SAN ANTONIO – The Stanford women’s basketball team decided to take a different approach this year to prepare for the NCAA Tournament.
In last season’s tournament, Stanford coach Tara VanDerveer said her team made a mistake in using the entire week before the Sweet 16 and Elite 8 games to prepare for just one team.
“I think we learned from last year’s situation where we actually did focus almost 100 percent the whole week on Connecticut,” VanDerveer said. “And then [we] had one day to get ready for Michigan State and that wasn’t enough time.”
But this year, VanDerveer said she is confident in her team’s altered approach of its regional final match-up Monday against No. 1 seed LSU.
“We’ve coached getting ready for our bracket, not just one team,” VanDerveer said. “We did not spend all last week getting ready for Oklahoma. We actually put in things that everyone in our bracket did on the first day of practice.”
And one constant in practice, VanDerveer said, is her team’s preparation for dominant post players.
On Saturday, the Cardinals defeated No. 3 seed Oklahoma, who has 6-foot-4-inch center Courtney Paris.
Now, center Brooke Smith said Stanford must focus on LSU sophomore center Sylvia Fowles.
“Sylvia is different from Courtney,” Smith said. “Playing against our entire bracket, which has a lot of really good post players, they all sort of build on each other and we’ve been able to prepare for all post players.”
Fowles said she is similar to Paris but does possess both a height and a speed advantage over Paris.
Stanford forward/center Kristen Newlin, who is 6 feet 5 inches tall, said she will mainly guard Fowles and is aware of Fowles’ ability to fuel LSU’s offense.
“[Fowles and Paris] are two different players,” Newlin said. “Sylvia’s athletic, she’s taller, she can run the run the floor, and she can jump. But the defensive plan is still pretty much similar in that they’re both very go-to block players.”
Fowles said she would caution Stanford to comprise a different defensive scheme since she is taller and faster than Paris.
“That’s the system they run,” Fowles said. “If [they] chose not to do anything different, then more power to them.”
 
TO DUNK OR NOT TO DUNK
Fowles had the perfect setting Saturday against DePaul to steal the national dunking spotlight from Tennessee forward Candace Parker.
Halfway into the first half after a DePaul turnover, Fowles received an outlet pass just past half court with no one between her and the goal.
“I know on that one play she wanted to dunk the ball,” DePaul coach Doug Bruno said. “I could see it in her eyes. She was going up with two hands and had her stride, but our kids caught up to her and she had to lay it in.”
Fowles said the time did not feel right to dunk and instead settled for the conventional layup.
“I had to think about it. It was early in the game,” Fowles said. “If I had the opportunity to do it again in the second half, I would have [dunked]. But it was early in the game. I was just worried about getting the score.”
 
TOURNAMENT
RENDEZVOUS
Stanford center Brooke Smith does not need to watch hours of film to get to know Seimone Augustus and Sylvia Fowles.
The trio played together on the 2005 USA basketball team.
But Smith said the familiarity is not a great advantage because the players competed on the same team instead of against one another.
 
FREE THE TREE
The Stanford band members decked themselves out in tree leaves and other tree-like decoration in memory of their missing-in-action tree mascot.
This past Monday, the male in the costume, Tommy Leep, was ejected in Stanford’s win over Florida State for dancing in an area where mascots are not allowed.
The Stanford Tree has been banned for the remainder of the women’s tournament.
And this has not been the only trouble the Stanford Tree has gotten in.
Erin Lashnitts was banned from serving as the school’s mascot for arriving intoxicated at a men’s basketball game earlier in the season against UC-Berkley where she was supposed to be the Stanford Tree.
The UC-Berkley athletic department gave Lashnits a breathalyzer test where the student’s blood alcohol level was measured at 0.157 content level.
 
STANFORD CARES
The Stanford women’s basketball team is raising money for the Peninsula Habitat, Stanford’s local chapter of Habitat for Humanity.
Peninsula Habitat will build homes for Operation Home Delivery, which will ship new homes to areas devastated by Hurricane Katrina.
The team is collecting pledges for every assist Stanford makes during the season.
 
NO NOSEBLEED
Anyone attending the tournament in the AT&T Center in San Antonio, Texas, has a prime view of the court and the players.
Large black curtains cover the entire terrace sections of the arena, making no seats available in the conventional “nose-bleed” sections.
“Certain events demand a certain configuration,” said Ace Barajas, facility event coordinator at the AT&T Center. “You can put two and two together.”
The current setup in the AT&T Center for the tournament has 8,088 available seats compared to its usual capacity of 18,500 for the San Antonio Spurs.
 
 
Contact Kyle Whitfield at [email protected]