Kansas City Roos women’s basketball team envisioned a league championship, then won it
Kansas City Roos women’s coach Jacie Hoyt had practiced her postgame speech thanking fans in advance of this moment. But with her players opening the bags of Western Athletic Conference championship hats and shirts and a ladder making its way to the court at Swinney Center, Hoyt cut it short and joined the celebration.
The first of its kind for either basketball program that until this year was known as UMKC.
The Kangaroos have been a NCAA Division I basketball program for 33 years and a member of a conference since 1994-95. The women’s team became the first to finish first in its league with Thursday’s 61-53 victory over Utah Valley in a game that was decided in the final 75 seconds.
The speech wasn’t Hoyt’s only exercise in preparedness. Flanked by seniors Ericka Mattingtly and Awal Ajak, who combined for 31 points, at a postgame news conference, Hoyt revealed this wasn’t a first for the players.
“We actually practiced this,” Hoyt said. “We practiced having a press conference being conference champions.”
The speech, the press conference, anything else? Net-cutting perhaps?
“Believe it or not we did,” Hoyt said. “But you couldn’t really tell because everyone forgot what that looked like.”
But Hoyt and the players won’t forget how they felt as the final seconds ticked away.
“There are no words,” said Ajak. “This is what we envisioned since being recruited by Coach Jacie. It feels amazing.”
Ajak finished with 19 points on 5-of-8 three-point shooting, and Mattingly came up big for Kansas City down the stretch. Her pass to Cristina Soriano, led to the basket that broke a 53-53 tie with 1 minute, 14 seconds remaining.
Mattingly then produced a steal and run-out basket and added another drive to complete the scoring in the biggest game in program history.
One in which the Kangaroos were fully prepared.
“This is not KU men’s basketball where players come in and they expect to do that and know what that looks like,” Hoyt said. “That’s the hard part of our jobs. We’re trying to teach our players, this is how it feels.”
Hoyt said the team worked on how to handle a championship victory postgame experience three or four times during the offseason, and considerable time was spent preparing a team capable of filling the role.
Kansas City was picked to finish third in the WAC. But the program collected a signature nonconference victory over Missouri before starting league play. The Kangaroos are 12-3 in the WAC with a game remaining before the league tournament and stand 19-10 overall. That’s the third-best victory total in program history.
Hoyt, a former Kansas high school star who played at Wichita State and had been an assistant at Kansas State before being hired by Kansas City in 2017, will try to lead the program to its first NCAA Tournament appearance. The Kangaroos will have to capture the WAC Tournament in Las Vegas next week to accomplish that.
Hoyt and her players have foreshadowed that moment as well. They’ve been peeking at online mock brackets.
“You know what, we expect to be there,” Hoyt said. “We’re not going to shy away from that. I think that goes into what we’ve been saying about our vision.”
This story was originally published March 5, 2020 at 9:38 PM.