It will take days, if not weeks, for the full nature of what Glenville State’s women’s basketball program accomplished with its Division II National Championship to set in for Pioneers’ head coach Kim Stephens.
The initial phase of it took place for Stephens when the team returned to campus just under 24 hours after securing the first NCAA basketball title for any team from West Virginia with Friday’s 85-72 victory over Western Washington.
“To hear you say it is still kind of crazy to me,” Stephens said Monday on Talkline with Hoppy Kercheval. “It’s starting to sink in. We had an amazing welcome back and that’s kind of when things started to settle in — when we had so many people greet us when we got back to campus. That’s when it was like, ‘wow, we really did it.’”
Stephens estimates between 350-400 people were on hand to congratulate the Pioneers’ 35-1 season, which culminated with three victories last week in Birmingham, Alabama by a combined 84 points — 103-56 against West Texas A&M and 77-53 over Grand Valley State in advance of the final.
“They were screaming,” Stephens said. “There was confetti. Our girls felt like absolute rock stars when they got off that bus.”
With Glenville State on spring break this week, players have returned home in the immediate aftermath of the title-winning season.
Stephens says a more notable celebration is in the works when they return.
“They headed out to get some much-needed down time,” Stephens said. “Recruiting has already started, so there’s not a whole lot of down time as a coach. When they get back, they deserve to be celebrated a little bit more. We’re going to do a parade. A couple people have reached out about feeding us. We’re going to try to bask in it for a little bit longer with them once they get back to campus.”
The Pioneers won all six games in the NCAA Tournament by at least 12 points with an 82-70 victory over Shepherd in a second-round contest proving to be their smallest margin.
Along the way, GSU set a new record for points scored in the tournament with 524. The Pioneers made 48 3-pointers over the six postseason contests, including 27-of-63 attempts in their last three games. In the resounding 47-point victory against West Texas A&M, Glenville connected on 14-of-25 tries from long range.
Stephens believes the team had a guardian angel watching over them in her father Scott Stephens, an accomplished coach of the Parkersburg South High School girls program who later served as an assistant under his daughter at GSU. Scott Stephens passed away in November 2020 from a brain tumor.
“He was there with us,” she said. “You could kind of just feel it and our kids could kind of feel it. Last year was a rough year, but he would’ve loved this. He would’ve been on Cloud Nine. He would’ve loved to go to the Elite Eight and would’ve loved to win the games. I lost my dad, but they lost an assistant coach and that’s big for young people, too.
“We talked about him a lot. Our whole slogan was to give God glory, because that’s kind of the legacy he wanted. They really wanted that. There were some tears after the game and they hugged me and said, ‘this one is for coach Scott.’ It was really, really special. He would’ve loved it, but I know he helped somehow. Some of the shots we hit, especially in the early rounds, I was like, ’That’s higher than us,’ because everything we’re shooting right now is going in.”
During an interview on the CBS Sports Network telecast in the immediate moments after the victory over the Vikings in the final, Stephens credited her players for buying into what she demands of them. She noted that she isn’t the easiest coach to play for, with top of the line conditioning a necessity to help the Pioneers regularly make wholesale substitutions, utilize up to 12 players and thrive on forcing turnovers with fullcourt pressure.
Stephens expanded on those comments Monday.
“We do a lot of running. They know that’s part of the gig that if we’re going to play fast, we’re going to practice fast and if we’re going to practice fast, we’re going to run sometimes just to run,” she said. “They give me a hard time about it.
“It was actually pretty cute in the shootaround of the championship game, they were stretching in their circle and reminiscing about all of the burpees, all of the suicides and all of the different exercises that we had to do during the preseason. They were rehashing all of the workouts and saying, ‘it was really worth it.’ It’s not the most fun thing to get put on the line every time, but they did it and they understood it. They bought in and understood it’s going to take us to be in better shape than our opponents to win.”