How St. Joe’s women’s basketball was rebuilt by its 2021 recruiting class

Following a loss, and with just two days to prepare for the next opponent, it’s abnormal for Cindy Griffin to give her team the day off.

But after St. Joseph’s dropped just its third Atlantic 10 game last Wednesday at home against Fordham, a team the Hawks are supposed to beat, Griffin thought it was time for a reset. The final game of what had been a historic regular season on Hawk Hill was Saturday at Duquesne, and Griffin thought her team would be best served by taking a day during midterms week and coming back fresh on Friday.

The team’s captains, Talya Brugler and Laura Ziegler, thought otherwise. So the next day, the Hawks came back to Hagan Arena and spent some time together. They did yoga, meditated, and put some shots up.

St. Joe’s bounced back Saturday with a 77-73 win, and the Hawks head to this weekend’s A-10 basketball tournament as the No. 3 seed. Saturday’s victory tied the program record for most wins in a season. St. Joe’s is 26-4, yet likely won’t make the NCAA Tournament unless it cuts down the nets Sunday night in Henrico County, Va., just north of Richmond.

The Hawks have been teetering on the tournament bubble for weeks, but the loss to Fordham, on the heels of a loss a week earlier vs. second-seeded VCU, all but ended their at-large chances. The timing, Griffin said, wasn’t great. If the Hawks were going to learn a lesson, she wished it came earlier.

“I think there’s good that came out of it, but more damage because of how fragile the NCAA Tournament is and just giving the experts, if you will, a reason not to put us in,” Griffin said. “That’s where you have frustration as a coach because you know that these games do happen during a season, but the timing of it just really stunk.”

It is remarkable that the possibility of cutting the nets down — and it’s a real one — even exists. Just four years ago, the Hawks were 3-13 in the A-10, and 5-9 the next season. But the 2021 recruiting class, led by Brugler, Julia Nyström, and Mackenzie Smith, righted the ship.

Griffin, in her 23rd season leading the program, doesn’t think the class necessarily saved her job. She wasn’t waking up some mornings in 2020 wondering if she would get the dreaded phone call relieving her of her duties. But she also knew things needed to change quickly.

“I always thought, being a resilient person, the better years were ahead of us,” Griffin said. “Sometimes you cycle in and you cycle out based on classes, recruiting, injuries, and all that stuff. We knew that we obviously needed a really good recruiting class coming in, and we got that with the ’21 class.”

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The 2021-22 season wasn’t going all that well early on. So Griffin made a choice that would eventually pay off down the road.

She put her freshman class on the court a whole lot more. Brugler, Nyström, Smith, and Laila Fair — who later transferred — would sometimes all be on the court together, making mistakes, learning on the fly.

When did Griffin know a 15-3 conference record was possible with this group? It was in those moments.

“The middle of their freshman year, when I got smart and started to play them instead of waiting their turn,” Griffin said. “It wasn’t working that way. Throw them out there, throw them to the wolves, if you will, and see how they respond.”

Said Smith: “I do remember her at one point being like, ‘All right, just go.’ You’re at a point in your freshman year where you really don’t know a lot of what’s happening.”

It wasn’t all that pretty at times, Brugler said. There were growing pains. Sometimes the Hawks didn’t know the plays down to each movement, and sometimes the game was a little too fast for them.

This was a change in Griffin’s style.

“You don’t want to put the pressure on them right away,” she said.

The proof of its success was, in part, announced this week, when Brugler and Smith were named second-team All-Atlantic 10. Brugler leads the team in scoring at 16 points per game. Ziegler, a sophomore, got first-team honors after posting averages of 14.7 points and 9.8 rebounds in 27 games. Smith is fourth in the conference in three-point percentage (43.6%).

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It wasn’t just a new crop of talented freshmen who arrived at Hagan Arena ahead of the 2021-22 season. Griffin also decided to bring in a culture coach at the suggestion of athletic director Jill Bodensteiner, who said the coach, Pam Herath, was working with the softball team and it seemed to be having a positive impact.

“I was like, ‘I’m open for anything, because we need to turn this thing back around,’ ” Griffin said.

“I think sometimes when you’re doing this for so long, you’re just, like, X’s and O’s, X’s and O’s. That doesn’t matter if you don’t have the right people on the bus and don’t have the culture.

“The bigger picture is how you do things. And I just assumed everybody knew what ‘The Hawk Will Never Die’ meant.”

Herath holds about five sessions during the season with the Hawks, sometimes in-person and sometimes over Zoom. They talk about team culture, identity, and what the Hawks want their values to look and sound like.

They have settled on two major core values: being selfless and relentless.

“Everybody is very bought in to what our values are as a team and displaying them every day at practice and living through those core values that we have,” Brugler said.

Griffin gets a reminder of that some Sundays. The deacon at her church once commented on Griffin’s team and said: “It looks like they really love each other.”

It’s a close group that plays together, and the culture work has helped make sure there’s no pushback when, say, the captains want the team to come back in the day after a loss when the coach has given it the day off.

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The Hawks begin their run at an A-10 title Friday night in the quarterfinals. They are just three wins away from getting back to the NCAA Tournament for the first time since 2014, when Griffin was finishing off consecutive trips to the dance.

“It would be tremendous. I want it for the players,” Griffin said. “I think it’s just something they need to experience, especially because we’re still young in so many ways. They deserve it. I want them to taste that, feel that, experience that, being in the dance, one of 68, and having the experience.”

Still, so much is out of their control. They could set a new program record Friday and reach the semifinals and then have a bad shooting day and lose Saturday, a trip to the WNIT up next, and a long wait until another shot at reaching the real one.

“You’d be silly to say that it hasn’t been a success,” Griffin said. But ... “We want more,” Smith said. “We really want that championship.”

“If we come up short, is it a failure? Absolutely not,” Griffin said. “I know the kids would feel that way, but I think in the back of their minds, they know who they are and what they’re about, and one game is not going to define who we are.”

It won’t because it can’t.

“We changed the brand of St. Joseph’s basketball and this is what it is. This is what it should be,” Brugler said. “We left a legacy this season, and we still are currently leaving that legacy.”