Young Queen Bees Are Cinderellas of (Basket) Ball
Posted: March 19, 2008
Imagine a women’s college basketball team with three first-year students, a sophomore and a junior as starters. Then give them a new coach fresh from West Texas to lead them. That’s not typically a recipe for a storybook ending, but for the St. Ambrose Queen Bees, who ended their 29-6 overall season as conference champions and making it all the way to the NAIA Sweet Sixteen, it’s been as close to a Cinderella story as you could get.
This inexperienced team had all odds stacked against them. What people keeping an eye on the Queen Bees didn’t figure was that these young women and Coach Nate Altenhofen, the NJCAA Division I National Coach of the Year in 2007, actually were a perfect fit for each other.
“Any first-year coach will try to establish a foundation of what you are trying to accomplish,” Coach Nate said just a few days home from the NAIA tournament. “But we had a young, eager team who had a quick response to my coaching style.”
Of course, his style is to urge his team to play a fast game with the work ethic of a Clydesdale horse and the mental toughness of a chess player.
Leadership and Talent
They were also blessed with natural leadership and talent in freshman Ali Dolphin and sophomore Jenny Clark.
“Jenny and Ali were extremely competitive and mentally strong,” Coach Nate says, “and they could handle the mental intensity. The result was their teammates following their lead and also becoming intense players.”
The kind of game the Queen Bees intended to play and how they actually performed on the court shows in the statistics. In the Midwest Collegiate Conference, the Queen Bees were the top team in averaged offensive points (73.9), points allowed per game (52), and the points margin between them (21.9). Having both the top-ranked offensive and defensive scoring spots have made the women’s team a double threat, because not only do they make a lot of baskets, but they keep opponents away from the hoop as well.
The team also forced an average of 27 turnovers per game – the second-highest in the NAIA.
“This may be the best defense St. Ambrose has ever had,” Coach says.
Once they got the taste of victory and the joy of thoroughly beating other teams with double-digit point differences, the Queen Bees realized their potential of being the “team to beat.” But what was this incredible season like for the players, whose greatest adversary was often themselves?
“I think they were just hoping to have an enjoyable experience,” Coach Nate says. “But once they realized they were good it was fun to see how much better they could get.”
Paired with their conference records, the 2007-08 team also broke St. Ambrose records for the number of three-pointers made in a single season—297—and in a single game, at 18. The previous records were 255 and 12, respectively.
Breaking those records was a feather in everyone’s crown… er, cap, but Coach Nate says his favorite moments of the season were winning the MCC title and the first game of the national tourney, which hasn’t been done by a Queen Bees basketball team in eight years.
“Those wins made all that hard work pay off,” he says.