Mississippi Today
Against all odds, Lady Rebels make history and knock off Stanford
Against all odds, Lady Rebels make history and knock off Stanford
The Ole Miss Lady Rebels basketball team, guided by their effervescent leader Coach Yo, made history Sunday night on the far side of the continent.
Playing on top-seeded Stanford's home floor in Palo Alto, Calif., before a highly partisan Cardinal crowd, the Lady Rebels never trailed in taking a 54-49 victory that sends them to the NCAA Sweet 16 for the first time in 16 years.
What makes the Ole Miss accomplishment all the more significant, three-time national champ Stanford became the first top-seed to lose in the second round of the tournament since 2009. There's a reason for that. In the NCAA women's game, top seeds play the first two rounds at home. The event is designed to advance the highest seeds into the later rounds, which isn't really fair. But don't try telling the always positive Yolett McPhee-McCuin and her team that. They just out-worked, out-quicked, out-hustled and out-played a program that had been to 14 consecutive Sweet 16s and a team that had been to two straight Final Fours.
Next, the Lady Rebels go even farther from home to Seattle where they will face the winner of tonight's Texas-Louisville game. And how does Coach Yo feel about that?
“I love Seattle,” she gushed during her postgame ESPN interview. Travel clearly does't bother Coach Yo. She's from the Bahamas, played college basketball in Rhode Island and has coached all over this country and in her native Bahamas, where she has even headed the men's national team.
Playing in by far the best women's basketball conference in the land, these Lady Rebels achieved their 25th victory against eight defeats. That's up from 23 victories last year and 15 the year before. Coach Yo's first two Ole Miss teams won only 16 games combined. It has been a building process, and the construction began quietly when Vic Schaefer was a few miles away at Mississippi State making all the noise and leading the Bulldogs to two Final Fours. Now, just look at the bracket. Depending on tonight's outcome, the Lady Rebels could be facing Schaefer and mighty Texas in the Sweet 16 at Seattle.
Coach Yo has built her program on a foundation of maximum effort and defense. The Lady Rebels defend as if their lives depend on the outcome. Again, just look at Sunday night's boxscore. Stanford shot a season low of 33%. Harassed from the get-go, they committed a season-high 21 turnovers. That's defense.
Effort? The one statistic that always will tell you about effort are the rebounding numbers. The Rebels out-rebounded the taller Stanford players 44 to 39. More impressively, Ole Miss gathered 20 offensive rebounds. That's effort. There may have been a loose ball or two that the Lady Rebels did not get, but they surely retrieved most of them. That's effort, too.
Offensively, Ole Miss the Rebels were balanced if not pretty. Nobody scored more than 13 points, and the Rebels won despite hitting only one of 11 fourth quarter field goal tries. Freshman Ayanna Thomas, off the bench, might have been the biggest offensive spark hitting three of four three-point tries. Angel Baker scored 13, Marquesha Davis 12 and Madison Scott 11.
Not to be overlooked in this Ole Miss women's success story is the value of having come through a grueling 16-game SEC schedule. When you go against the likes of South Carolina, LSU, Tennessee, Mississippi State, Arkansas and Georgia on an almost weekly basis, you either get better or you get embarrassed. The league is simply more athletic, more physical than any other when it comes to the women's game.
This observer had to laugh when UConn's Hall of Fame coach Gino Auriemma complained about No. 1 ranked South Carolina's physical dismantling of his team in an 81-77 home court loss this past season. He said his players had visible bruises and that “it's not basketball.”
Well, it is in the SEC. It sounds trite but it's true: Only the strong survive. You should know that undefeated South Carolina's closest call this season came not at UConn but in Oxford where the Lady Rebels lost in overtime.
And, yes, South Carolina blasted the Lady Rebels 80-51 in the SEC Tournament a couple weeks ago. This tournament is South Carolina's to lose. Still, after tonight, there will be 16 teams standing, and one is Ole Miss.
This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.
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Mississippi Today
On this day in 1945
April 29, 1945
The memoir by Richard Wright about his upbringing in Roxie, Mississippi, “Black Boy,” became the top-selling book in the U.S.
Wrighyt described Roxie as “swarming with rats, cats, dogs, fortune tellers, cripples, blind men, whores, salesmen, rent collectors, and children.”
In his home, he looked to his mother: “My mother's suffering grew into a symbol in my mind, gathering to itself all the poverty, the ignorance, the helplessness; the painful, baffling, hunger-ridden days and hours; the restless moving, the futile seeking, the uncertainty, the fear, the dread; the meaningless pain and the endless suffering. Her life set the emotional tone of my life.”
When he was alone, he wrote, “I would hurl words into this darkness and wait for an echo, and if an echo sounded, no matter how faintly, I would send other words to tell, to march, to fight, to create a sense of the hunger for life that gnaws in us all.”
Reading became his refuge.
“Whenever my environment had failed to support or nourish me, I had clutched at books,” he wrote. “Reading was like a drug, a dope. The novels created moods in which I lived for days.”
In the end, he discovered that “if you possess enough courage to speak out what you are, you will find you are not alone.” He was the first Black author to see his work sold through the Book-of-a-Month Club.
Wright's novel, “Native Son,” told the story of Bigger Thomas, a 20-year-old Black man whose bleak life leads him to kill. Through the book, he sought to expose the racism he saw: “I was guided by but one criterion: to tell the truth as I saw it and felt it. I swore to myself that if I ever wrote another book, no one would weep over it; that it would be so hard and deep that they would have to face it without the consolation of tears.”
The novel, which sold more than 250,000 copies in its first three weeks, was turned into a play on Broadway, directed by Orson Welles. He became friends with other writers, including Ralph Ellison in Harlem and Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus in Paris. His works played a role in changing white Americans' views on race.
This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.
Mississippi Today
Podcast: The contentious final days of the 2024 legislative session
Mississippi Today's Adam Ganucheau, Bobby Harrison and Geoff Pender break down the final negotiations of the 2024 legislative session's three major issues: Medicaid expansion, education funding, and retirement system reform.
This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.
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Mississippi Today
Lawmakers negotiate Medicaid expansion behind closed doors, hit impasse on state budget
House and Senate Republicans continued to haggle over Medicaid expansion proposals Sunday, and the state budget process hit a snag after leaders couldn't reach final agreements by a Saturday night deadline on how to spend $7 billion.
House Speaker Jason White on Sunday told his chamber that Medicaid expansion negotiators from the House and Senate had been meeting and he expected a compromise “will be filed by Monday or Tuesday at the latest.”
House Medicaid Chairwoman Missy McGee said the Senate had delivered another counter proposal on expansion Sunday evening but declined to provide details. Her Senate counterpart, Medicaid Chairman Kevin Blackwell, declined comment on Sunday. The two leaders met in McGee's office on Sunday evening following a Saturday afternoon meeting.
READ MORE: House, Senate close in on Medicaid expansion agreement
Lawmakers have for the past couple of months been debating on how to expand Medicaid coverage for poor Mississippians and help the state's flagging hospitals. The House initially voted to expand coverage to an estimated 200,000 people, and accept more that $1 billion a year in federal dollars to cover the cost, as most other states have done. The Senate initially passed a far more austere plan, that would cover about 40,000 people, and would decline the extra federal money to cover costs.
Since those plans passed, each has offered counter proposals, but no deal has been reached.
A group of about 50 clergy, physicians and other citizens who support full expansion showed up at the Capitol on Sunday to sit in the Senate gallery and deliver letters to key leaders who are negotiating a final plan.
“When we stand before the Lord, he's not going to ask how much money did you save the state. He's going to ask you what you did for the least of these,” Monsignor Elvin Sounds, a retired Catholic priest, said outside the Senate gallery on Sunday.
READ MORE: A solution to the Republican impasse on Medicaid expansion
Lawmakers hit an impasse on setting a $7 billion state budget and missed Saturday night's deadline for filing appropriations bills. This will force the legislature into extra innings, and require lawmakers to vote to push back deadlines. Lawmakers had expected to end this year's session and leave Jackson by early this week. But House Speaker Jason White told his chamber on Sunday they should expect to continue working through Friday, “and possibly through Saturday or Sunday.
White later said of the budget impasse, “When you get to haggling over spending $7 billion, folks are going to have disagreements.”
Lt. Gov. Delbert Hosemann, who presides over the Senate, said “things are fluid. But everybody is working.”
He looked at his watch and said “It is 5 o'clock. By 6 o'clock what I tell you will have changed.”
White said one reason for the session having to run extra innings is that when he became speaker he vowed to House members that he would not continue the practice of passing much of the state budget last-minute, late at night or in the wee hours of the morning with little or no time for lawmakers to read or vet what they are passing.
He said the House was prepared early Saturday night to file budget bills with agreed-upon numbers, but not to file “dummy bills” with zeros or blanks and continue haggling a budget late into the night.
“I made a promise that we are not going to keep them up here until midnight, then plow through all these budget bills,” White said. “We had had a gentleman's agreement (between the House and Senate) earlier in the session to negotiate a budget by April 15. That didn't happen … We are not going to do everything last minute with no time for our members to read things and ask questions. We are not going to do it in the middle of the night.”
READ MORE: Senate negotiators a no-show for second meeting with House on Medicaid expansion
This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.
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