‘March Madness is back.’ Members of Eastern Washington’s 1987 NCAA breakthrough team proudly root for the current Eagles
Thirty-seven years have passed since the 3-point shot was adopted in NCAA Division I women’s basketball.
And that’s exactly how long Eastern Washington University has been chasing its second NCAA Tournament berth.
That drought ended last week when the Eagles beat Northern Arizona 73-64 to win the Big Sky title in Boise, and secure the conference’s automatic bid.
“It’s so awesome,” former player Sonya Gaubinger-Elliott said of this year’s breakthrough. “It was fun to see them make it again. March Madness is back.”
A 1985 graduate of University High School, Gaubinger-Elliott knows just how special the NCAA Tournament can be. In her day, the tournament was 40 teams and Eastern was a member of the Mountain West Athletic Conference, which would merge with the Big Sky Conference in the fall of 1987.
“I’m thrilled they are getting the opportunity,” she said. “When it happened for us, it was obviously amazing and super cool. But I don’t think we ever realized how lucky we were.”
“It’s outstanding and a great accomplishment,” said EWU Hall of Fame head coach Bill Smithpeters, who spent 18 seasons from 1977 to 1994 at Eastern. “A lot of times people don’t understand how hard it is to get there.”
Dave Spencer was a freshman student manager at EWU that season, during which he subsequently started a public announcing career now approaching a fourth decade in Cheney. His experiences came full circle for him last week in Boise where he watched the latest Eagle team cut down the nets.
“For a 19-year-old freshman, it was like, ‘Wow, does this happen every year?’ ” he asked himself. “Obviously it doesn’t – it took another 37 years to get back there.”
Peaking at the right time
Eastern secured its first NCAA berth – thanks in part to the conference’s adoption of an experimental 3-point line that season – with a monumental win in Missoula in 1987.
The team finished the year 18-12 and was 8-4 in league play. But the Eagles came on strong late, knocking off second-seeded Weber State 71-65 in the conference tournament semifinals, then registering an epic upset of Montana 77-74, burying six 3-pointers, a rarity in those days.
“As a team we came together at the right time,” said Gaubinger-Elliott, who was a junior at the time. “And that’s what you need to do.”
The Griz had won 78 of their last 79 games at home entering that contest, and nearly 2,000 fans were in the crowd that night.
“Even back then as a freshman, that was my first taste of knowing that these two schools do not like each other,” Spencer said, laughing. “It became obvious to me right away that this was a big rivalry for those two schools.”
Seeded seventh and riding a 10-game winning streak heading to the NCAAs, EWU went on to lose to 10th-seeded Oregon 75-56 on March 11, 1987, in Eugene, Oregon, That was just the sixth women’s version of the Big Dance, and Gaubinger-Elliott has seen it grow ever since.
“We were at the very beginning of teams having those opportunities,” she said. “It’s just amazing to see the growth of the whole experience. And now to see them back in it is such a thrill. I’m excited for them.”
‘A team of destiny’
Eastern had been to the Association of Intercollegiate Athletics for Women (AIAW) National Tournament in both 1978 and 1979 under Smithpeters. In 1981-82 the NCAA took over as the governing body and hosted its first national tournament, and Eastern stepped up and went for a wild ride as the Mountain West, with offices in Eastern’s hometown of Cheney, received an automatic bid when the league began in the 1982-83 school year.
“We had to compete at a high level,” said Smithpeters, now 93 and still residing in Spokane with his 90-year-old wife, Georgialee. “It was a nice accomplishment for us to be able to be the first Eastern team to get into the Division I postseason. And now here is a second one, but it took 37 years to get back.”
It didn’t look promising to start the 1986-87 season. Coming off a conference title loss to Montana the season before, EWU lost its first five games. The team rallied a bit, and EWU sat 4-4 in conference play after a 16-point regular-season loss in Missoula.
“In my four years there, it was not our best team. But it was a team of destiny,” said Kris Karnes-Allan, a senior backup guard who would later receive the team’s most inspirational award. “We had our ups and downs that year – like a lot of them. But heading into the tournament, I was saying, ‘We’re going to win this, we’re going to win this.’ I don’t know what it was, but I felt like we were going to be champions.”
In the conference championship, Eastern was down 14 at halftime to Montana and behind by 12 with 11:42 left in the game. But over the course of the next nine minutes, Eastern outscored the Griz 26-9 to take a seven-point lead. The Eagles sank 7-of-10 free throws in the final 1:34 to clinch the win and snap Montana’s 17-game winning streak overall and 34-game streak at home.
“I remember our comeback was furious and fast,” said Karnes-Allan. “The fact we overcame so much to get to the Big Dance was a big deal. On paper we shouldn’t have even played the game.”
Montana finished the season with the nation’s fourth-best scoring defense , but the Eagles riddled them for 49 second-half points on 71% shooting from the field.
“I remember looking at the sidelines and Montana was in shock that we actually beat them,” Gaubinger-Elliott said. “They had always come out on top at the tournament. We started to really work together at the end of that year. It was great to be able to come together and play like that.”
Shock may have been an understatement. The Griz have won 86 % of their home games all-time. Smithpeters was 2-19 all-time in Missoula, and ended his career with a 10-game losing streak at Dahlberg Arena.
“They would pack Dahlberg, and at the time for women’s basketball, it was a big, big deal,” said Karnes-Allan of the arena, which has had 12 women’s basketball crowds there in excess of 7,000. “There was always this super healthy rivalry between Eastern and Montana, at least during those days.
“Those were the days when winning at Montana was pretty rare,” the graduate of Bonners Ferry High School said. “We had a great semifinal and then we wound up beating them.”
In the semifinal win over Weber State, Karnes-Allan took a late charge that secured an EWU victory in a game highlighted by Brenda Souther’s 37-point outburst. “It was a pretty gutsy move for me to take a charge, because that call can go either way. Thankfully it went the way it needed to go.”
Souther, a four-time All-Big Sky player and a member of EWU’s Hall of Fame, was named tournament MVP after contributing 24 points and 11 rebounds in the title game against the Grizzlies. Lisa Danner scored 21. They combined for a dominating 18-of-24 shooting performance inside the paint.
“We were always battling it out with Montana,” Gaubinger-Elliott said. “To win that one year and move on was so amazing.”
Riding the 3 to the end
Eastern’s six 3-pointers, including four by Susan Smith and two more by Roj Johal, were instrumental against the Griz. But the 3-point shot was only used on an experimental basis in the 1986-87 season. It wasn’t used in the NCAA Tournament that year.
Against Oregon, Smith made 10-of-15 shots from the field – most from long range. But without a 3-point stripe, the Eagles didn’t get to reap the benefits of their inside-out strategy.
“Susan Smith was a 3-point sharpshooter,” Spencer said. “It seemed like she never missed.”
“Susan was one of our excellent 3-point shooters,” Smithpeters said of the effect the 3-point restriction had in the Oregon game. “That really cut down on our ability to generate scoring in another way.”
Oregon rewind and EWU today
Gaubinger-Elliott and Karnes-Allan both live in the Seattle area now, and see each other regularly. They’ve even returned to Spokane to play in Hoopfest together, and several years ago they unearthed a videotape of the Oregon game.
“In those old VHS videos, you could barely see the people on the court – they were like little ants,” Gaubinger-Elliott recalled. “But I thought we did better than I remember. In the end the score wasn’t good, but we gave them a run for a while. Just getting to go to the NCAA Tournament was cool.”
Her husband, Jason Elliott, was a football player at Eastern and was a part of the first Eagle team to advance to the then-Division I-AA playoffs (now FCS) in 1985. Karnes-Allan married Andy Allan, who was also a member of that football squad. Both of those championship teams have been inducted into the Eastern Athletics Hall of Fame.
“I feel very lucky to have played on great teams at Eastern, and Jason does as well,” she said. “It was amazing there.”
Gaubinger-Elliott‘s connection to this year’s EWU team runs fairly deep. She was a Spokane Stars teammate of Yvette Reeves, who played at Lewis and Clark High School. She is now Yvette Reeves-Buckley, and her daughter, Jacinta – who also played at LC – scored 20 points and had 11 rebounds in Eastern’s Big Sky championship game victory.
The connections are not lost on Smithpeters, who has admired the work of coach Joddie Gleason from afar.
“Joddie Gleason at Eastern has really worked hard at it and accomplished what she set out to do,” Smithpeters said. “A lot of times things just don’t fall into place, and you always don’t get what you want or deserve out of a season. Like us, they had a really good year and have brought in some really, really good players.”
“I’m super excited for the gals to be there,” added Karnes-Allan. “Records and winning happen, and they are meant to be broken. It’s so good to see Eastern back in the tournament.”
Especially after 37 years.