We’re All We Need: The Story of 2022-23 ECU Women’s Basketball
May 17, 2023 | Women's Basketball
Part Two: Conference Play and Belief in Things Not Seen
I was in the room when Coach Kim found out that her 2022-23 Pirates had been picked last, 11th of 11 teams in the American Athletic Conference preseason standings – as voted on by her coaching peers. It was moments before she went live on air for the AAC's media day on ESPN+. Not exactly the moment you want to hear bad news.
Coach Kim was, perhaps, not surprised. She understood the logic of it, I suppose. But the vote wasn't particularly close. It was, fair or not, an insult. Sill, I can't describe Coach Kim's demeanor as anything other than Resolute.
"They picked us last!" she would infamously exclaim five months later. They picked us last, indeed.
In This Room
After a successful run in non-conference play, the Pirates had shown some ability to win tough games. It had been the program's best start in some time, but they still had a daunting label to shed. They had won, but according to Coach Kim, they didn't yet understand what they could be… Then they hit a speed bump.
Opening AAC play on Dec. 30, the Pirates dropped a tough competition to a skilled Tulsa team. It was a Tulsa team expected to have a good year. It was not a shocking loss, but looking back, it could have been a troubling one.
It was only an eight-point loss, but ECU trailed by double-digits after a quarter and never seemed to be truly in the game. MyMy had a tremendous day with 16 points and 16 rebounds, but Danae slid into the background with four points while the team limped to a 55-47 defeat. It simply wasn't a complete effort – a team effort.
To an outsider it looked to be a reversion to the mean. ECU Women's Basketball being ECU Women's Basketball. Oh well. Bury them and move on. Coach Kim wasn't so worried.
"In that process, there's going to be highs and lows," she said. "You know, we always tell the team during games: you can't get too high, you can't get too low – you've got to kind of stay even keel. So that's what we did. I didn't look at it as 'oh, this is a setback.' I didn't look at look at it that way. I just looked at it as this is a part of the process. I still felt like it was a winnable game.
"And I felt like at that point, there was some other changes that we needed to make in line up. At that point, we had put Jayla in the lineup, and I felt there was one more change that we needed to make. And we made that change going on into Memphis, the next game, with Micah going in taking the point."
And so, it was time – a changing of the guard at the point. Micah was ready to take the reins and that's just what she did as the team ventured to the banks of the Mississippi River for a road date with the Memphis Tigers.
No one – I mean no one expected East Carolina go into that gym and get a win. Danae dropped 20, MyMy registered a double-double and Micah put up 13 points and six rebounds. It was a tight game most of the way, then the Pirates took over. A 21-10 margin in the fourth quarter, highlighted by dominant team defense, meant an eight-point win for the visitors.
It was a surprising win and an impressive one to earn on the road. It was more surprising when the Pirates came home and kept things rolling with a win over a Tulane team searching for what Coach Kim called their "get right game."
It was a game which was once again close until it wasn't. Those scrappy Pirates owned the fourth quarter. It was the beginning of what would become a recurring theme. Danae dropped 26 in the game, including six triples – including five in the first half alone. She was on what was the start of an otherworldly tear.
That tear continued a game later as she scored 28 points at Temple. It was never close. ECU wins, 72-51. The Road Warriors were finding a little mojo. But they didn't have the key ingredient yet. The thing that would take them from solid team to Champion.
Anguish Tears to Angry Tears
ECU rode into Dallas, Texas riding a three-game winning streak in AAC play. The league was on notice. Though, it's hard to say that at that time anyone really believed in the Pirates yet – not even themselves.
The team had as an abysmal a start to a game as a team of their quality can have. They trailed by as many as 18 in the third quarter. It was brutal. It was the kind of situation where the ECU teams of old would have folded to lose by 30. This team did not.
That full court defense locked in and started chipping. They forced turnovers, made effort plays, and got back in the game.
The indelible memory of the kind of heroism that changed the course of the game came with just under five minutes to play in regulation. On a long rebound the ball bounced out to the left wing, towards the ECU bench. It seemed like the ball was going out of bounds for sure. It would have probably been SMU ball in a three-point game (by this point the Pirates had come back to take the lead).
The ball bounces harmlessly away from the 10 players on the court until Micah made a miraculous play to dive across the floor, grab the ball, and call timeout in one motion before sliding out of bounds.
It was momentous. It should have won the game – but it wasn't meant to be that day. The game went into overtime and SMU hit the game-winning basket with 29 seconds left. 68-66. Heartbreak.
Coach Kim was, perhaps, not surprised. She understood the logic of it, I suppose. But the vote wasn't particularly close. It was, fair or not, an insult. Sill, I can't describe Coach Kim's demeanor as anything other than Resolute.
"They picked us last!" she would infamously exclaim five months later. They picked us last, indeed.
In This Room
After a successful run in non-conference play, the Pirates had shown some ability to win tough games. It had been the program's best start in some time, but they still had a daunting label to shed. They had won, but according to Coach Kim, they didn't yet understand what they could be… Then they hit a speed bump.
Opening AAC play on Dec. 30, the Pirates dropped a tough competition to a skilled Tulsa team. It was a Tulsa team expected to have a good year. It was not a shocking loss, but looking back, it could have been a troubling one.
It was only an eight-point loss, but ECU trailed by double-digits after a quarter and never seemed to be truly in the game. MyMy had a tremendous day with 16 points and 16 rebounds, but Danae slid into the background with four points while the team limped to a 55-47 defeat. It simply wasn't a complete effort – a team effort.
To an outsider it looked to be a reversion to the mean. ECU Women's Basketball being ECU Women's Basketball. Oh well. Bury them and move on. Coach Kim wasn't so worried.
"In that process, there's going to be highs and lows," she said. "You know, we always tell the team during games: you can't get too high, you can't get too low – you've got to kind of stay even keel. So that's what we did. I didn't look at it as 'oh, this is a setback.' I didn't look at look at it that way. I just looked at it as this is a part of the process. I still felt like it was a winnable game.
"And I felt like at that point, there was some other changes that we needed to make in line up. At that point, we had put Jayla in the lineup, and I felt there was one more change that we needed to make. And we made that change going on into Memphis, the next game, with Micah going in taking the point."
And so, it was time – a changing of the guard at the point. Micah was ready to take the reins and that's just what she did as the team ventured to the banks of the Mississippi River for a road date with the Memphis Tigers.
No one – I mean no one expected East Carolina go into that gym and get a win. Danae dropped 20, MyMy registered a double-double and Micah put up 13 points and six rebounds. It was a tight game most of the way, then the Pirates took over. A 21-10 margin in the fourth quarter, highlighted by dominant team defense, meant an eight-point win for the visitors.
It was a surprising win and an impressive one to earn on the road. It was more surprising when the Pirates came home and kept things rolling with a win over a Tulane team searching for what Coach Kim called their "get right game."
It was a game which was once again close until it wasn't. Those scrappy Pirates owned the fourth quarter. It was the beginning of what would become a recurring theme. Danae dropped 26 in the game, including six triples – including five in the first half alone. She was on what was the start of an otherworldly tear.
That tear continued a game later as she scored 28 points at Temple. It was never close. ECU wins, 72-51. The Road Warriors were finding a little mojo. But they didn't have the key ingredient yet. The thing that would take them from solid team to Champion.
Anguish Tears to Angry Tears
ECU rode into Dallas, Texas riding a three-game winning streak in AAC play. The league was on notice. Though, it's hard to say that at that time anyone really believed in the Pirates yet – not even themselves.
The team had as an abysmal a start to a game as a team of their quality can have. They trailed by as many as 18 in the third quarter. It was brutal. It was the kind of situation where the ECU teams of old would have folded to lose by 30. This team did not.
That full court defense locked in and started chipping. They forced turnovers, made effort plays, and got back in the game.
The indelible memory of the kind of heroism that changed the course of the game came with just under five minutes to play in regulation. On a long rebound the ball bounced out to the left wing, towards the ECU bench. It seemed like the ball was going out of bounds for sure. It would have probably been SMU ball in a three-point game (by this point the Pirates had come back to take the lead).
The ball bounces harmlessly away from the 10 players on the court until Micah made a miraculous play to dive across the floor, grab the ball, and call timeout in one motion before sliding out of bounds.
It was momentous. It should have won the game – but it wasn't meant to be that day. The game went into overtime and SMU hit the game-winning basket with 29 seconds left. 68-66. Heartbreak.
•••
Now, the moral of this part of the story is not simply that the Pirates came back. That was great. To be able to fight in a game like that was an immense moment of growth. But it was what happened within the four walls of the locker room after the game that changed the course of the season.
There were tears. That wasn't surprising. It was a hard loss and the kind of loss that just had to hurt. There are tears in losing locker rooms all the time. What mattered was that these tears were different.
"At the end of the game," said Coach Kim. "In the locker room I just saw I saw tears. Angry tears. In the past, I saw tears, but I saw tears of 'I'm tired of losing.' Like, 'when is this ever going stop' almost like 'woe is me' types of tears. But that game I saw anger. Like, 'We should have won that game. We deserve to win that game. We can win that game' types of tears."
Angry Tears. And something else: Belief.
I was in the locker room after that game. Something had cosmically shifted. Standing before her team after that game, Coach Kim told the team she saw in their eyes, for the first time in her time at ECU, that they believed. They believed – whole-heatedly believed that they could win. That they would win.
The Christian Bible dictates to us that faith is the belief in things not seen. No one in that room could see the team cutting down the nets in Forth Worth, but for the first time everyone believed that it could.
The Danae McNeal Experience
The game in Dallas was also significant for being the first time I saw that look Danae gets in her eyes. It's the look in her eyes that tells her opponent she's got them. She's got them, she knows she's got them, and they aren't getting that ball past her.
When Danae gets that look in her eye, it's over. She's going to rack up steals and rack up baskets. I saw that look a lot late in the season. It was joyous.
That brings up another aspect of the Danae McNeal Experience. That look she gets on defense is symbolic of the importance of defense on her game; because it's true that Danae is simply better when she starts her game on the defensive end.
At one time in the season, she was averaging somewhere in the range of eight more points per game when she recorded three-plus steals in a game than when she recorded fewer. Danae, by the way, recorded the fifth most steals in program history this past season with 97. She led the AAC by 19 takeaways and finished eighth in the nation in total steals. She was dominant on that end. It created a problem for opponents – and an opportunity for the Pirates.
As her defensive legend grew, so too expanded her offensive game. Danae finished the season near the top of the conference in scoring and as a bona fide go-to option for the Pirates. She went on a tear down the stretch and earned herself some hardware to go with it.
•••
The Pirates took care of business in their next two contests in Cincinnati and Wichita – not playing pretty basketball but fighting tooth and nail for well-earned victories. It was ECU basketball; not pretty, but it worked.
The team suffered a setback against Memphis at home – a revenge game for the Tigers – then took a beating on the road against South Florida. Neither loss was great, but neither was backbreaking.
That brought the team to UCF, the end of the Florida trip in a place where the program had never won. The final score doesn't really show it, but the Pirates were absolutely dominant that day. It was over early and despite a slight Knights comeback in the fourth, ECU had control from the jump.
Not a Freshman Anymore
Coming back to Minges Coliseum after the trip to Orlando set up what was, in my mind, the meanest game of the season for MyMy. The freshman played bully ball and absolutely dominated against a quality opponent.
MyMy was simply unguardable in the fourth quarter as she pounded the ball in the paint and put the game away seemingly singlehandedly. She finished with a new best of 23 points to go with 14 rebounds. Temple actually led that game by three points through three quarters, but it was not to be their day. ECU went on to lead by as many as 19 in a 25-7 final period in which the Pirates imposed their will to blow the game wide open.
It kicked off a tear for MyMy. From the Temple game on she put up totals of 14, 10, 15, 12, 15, 14, 19, 8, and 15 rebounds through the end of the conference tournament. She was a magnet to the ball and there was no one who could get in her way.
That game started a heck of a stretch for the team, too, taking care of business against Wichita State, Cincinnati and UCF to set up High Noon in the AAC. 6 p.m. on a Wednesday night in Minges Coliseum. ECU. Houston. For outright second in the conference.
It was the game of the year on the billing. It lived up to it on the court.
The recap of the game at the time began: "It was like it was scripted..." It really was. It was just an incredible college basketball game. Highlight reel play after highlight reel play. Back and forth. Micah put up 12 assists, ninth most in program history (oh, and she played all 55 minutes in the game). It was spectacular.
The Pirates should have lost that game.
•••
Remember, if you please, the SMU game. So close, but the Pirates came up short. Against Houston, the Pirates trailed by 12 with under six minutes left and by nine with under three minutes left. As I said, the game should have been over. It was not.
It started with a Synia Johnson bucket with 2:37 left. Then a stop, then a MyMy basket, a second chance look off of an Iycez Adams board – Iycez was awesome in this game, by the way, piling up a career-high 10 rebounds before fouling out.
Then Synia stole the ball, then scored again. Three-point game.
Then another stop, another offensive rebound, and a bucket for Iycez. One-point game.
Then a missed free throw gave the Pirates a chance. On the attack Danae drew a foul. She sank them both (she had, at one point on the season, hit 36 consecutive free throws). Tie game. The Pirates had come back from the dead.
A pair of missed opportunities later and the game went to OT.
Then the Pirates got down by five again. Then Danae hit some free throws, then a bucket, then finished a remarkable and-one bucket. Two-point lead for the Pirates. It was destiny, it was incredible. Well, no. Houston tied it at the death. 2OT in Minges.
The second overtime was a bit less eventful. A traditional back-and-forth extra period that led to another.
It was a shame that someone had to lose the game – but they did, such is the nature of sport. After 55 minutes someone had to run out of gas and Houston did first. The Pirates ended up hitting six free throws in that final OT period to ice the game. They had sole possession of second in the conference with a game remaining and a signature win to boot – the second longest game in program history.
"That's when I'm the most proud of this team down the stretch, because we were in so many situations we had never been in…" said Coach Kim. "You've got to win that game to even put yourself in a situation to be able to finish second – we've never been in that spot. And even leading up to that, the Central Florida game, the Cincinnati game, the Wichita State game – to be able to come back in those situations, I the perseverance of this team is what I'm so proud of because we were just in so many first situations that we handled very well."
Houston played a great game, too. They were a really good team. It wasn't a bold prediction to say the teams might meet again before the season ended. Fate would make it so.
An Emotional Fatigue
After the electric win over Houston in Minges, the Pirates went on the road to Tulane to close out the regular season. A win meant that ECU would clinch second in the AAC. Second in a season in which the Pirates had been picked 11th.
Just one win, against a team that they'd already beat. It seemed simple enough.
Then again, after a long travel day, two days after a three-overtime game and on your opponent's senior night. That's not an easy win – that's an impossible win.
The Pirates were tired, and they looked it. They couldn't buy a basket – how could they? They had no legs. You need legs to score, to play defense, to get out in transition. It was a tough ask.
The team did draw within five in the fourth quarter, but Tulane hit the triple that every other team had missed, and the Pirates ran out of steam. Maybe it was all physical fatigue, but after the high of the Houston game and the expectation of finishing second in the league, it seems unlikely.
Memphis beat SMU on a buzzer beater a day later and the Pirates finished third. Third after being picked 11th. It was a heck of an accomplishment, but still, it was hard for the players not to feel disappointed – but make no mistake, the team was also hungry. They wanted another crack at Tulane. They wanted to compete, and after a short break to rest up, they wouldn't have to wait long to do it.
"After playing a triple overtime game, tough travel senior night for them," said Coach Kim. "And you know, it didn't come out the way we wanted it. To come out, but maybe we needed to lose that game in order to win a championship. Maybe we needed that loss at that time."
In 2021-22 the East Carolina women's basketball team lost to Memphis in the regular season finale, then played them again, and lost again, in the AAC Tournament. The Pirates had lost to Tulane and by virtue of their three seed and Tulane winning their tournament opener, history was threatening to repeat for those upstarts out of Greenville.
The eyes of history were upon them, lest the forces of fate be with them. 20-9 and 11-5 in the regular season were historic marks, but it was Tournament Time. 0-0. A new season was upon us.
###
NOTE: This story is the second part of a three-part feature recapping the 2022-23 ECU Women's Basketball season. Part three will be released on May 24.
Players Mentioned
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/ Women's BasketballECU Head Women's Basketball Coach Kim McNeill Media Day (Oct. 20, 2023)
Friday, October 20
3/14/23 Kim McNeill Presser
Tuesday, March 14
EPISODE 5 - Kim McNeill Podcast 3-1-22
Tuesday, March 01
ECU Senior Day 2022
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