Coyotes' passion sets the court ablaze

It’s true the South Dakota women’s basketball team has repeated history in the last week and it’s also true the Coyotes did it with some of the same players who have figured prominently in landing the previous three consecutive NCAA tournament berths.

What is not true is that they took the same route to get there every time, or that getting there got easier every season because they had super-senior soldiers like Hannah Sjerven, Chloe Lamb and Liv Korngable.

There were a lot of adjectives Coach Dawn Plitzuweit could attach to the Coyotes’ 56-45 win over South Dakota State for a Summit League tournament championship at the Premier Center on Tuesday afternoon but easy would not be one of them. 

Even though the victory was not necessarily an artistic success, at least not on the offensive side, it remained a graceful effort in the art of handling the weight of expectations. When Sjerven, Lamb and Korngable – three all-time Coyote greats in anyone’s book – all decided to come back for one more season, it was pretty clear what they were after. Fear of falling short of such a clearly defined goal can make things a lot more difficult if you let it. The Coyotes, all 16 of them, did not let that happen.  

“There’s a personality about this team that is really special,” Plitzuweit said. “They have been working their tails off for this, but they’ve been doing it while they’re having fun. That’s important to who we are. That’s part of our identity.”

The Coyotes moved forward with some bedrock themes this year that revolved around three things:

No. 1: Be the best.

No. 2: Be thankful.

No. 3: Enjoy the precious present.

It’s not revolutionary to make those sentiments part of the message to a college basketball team, but it’s one thing to post them in the locker room and another to genuinely embrace a philosophy.

“Coach P prepared us really well all year,” said Sjerven, a three-time all-Summit League first-team player who will go down as one of the best defensive players the Summit has ever seen. “We’ve had her voice in our ears for the last four or five years reminding us to stay in the precious present. It was a way for us to focus on the inside voices – our teammates, our coaches, the athletic trainers – and realize that no one else really matters."

What did staying in the precious present really mean this year?

That would depend on the day. One of those days recently for Plitzuweit meant wearing a genuine Vermillion Fire Department hat to practice. It was the real deal, not unlike the story that explained its appearance.

Recently the team’s creative content coordinator Madisen Martinez led a team prayer that included these words from St. Catherine of Siena: “Be who you were created to be and you will set the world on fire.”

It quickly caught fire as a source of inspiration for the Coyotes, who, with nothing but the best intentions, decided to have the word “Arson” printed on T-shirts. 

It was a way of emphasizing St. Catherine’s words. It minimized the stress of the situation while maximizing other more productive emotions.

“It meant ‘Play with passion,’” Plitzuweit said. “It meant we should have fun with it. Let’s play with energy."

So at a pre-tournament shoot-around the coach showed up with firefighter’s headgear, thanks to Martinez, a Vermillion native, who understood the marketing potential.

“It’s a real firefighter’s hat -- it even had soot on it,” Plitzuweit said. “It was heavy, too. But I was committed to wearing it for the whole shoot-around. The players were laughing about it but to me it made sense. Some people say they’re about doing things and others are totally committed. The players were totally committed to this and so was I. By wearing that heavy helmet there was a good chance I was going to have a sore neck for the game. I didn’t care because I was all in, just like this team.”

It was a message sent and received with an assist from St. Catherine. As such, it was just one of many messages heeded over the course of a season that, aside from Sjerven, Lamb and Korngable, would begin with players cast in new roles.

Maddie Krull and Kyah Watson joined the three seniors in the starting lineup with Grace Larkins the first off the bench. Natalie Mazurek, Macy Guebert, Jeniah Ugofsky, Allison Peplowski all averaged seven or more minutes a game. Plitzuweit also counted Morgan Hansen, Aspen Williston and Regan Sankey as vital contributors during a season that included 16 players. Alexi Hempe, Carley Duffney and Cassidy Carson were also part of the effort, but not active roster.

The necessary magic involved everybody understanding their roles. For the departing seniors, a group that includes Sankey, it was a willful effort to make sure everyone – freshmen, sophomores, juniors – all embraced this particular dynamic.

“We’ve always had some – I would say almost ‘cheesy’ – ways to build chemistry,” Sjerven said. “But from that we’ve built actual connections.”

There have been very intentional ways to get everybody together throughout the season. Sjerven chuckled while recounting what she referred to as “ice cream dates” with younger teammates but understood their effectiveness in establishing a team culture.

“You develop a real relationship with teammates,” she said. “You learn to trust each other on and off the court.”

Sjerven has been around college basketball long enough to understand what a clean-burning machine looks like on the way to a share of a league title, a league tournament championship and an NCAA  tournament berth.

So when asked to come up with an under-recognized element to the 2021-22 successes, she pointed toward the people who are not getting into games too often but making great contributions in preparing starters and top reserves to do what they ultimately did.

“The people I continue to haul out – because I don’t think they get enough recognition – are our scout girls, who don’t play a lot but prep every week and go their hardest for us in practice to get us ready. They don’t have an easy job. They’re expected to play in practice like some of the best players in our league. They provide that spark for us that gets us ready.”

On Tuesday after the title game win, Korngable was asked about the three seniors completing each campaign with an NCAA berth. Paraphrasing, she talked about how many of the names had changed over that span but all had effectively maintained a winning culture. It wasn’t easy, in other words, but it was fun.

“Liv said it very well,” Plitzuweit said. “Just because you have a great core returning doesn’t assure you’re going to have the same anything. It has to be recreated each year. Our seniors understood we needed to recreate who we needed to be. That can be very challenging because what you might expect is going to happen doesn’t mean it’s going to happen. You have to set the foundation and go all the way through with it.”

Start the fire, in other words, and keep it burning.