Right on time: Success for QU women’s basketball time comes at the exact minute Boyd said it would

ST. CHARLES, Mo. — As the Quincy University women’s basketball players began to pull on their championship T-shirts on the Hyland Arena court after Sunday’s 64-60 victory over Maryville in the title game of the Great Lakes Valley Conference Tournament, reserve guard Sydney Runsewe looked at Hawks coach Courtney Boyd and asked, “What time is it?”

Boyd smiled, then looked into the crowd for the answer because she wasn’t wearing a watch.

The answer? 5:38 p.m.

Boyd looked at her team with a big grin, and the Hawks mobbed their coach.

Her prognostication from last week proved to be correct … exactly.

“All I can say is, cut the nets down,” senior Cymirah Williams said. “I wish I could show you my itinerary. (Boyd) even wrote 5:38 on the board (in the locker room).”

Before the team left Quincy for St. Charles last week, Boyd passed out daily plans for their four-day stay. At the end of Sunday’s itinerary, the coach had written, “5:38. Cut the nets down.”

It was that kind of confidence in an unlikely champion, which lost 18 of 28 games a year ago, that made Sunday’s championship taste that much sweeter.

“It was 5:38 when they pulled the ladder out (to cut down the net). That’s what our goal was,” Boyd said. “Our goal was not just to show up and be participants. Our goal was to push through. We were down at half every single game, and we just continued to grind.”

Boyd also thought her team grinded during her first season as coach last year, but the results weren’t as positive. Eleven of her team’s 18 losses were by less than 10 points.

“I think the biggest thing for this group, and what got us here, was them believing after year one and going into year two how close we were in every single game last year,” she said.

For Williams and fellow senior Janiece Dawson, the journey was even more difficult. Those two, along with Runsewe and junior Chomp Danso, joined a program for the 2022-23 season that had stumbled through six consecutive seasons of single-digit victories. After Kaci Bailey left to coach at Drury following a 13-victory season, those four were forced to adapt to a new coach, too.

Now, the Hawks are back to a level they haven’t been since 2016.

“We came a long way,” Dawson said. “The people who have stayed with us, now we’re champions. We stayed, we trusted the process, and we believed in one each other. Whoever came in, we took them in as family. And look where we are now.”

“I came to an environment where I was by myself,” Williams said. “I left my (junior college) environment, where I had everybody I knew from high school (in Oklahoma City). Coming here, I had to learn how to find myself and figure out who Cymirah is. I made new friends, lifelong friends.

“Then (Bailey) ended up leaving, and that’s OK. I never stopped trusting. The one thing about Coach Boyd is she looked at us as people and players, not players and people. That’s the difference. We all need people to care about us. We’ve got to do what we’ve got to do when we get here, but at the same time, this is a family. This is not a business. Everybody on this team is family.”

Success came a little faster during Boyd’s most recent coaching position at Clarke (Iowa). The Pride won at least 20 games in each of her six seasons, winning an NAIA national title in 2022-23.

“But it started when it took us two years to win the conference championship at Clarke,” Boyd said. “This team just wanted it. This team believed they had the ability to do it, and we had to take pieces and turn it into a team. When we turned them into a team, there was nobody that was going through us.”

This year’s team returned the top seven scorers from last year’s team, and Boyd added two graduate students — Nicole McDermott and Taylor Haase — from Clarke’s title team to this roster. However, QU was only picked to finish seventh in this season’s preseason poll.

“No one expected us to win our conference. No one expected us to be here right now,” McDermott said. “No one expected us to be cutting down the nets. Coach brought me in. She trusted what I could do here, and that gave me some confidence. My teammates trusted me too, and we just believe in each other.”

“It wasn’t hard to convince them,” Boyd said of this year’s team. “They all have a little chip on their shoulder. They’re a little bit more confident than any team I’ve ever had, so I have to figure out how to match that. Sometimes I can be humble to a fault, and sometimes they’re a little bit too confident for my liking. So we’ve met in the middle, and that’s what got us here.”

Right on time.