of a few of the other bar patrons. "What are you guys," one asked Smith with mild disgust, "Duke fans?"

If the name Santa Clara University didn't resonate with Tar Heels fans on Friday night, it certainly did by Saturday night. By then Smith's 16th-seeded team had knocked the top-ranked North Carolina women's team out of the NCAA tournament with a 1-0 win, ensuring that for the first time in the 23-year history of the tournament the Tar Heels would not be in the College Cup, soccer's final four. When the Broncos, who defeated North Carolina to win the NCAA title in 2001, returned to their small Jesuit campus in the Silicon Valley on Sunday, sophomore midfielder Bonnie Bowman went out to dinner with her boyfriend, 6-foot-7 junior Broncos starting forward Travis Niesen. They compared notes. Says Niesen, "I told her her team's victory over North Carolina was much bigger than ours."

That may be true, but it wasn't nearly as unlikely. The Bronco men hadn't beaten a top-five team since Steve Nash and Marlon Garnett combined for 40 points against defending national champ UCLA at the Maui Invitational in '95. The Tar Heels, on the other hand, had lost just four opening games since '30. They were more talented, more athletic, stronger and quicker than the Broncos at every position. Did I mention they were supposed to be the best team in the country? But on their way to a 77-66 loss that could have been worse, the Heels got outhustled, outdefended and outrebounded. (Santa Clara's three guards, Brody Angley, Doron Perkins and Kyle Bailey combined for 22 boards, six more than North Carolina forwards Sean May, Jawad Williams and Marvin Williams.)

North Carolina couldn't stop the Broncos dribble penetration, and it couldn't stop the left-handed Niesen, who scored a career-high 26 points, mostly with the same signature spin move the Tar Heels had seen repeatedly on tape. The absence of UNC point guard Raymond Felton, who was serving a one-game suspension for playing in a non-sanctioned summer league, was a poor excuse for the collapse. After all, the Broncos also started a freshman at point, Angley, and they were missing their starting center, 6-11 Sean Denison, who is out for at least three or four weeks with a stress fracture in his right foot.

There's little doubt the Tar Heels, who beat BYU 86-50 in Maui on Monday with Felton in the lineup, will continue to play better; the only other two Roy Williams-coached teams that lost their opening games, the '90-91 and '01-02 Kansas Jayhawks, wound up in the Final Four. But will Santa Clara? Were the Broncos, picked to finish in the middle of the West Coast Conference pack, playing out of their heads on Friday, or was their victory a warning shot -- much like Nevada's 75-61 win over Kansas last December -- that they are a much better team than people realize?

There's plenty to suggest the Broncos have promise. The return of Denison will be a boost. Beyond that, Santa Clara is a humble, old-school team that knows its limitations, works hard as a team to counteract them and fears nobody. "When we started preparing for this game on Tuesday, Coach [Dick] Davey turned to us and said, 'At every single spot, they are better. But that's not what it's about. It's about a team getting together and playing as a team and playing hard. We can beat these guys, just like Santa Clara beat Arizona in the '93 NCAAs,'" says Niesen, a blond Southern Californian surfer, who is as intense on the court as he is laid-back off it. "I got goose bumps when he said that. Because I thought he was so right, it is a team game. Whenever we win or lose it always comes down to whether or not we did what Coach Davey told us to do. As cheesy as it sounds, it's really true."

Davey told his players they'd have a chance if they limited turnovers, hung with the Tar Heels on rebounding and made their shots. The Broncos did all those things fairly well. "We made a lot of stupid mistakes, too," says Niesen. "We could be better in a lot of areas."

The Broncos don't have any more top-10 teams on their schedule -- they face Pacific's formidable frontline in Stockton, Calif., on Tuesday night -- but they will get plenty of competition this year in the West Coast Conference, which has made a lot of noise in November. Aside from Santa Clara's big win, St. Mary's beat Cal without two of its best players, Frederic Adjiwanou and Paul Marigney, and USF almost knocked off Stanford in the nightcap at the Pete Newell Challenge. Pepperdine may have lost 80-58 to Eastern Carolina back East, but the Waves could be the most physically talented team on the West Coast. "Our league, believe it or not, is pretty darn good this year," says Davey.

Will his team turn out to be one of its star attractions? "We got lucky in a lot of regards against North Carolina," says Davey. "But what our players know now is they are capable of playing with just about any team in the country if they work hard. It's a daily struggle for us. We're not super athletic, we're not gifted in a lot of ways, but we do have big hearts. I think that will play into the mix somehow."