CIAA women’s hoops tournament is playing just fine at 50

CIAA

The CIAA women's basketball tournament has generated its share of excitement and drama over its first 49 years. The 50th tournament is in Baltimore.

The CIAA is celebrating 50 years of its women’s basketball tournament in Baltimore this month.

First things first: I was NOT at that first tournament or the second or the … my first tournament was in 1999 – the last year the weeklong event was in Winston-Salem before moving to Raleigh.

Bowie State women were queens of the conference. The Bulldogs won their third straight championship that year and were looking to set a new women’s tournament record with four consecutive titles in 2000.

How good was the program? They played AFTER the men, not before. The women, coached by Ed Davis Jr., who’s now at Morgan State, oozed such confidence they’d walk into a gymnasium 10 points ahead before the game even started.

Nobody, and I mean N-O-B-O-D-Y, thought Bowie would be dethroned, and certainly not by a bottom-seeded team with a losing record. But the beauty of any tournament is how a team can get on a roll and not be stopped. Livingstone, coached by Andrew Mitchell, was supposed to just hand over the trophy to Bowie – instead the Blue Bears took it from the Bulldogs – in a thriller that went down to the wire.

Truth be told, the women’s tournament has produced more excitement, upsets and thrillers – at least during my 26 years.

After the Blue Bears’ upset, Fayetteville State followed suit. Instead of big, bad Bowie, it was a North Carolina Central team led by a superstar center named Amba Kongolo.

The Eagles set several program records during the 2001 season under coach Joli Robinson, and all that was left was a CIAA championship. Again, Fayetteville State was not supposed to be in the title game, so NCCU just needed to show up and collect its trophy.

But, in the words of then-FSU coach Eric Tucker, it’s not where you start but where you finish. The Broncos finished atop the championship podium before a shocked predominately NCCU crowd at the RBC Center.
Kongolo never won a CIAA championship, but she was the first – and still the only – CIAA women’s player to be drafted by a WNBA team.

After Virginia State’s title in 2002, the tournament turned into the Shaw Invitational. Coach Jacques Curtis revitalized the program from a laughingstock into one of the most dominant and feared in conference history.
Instead of Bowie, Shaw set the women’s tournament record with four straight titles – many against Johnson C. Smith – was dethroned by NCCU in 2007, won it again in 2008, and then another four straight from 2011-14. Nine championships in 12 seasons.

But the granddaddy, or rather the grandmother of them all was a 2012 NCAA Division II national championship. Shaw was the Duke of the CIAA. You either loved the Bears or hated them; there was no middle ground, largely due to Curtis’ massive ego.

Virginia State snapped the Bears’ streak in 2015, led by who? Former Shaw women’s assistant coach James Hill.

Virginia Union, under coach AnnMarie Gilbert, won three of the next four championships and looked to be a dynasty in the making. But Gilbert decided to take her talents elsewhere. That didn’t turn out well.
Regardless, as Aretha Franklin sang, “Sisters are doing it for themselves.” The CIAA women’s tournament has more than held its own against the men.

Here’s to another 50!

Bonitta Best is sports editor at The Triangle Tribune in Durham.

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