STARKVILLE — Legacy.
Years from now, Vic Schaefer hopes historians will be able to look back on the 2014-15 season and call it the year the Mississippi State women’s basketball team re-established itself on the national scene.
In his third season in Starkville, the longtime assistant and associate head coach at Arkansas and Texas A&M and his staff blended the talents of back-to-back nationally rated recruiting classes with a group of players they inherited from the previous regime and produced a history-making season.
The record will show Martha Alwal, Savannah Carter, Kendra Grant, and Jerica James were seniors on that team. While none of the four was the team’s leading scorer or played the most minutes, each one contributed in a unique way to help MSU set school records for overall wins (27) and Southeastern Conference wins (11) and push the program back to the NCAA tournament for the first time since the 2009-10 season.
“They are a part of history,” Schaefer said. “No one can ever take that from them. They have all made an impact here. Whether it was Martha, JJ, and Kendra, the three we inherited, or if it was Savannah, all of them impacted our program.
“As long as I am here, their impact will be felt for every season because they have set a standard of the way we’re going to do things here.”
At 6 tonight at Mize Pavilion, MSU will celebrate its record-breaking season with its annual Hail State Hoops Award Banquet. It likely will be one of the final times the seniors will gather with their teammates for a team function. That’s because Thursday a new chapter could begin for Alwal and Grant, who could hear their names called in the WNBA draft.
While Alwal and Grant inch closer to the reality of earning money to play basketball, Carter and James also are preparing for a new chapter in their lives. Carter won’t complete work on her degree until December, so she will continue her rehabilitation from stress fractures. She said Tuesday she feels she is at 70 percent and that her goal is to get back to 100 percent so she can put herself in position to pursue potential opportunities playing professional basketball.
Carter said her mother and father are getting her a trainer who will be able to help her get her legs back to the point where she was last season. As a junior transfer from Trinity Valley (Texas) Community College, Carter brought “toughness” to the team, according to Schaefer, and started 34 of 36 games and averaged 7.3 points and 4.9 rebounds per game.
This past season, the stress fractures limited Carter to 23 games (7.7 minutes per game). She averaged 1.8 points and 1.2 rebounds per game. She said Tuesday she hopes to use the next eight months to recover physically and to polish her skills as a point guard. Carter said she spent much of her earlier career playing that position and moved to other positions when she played in junior college and at MSU. She said she is anxious to see how she feels once she gets back to feeling closer to 100 percent.
“In practice, I got to where I’d hurt probably toward the end,” Carter said. “It just got to the point where I just played with. It didn’t even bother me anymore until it bothered me really bad.”
Carter acknowledged she would have liked to have been healthier so she could have played a bigger role in MSU’s 27-7 season. She averaged 28.3 minutes as a junior in MSU’s 22-14 season. She said she hopes to keep her basketball career going so she can see how far she can progress.
“I am going into the training stuff really confident about my legs because they did make a lot of progress from where I started,” Carter said. “I didn’t even end up practicing when I was supposed to, so getting back to where I used to be is taking gradual steps and it is taking forever.”
James likely will be the only senior who won’t pursue a professional career. Instead, the 5-foot-5 point guard, who will earn her degree in kinesiology (concentration in health and fitness studies) in May, will begin work on a master’s degree in sports administration at MSU. She said Tuesday her goal is to become a coach or a teacher. James said she will work in a graduate assistant capacity at the Templeton Athletic Academic Center.
“I would love to be coaching, preferably college level,” James said. “Coming in, I knew I wanted to coach. Whether you are coaching or playing, you are still getting the experience of seeing the Final Fours and stuff like that.
“I think coming in I was real steady on coaching because I do consider myself a mentor, and I want to take what I have learned here at State and instill it in other players so they can be great.”
James started all 34 games for the Bulldogs this season. She averaged 4.9 points and 1.6 rebounds per game in 17.9 minutes. She also was second on the team with 93 assists. More importantly, she served as a mentor to freshman point guard Morgan William.
James isn’t sure what kind of coach she will be, but she knows she has had plenty of influences who have taught her many lessons. She had to ask Carter for the perfect way to describe the philosophy that she could adapt once she begins a career as a coach.
“Do it wrong, do it long or do it right, do it light,” James said. “I will be that type of coach. I get emotionally attached, so I probably will be the soft one, but we’ll see. Hopefully you will hear about me in the future.”
James and her classmates will have to check back in 10-15 years to see what their work helped create. If the energy the Bulldogs created in setting a home attendance record of 67,598 and drawing a single-game record crowd for a women’s basketball game in the state of Mississippi (7,326) is any indication, fans will have a lot of positive things to say about the legacy Alwal, Carter, Grant, and James created.
Follow Dispatch sports editor Adam Minichino on Twitter @ctsportseditor
Adam Minichino is the former Sports Editor for The Commercial Dispatch.
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