For ten years, Bellwater State's women's basketball program watched other conference teams cut down the nets. On Sunday, the Miners finally got to do it themselves.
Bellwater State won the conference tournament championship 68-61 over the top seed Sunday, a result that snapped a ten-year title drought for a program that had reached the championship game twice in the interim without winning. Coach Carmen Whitlock, in her fifth season, said the win validated a rebuilding approach she said required convincing the athletic department and fans alike to be patient through several difficult seasons early in her tenure. “I inherited a program that had forgotten how to expect to win in March,” Whitlock said. “You don’t fix that with one good recruiting class. You fix it by staying the course long enough for a group to grow up together and actually believe it.”
A senior who stayed through the rebuild
Senior guard Bailey Nakashima, who scored 24 points in the championship game and was named tournament most valuable player, has been with the program since Whitlock’s second season, a stretch that included a 9-19 finish in Nakashima’s freshman year. “I remember sitting in the locker room after some of those losses my freshman year wondering if I made the wrong decision coming here,” Nakashima said. “I’m really glad I didn’t transfer, because I don’t think I would have believed you if you told freshman me we’d be cutting down nets by senior year.”
Whitlock said the turning point came two seasons ago, when the Miners lost in the championship game for the second time under her leadership, a defeat she said the current group of upperclassmen used as motivation rather than a discouragement. “That loss two years ago is the one I actually credit for this championship,” Whitlock said. “These players decided together that losing that game again wasn’t an option, and they’ve carried that decision through two full offseasons of extra work most people never see.”
A decade is a long time to wait for this. I’m not going to pretend the losing seasons in between didn’t hurt, because they did. But I think this team needed to lose that championship game two years ago to understand exactly what it was going to take to actually win one.
Carmen Whitlock, Head Coach, Bellwater State Miners Women’s Basketball
A program department officials say deserves more attention
Athletic Director Frank Alcott, who has pushed for facility upgrades across the department, said the women’s basketball program’s championship should raise its profile relative to the men’s team, which has historically drawn larger crowds and more media coverage. “This group did something the men’s program hasn’t done in this same window, and I want our fans to know that,” Alcott said. “We’ve talked about facility investments benefiting the whole department, and this is exactly the kind of result that should make it easier to make that case to donors going forward.”
Nakashima said the team noticed a modest but real increase in attendance at home games this season compared to previous years, though she said crowds still lag well behind the men’s program’s typical turnout. “We’d love more people in the building on a random Tuesday in January, not just for a championship run,” she said. “Hopefully this changes that a little bit, at least for next season.”
What comes next
The conference title comes with an automatic bid to the national tournament, the program’s first appearance since before Whitlock arrived. Whitlock said the Miners have been assigned to face a higher-seeded regional opponent in the tournament’s opening round, a matchup she said the team is treating as a bonus rather than the primary measure of the season’s success. “We already got what we came for this year, honestly,” Whitlock said. “Everything from here is us seeing how far this group can push it, without the weight of ten years of history sitting on their shoulders anymore.” Nakashima, whose collegiate eligibility ends after this postseason, said she plans to enjoy whatever games remain rather than think about the season being her last. “I waited four years for this feeling,” she said. “I’m not rushing through it.”
Whitlock said the championship has already changed conversations with recruits, several of whom she said had previously ranked Bellwater State as a backup option behind conference rivals with longer track records of postseason success. “For years I was recruiting against our own history, basically apologizing for a decade without a title before I could even get to why a recruit should choose us,” Whitlock said. “That conversation is different now. I get to lead with what this program just did instead of what it hasn’t done in a while.”
The team held a small celebration at a downtown restaurant Sunday night before returning to campus, where Nakashima said several dozen students who do not typically attend games showed up outside the athletic building to greet the team’s bus. “I’ve never seen that many people waiting for us anywhere,” she said. “It made the whole thing feel real in a way that hadn’t quite hit yet during the game itself.” Whitlock said she hopes the reception marks a lasting shift in how the campus engages with the program rather than a one-time reaction to a single championship weekend.