By Gordon Mann
Deputy Managing Editor, D3hoops.com

BLOOMINGTON, Ill. -- If you’re a teenager who has gained admission to a school like Amherst College, you already have a lot going for you. You’re going to spend four years at one of the country’s elite liberal arts schools, a highly selective college that probably chose you because you’ve already demonstrated academic and other aptitude. You would have good reason to be optimistic about the next four years and whatever lies beyond that.

But if you were a women’s basketball player headed to Amherst in the summer of 2007, you didn’t have much reason to expect excellence on the basketball court. That was the situation for Jaclyn Daigneault, Kristyn Dunleavy and Sarah Leyman and Courtney Long. They were headed to a terrific school with a non-descript basketball program.

At the end of the 2006-2007 season, the last one before these four arrived, Amherst was a middle-of-the-pack team in the New England Small College Athletic Conference (NESCAC). The Lord Jeffs finished that season at 12-13 after a loss to Bates in the opening round of the conference playoffs. Prior playoff appearances were similarly short. The Lord Jeffs were 2-5 in five NESCAC tournaments with one finals appearance and no titles. The school had never reached the NCAA tournament. 

Dunleavy recalls a conversation with Long about that point early in their first season. “I saw our record last year. We’re only .500. My high school played really well and we went to the championships. Same thing with [Courtney]. Same thing with Jayci. Same thing with Sarah. And we all said, ‘I don’t want to lose here. I don’t want to come here to a program that’s going to be losing.’”

Amherst’s coach at the time, Billy McBride, took an assistant athletic director position at Amherst, opening up the head coaching job. The four matriculating freshmen didn’t know who would fill that slot until June. Sarah Leyman recalls her father being anxious because there was no one in place to provide an offseason workout plan.

The soon-to-be man with the plan, G.P. Gromacki, had finished his first season at Hamilton, another elite liberal arts school in New York. He had seen the Lord Jeffs and beaten them 57-47 six months earlier as the Continentals head coach.

But he also knew that Amherst had a great reputation with enviable resources and that it was close to his family in Western Massachusetts. So he interviewed for the job and accepted it, his fourth coaching change in five seasons.

Gromacki’s first head coaching job was at St. Lawrence where he led the Saints to the program’s first 20 win season in his first season. Five more 20-win seasons followed and the Saints made the 2002 Final Four, losing a heartbreaker to UW-Stevens Point when a long 3-pointer to win rimmed out at the buzzer. After a stint at Division I Temple, Gromacki went to Hamilton and took the Continentals to their first NCAA tournament in his first and only season.

In 2007-08, the Lord Jeffs went 27-2 in the regular season and won the NESCAC tournament, earning their first ever bid to the NCAA tournament. Leyman worked her way into the team’s starting lineup while Daigneault, Dunleavy and Long contributed off the bench. The postseason run ended when the Lord Jeffs lost to defending national champion DePauw 68-63. The season was over, but the ceiling for Amherst’s potential was raised.

“After that first year ... our expectations definitely changed,” says Leyman. “We put our eye and our goals way ahead.” Long adds, “Especially after we got to the Sweet 16, right from there, we knew that we had great people on our team. We had three years to work at it together as a group and we had incoming players. We set our sights on a national championship after that first year.”

From his St. Lawrence experience, Gromacki knew what it would take to go further in the NCAA tournament. He needed size and depth, particularly at forward, to complement his talented guards, including new recruits Caroline Stedman and Shannon Finucane. Sarah Leyman gave him a tough, tireless worker at forward who could score and rebound. Daigneault was a versatile player who could play on the wing or in the post and score from most places on the court. Other players, like Long and Dunleavy, found ways to contribute but their game wasn’t grabbing boards and blocking shots in the paint.

So, along with Stedman and Finucane, Gromacki also recruited Awah-Lem Atanga McCormick. Lem, as she’s known, is a six-foot forward whose skills were on full display this weekend in her home state of Illinois.  She blocks shots around the rim and makes them from behind the arc. She provided a scoring spark in Amherst’s semifinal win over Christopher Newport and an interior defensive presence against Washington U. The next summer Jackie Renner transferred to Amherst from Division I Vermont. Renner is another six-foot forward who ran Amherst’s offense like a point guard in the first half of national title game and defended the post in the second half. The Lord Jeffs had depth and size.

In the sophomore season for Daigneault, Dunleavy, Leyman and Long, the Lord Jeffs reached their first Final Four. They lost to Washington U. 65-49 in a game where the Bears outrebounded the Lord Jeffs by 11.  The Bears’ starting frontcourt outscored Amherst’s 23-10. Another Final Four appearance followed in 2010. So did another loss to Washington U. This one was even more painful since the Lord Jeffs led by 10 with nine minutes left in regulation, only to lose 86-75 in overtime.

As Brian Falzarano detailed last week, after that loss, Gromacki urged the team to use the third place game the next day against Rochester as the start of the 2010-11 campaign. That’s a familiar motivational speech for coaches who often tell players that the next season starts now, even when “now” is only an hour after the last season just ended. But Gromacki didn’t have to sell that concept too hard to a roster that had everyone returning for the next season.

“We knew that we didn’t have any seniors last year. We knew we had some talent coming in,” Leyman remembers. “We were sold. We knew that we work hard enough that we can turn it around.”

“To be frank, we came in this year saying, ‘We’re not going to play in a consolation game again," says Dunleavy. "We’re not doing that again."

So Daigneault, Dunleavy, Leyman and Long – now seniors at Amherst – began their final season as Amherst basketball players. The team was picked No. 1 in the preseason D3hoops Top 25 poll and played up to those lofty expectations. Their offense clicked and their defense stifled, leading to a 29-point average margin of victory. The only blemish was an 85-82 overtime loss at nationally ranked Kean. 

“At beginning we had trouble getting up for every game, especially if we knew that we were the stronger team,” confesses Daigneault. “We always had it in the back of our mind. We didn’t talk about it much. We always knew what we had to do…That’s the great thing about our team is that, us as seniors, us as captains, we don’t have to say anything. We just know that our team, our chemistry, how motivated we are, has helped us through.”            

The focus intensified once the Lord Jeffs hit the NESCAC tournament. It showed as the Lord Jeffs romped their way to a third NESCAC championship. They held Trinity (Conn.) to 32 points. They held off Williams 71-64, just their second win by less than 10 points all season. They blasted Bowdoin 72-37 in the title game.

Big wins followed in the first four NCAA tournament games. The Lord Jeffs earned their third straight Final Four appearance by defeating previously unbeaten Babson 68-49. Instead of playing Washington U. in the national semifinal as in the prior two years, Amherst drew Christopher Newport. The Lord Jeffs used stifling defense to slow down Division III’s top scorer Chelsie Schweers, holding her 14 points below her tournament average. Kim Fiorentino and all-star guard Caroline Stedman matched up with Schweers and their teammates threw quick double teams at her. The Lord Jeffs used depth and size to pull away from the Captains 69-59. Dunleavy scored 10 second half points to help Amherst seize the win. During the semifinal postgame news conference, Christopher Newport coach Carolyn Hunter cited Amherst’s depth and size as the difference in the game. She also cited Amherst’s development over the last four years as a model she’d like to replicate.

While Amherst had never reached the national championship before, that wasn’t the team’s goal. It was to win the national championship. Coincidentally, to do so, the Lord Jeffs would have to beat the same Washington U. team that beat them the prior two seasons.

The Lord Jeffs came out of the locker room with furrowed brows and few smiles for the pregame introductions to Saturday’s championship. If that stern look conveyed a little tightness on the offensive end, it also conveyed focus on the defensive end. Washington U. scored just 10 points in the first 16 minutes. Amherst didn’t fare much better so a late first half surge by the Bears cut the Lord Jeffs' halftime lead to four.

In the second half of the national championship, the lead changed hands a couple times. Amherst built a small lead only to see the Bears tie the game again at 39 with eight minutes to play. The Lord Jeffs seized control from there. Caroline Stedman, who wowed all weekend with her outside shooting and explosive move to the basket, hit a runner in the lane. McCormick nailed a 3-pointer. Stedman added another.

After McCormick hit a bucket in the lane and got fouled, pushing the lead to 12 with 3:27 left, the stoic soldiers from Amherst finally let their emotions explode to the surface. Fiorentino leaped into McCormick’s arms in a full body hug. The Bears quickly called time out but it was too late. Daigneault pumped her first and screamed “LET’S GO” to her teammates who were well on their way to doing so.  After four years, the Lord Jeffs weren’t going to be beaten in the Final Four.

A few minutes later, after the Lord Jeffs calmly hit their free throws to repel the Bears’ rally. 

Adrenaline-filled aggression gave way to incredulous joy. It’s a familiar scene in the late stages of the national championship game and it never gets old. The Lord Jeffs won 64-55 and the team poured onto the floor to celebrate.

When players are asked to explain what that moment is like, the word they most frequently use is “indescribable.” An hour after the final buzzer sound All-American Daigneault was able to put it into words. “We have worked so hard for this all year. It’s kind of like a release of emotion, every emotion that you can feel.”

In the postgame news conference, Gromacki was asked to explain his feelings after winning a national championship in his fourth try. He is quick to deflect attention to his players. “This is the thing that people don’t understand and they don’t get to know about our athletes is what they are outside of basketball. We’d like to say they come to Amherst to play basketball but they come for a lot more. They’re well rounded students and great people off the court.”

He has a genuine admiration for his players who will, as the NCAA likes to remind us, “go pro in something other than sports.” Daigneault will do research in child psychology and then think about graduate school. Long is fielding offers for research and writing positions at CBS, NBC or ABC. Dunleavy is interested in international law. Leyman is focusing on veterinary science and will work with the Rwanda mountain gorilla project.

As for Gromacki, he’ll return to campus in the fall with a ton of talent, including Stedman, Atanga McCormick, Fiorentino and starting point guard Shannon Finucane. He’ll have another incoming class and the ultimate recruitment tool, a national championship. Throughout the Final Four, Gromacki said with self-deference that he didn’t have to do much with this senior led team.  He says that the four seniors taught him a lot in their four years.

“[They taught me that] you just have to persevere,” explains Gromacki. “Things in life aren’t going to go your way all the time. You keep working hard and you hopefully get a break. They taught me you’ve got to stick together and that’s what it’s about.”

Given the program’s turnaround, it’s safe to assume those seniors learned something from Gromacki, too. So Daigneault, Dunleavy, Leyman and Long will get their degrees in a couple months and leave Amherst for their next step. 

Much has changed for Amherst basketball in four years but this much is the same for those four women. They have a lot going for them.