Greatest season in Coastal Carolina women’s basketball history ends due to coronavirus
The best season in the history of the Coastal Carolina women’s basketball program came to a crushing end Thursday with the Sun Belt Conference’s cancellation of its men’s and women’s basketball tournaments because of concerns over the coronavirus.
“That was the hardest conversation I’ve ever had to have,” head coach Jaida Williams wrote Thursday on Twitter, referring to informing her players that the tournament was canceled and their season was over.
Coastal set a program record for wins with a 25-4 record and went 15-3 in conference play to finish second behind Troy.
The Chants had a bye into Saturday’s scheduled conference semifinals and were slated to face sixth-seeded South Alabama (16-16) at the Smoothie King Center in New Orleans, needing two wins to qualify for the NCAA Tournament for the first time.
The Chants recorded a 10-game winning streak in the conference that was snapped in the regular season finale in double overtime against Appalachian State, which dropped the Chants out of a tie for the conference title.
Because the conference tournament was canceled, Troy would have participated in the NCAA tournament as the Sun Belt’s representative.
But later Thursday the NCAA announced that the event known as “March Madness” was canceled, along with all NCAA championships for winter and spring sports.
The NBA, NHL, Major League Baseball and Major League Soccer all suspended operations on either Wednesday or Thursday.
The NCAA initially announced Wednesday that the men’s and women’s basketball tournaments would be held without fans in arenas, though that was before the ACC and high-profile programs including Kansas and Duke suspended athletic activities indefinitely on Thursday.
The Sun Belt was one of 13 conferences that canceled their tournaments on Thursday, including the ACC, SEC, Big Ten, Big 12 and Pac-12.
Coastal’s success on the court led to a near sweep of the Sun Belt’s 2019-20 season awards.
Senior D.J. Williams was named the Player of the Year, senior Naheria Hamilton was named the Defensive Player of the Year, and Jaida Williams was named the Coach of the Year.
The only performance-based awards the Chants didn’t collect were the freshman and newcomer of the year honors.
Williams was named to the All-Sun Belt First Team while Hamilton and sophomore forward Aja Blount were selected to the Second Team. Voting for the individual awards and All-Sun Belt teams was conducted by the league’s 12 head coaches along with a selected media panel.
Williams, a guard from Moreno Valley, Calif., is just the third Chanticleer to win a conference player of the year award and the first since Alisha Dill in 2006-07, and is the first Coastal player to be named to the All-Sun Belt first team twice, having been named to the first team last season.
Williams averaged 19.4 points, 5.3 assists, 7.5 rebounds, and 2.4 steals per contest and led the conference in scoring average, free throw attempts (210), free throws made (163) and steals (68), and was second in assists.
She scored a career-high 51 points – the most by a Division I women’s player since 2018 – in a 124-103 win over Troy on Feb. 13 to break a 34-year old school record for most points in a game. She followed that up with just the third triple-double in school history against South Alabama two days later.
Hamilton is just the second Chant to win a conference defensive player of the year award, joining Amanda Stull in 2009-10. The center averaged a double-double with 10.3 points and 10.2 rebounds per game while leading the league in rebounds per game.
She was the top defensive rebounder in the conference and 15th nationally grabbing 7.4 defensive boards per contest, and was twice named Sun Belt Player of the Week.
Blount, a forward, was fourth in the conference in scoring with 14.7 points per contest and led the league and ranked 11th nationally in free-throw percentage at 89 percent. She recorded a career-high 38 points against South Alabama on Jan. 4 and had 22 double-doubles on the season.
Coach Williams becomes just the second coach in CCU women’s basketball history to be named coach of the year, joining Big South Conference Coach of the Year Alan LeForce in 1998-99. The Chants were picked to finish sixth in the league’s preseason coaches’ poll.
CCU seniors D.J. Williams, Hamilton, point guard Torrie Cash and shooting guard Caitlin Roche all started this season to lead the team to its historic accomplishments, but their careers are now over.
This story was originally published March 12, 2020 at 3:25 PM.
