Benedict basketball has a history of success. The Tigers want more

The rafters of Benedict College’s HRC Arena are heavy with athletic championship banners.

“We’re still missing a couple of banners, probably like six of them that need to be up there,” women’s basketball head coach James Rice said. “But that’s the goal, to win those championships.”

Rice has a lot of personal history over 27 years woven into those Benedict banners. For him and the Tigers, there’s room for more history to be made.

“A lot of teams just want to win a [conference] tournament championship,” Rice said. “Our goal every year is to win a national championship. We won the tournament a whole lot of times. We’ve been there. We want to do something different.”

As head coach of the Benedict women since 2012, Rice’s teams added Southern Intercollegiate Athletic Conference tournament banners to those rafters in 2014, 2016 and again in 2017.

He was a point guard for coach Willie Washington in the 1990s and a four-year player for the Tigers’ four Eastern Intercollegiate Athletic Conference regular-season championships when Benedict was in the NAIA. He later served as a student assistant for Washington.

As an assistant for Fred Watson when Benedict moved up to the SIAC, he was part of a team that made NCAA Division II tournament appearances in 2004 and in 2006 and 2007. He played a role, as a women’s assistant to Felicia Jenkins, in the Tigers winning SIAC tournament titles in 2007 and 2010.

This season Rice’s Tigers — 24-3 overall and ranked No. 15 nationally — are openly gunning to add to their four NCAA Division II tournament appearance banners.

Benedict had an unexpected first-round exit from the SIAC tournament after a 23-win season last year. The women are fired up not to repeat that outcome in this week’s conference tournament in Rock Hill.

“It hurt. It hurt a lot,” junior forward Ay’Anna Bey said. “Doing so well in the regular season, you expect to do well in the playoff times, so when we lost in the first round, it hurt. It came from a lot of inexperience. We were really young last year. This year we have a lot of veterans on the team. We have more knowledge.”

Bey, from Blackwood, New Jersey, averages 16.8 points and 9.5 rebounds per game to lead the team.

Sophomore point guard Wykira Johnson-Kelly, from Camden, New Jersey, is the next scoring leader with 13.8 points per game. She and sophomore Glory Morton were teammates at Camden’s Delsea High School.

Kelly said the final game of the 2018-19 season was pivotal in her growth from incoming freshman to starting sophomore.

“I feel like we didn’t have control of the game from the beginning, and that was our fault,” she said. “In a lot of games we feel like we can just show up, and that game taught us that we can’t.”

The team, which has no seniors on the roster after the only one left earlier this season, is poised to be both young and experienced. The Tigers took two early season losses, one to Newberry and then to Miles College in the SIAC opener.

After the one-point defeat to the Bears Nov. 30, Benedict reeled off a 15-game winning streak before falling 63-60 at Fort Valley Sate Feb. 8. The Tigers (24-3, 15-2 SIAC) have won four straight games going into the conference tournament.

Benedict needs to win the SIAC tournament or receive an at-large bid from the NCAA to make the 64-team Division II tournament that begins March 13.

“Last year was a big disappointment for us. We felt like we worked super hard for that moment and we just couldn’t finish.,” junior guard Ayanna Armistead said about her team’s drive this year.

The Coral Springs, Florida native who averages 9.9 points and 4.2 boards per game added that this year has a different feel. Along with the usual work comes a tempered determination that understands failure.

“We feel good. We’ve been working hard, 4 a.m. practices ,5 a.m. practices,” she said. “We’ve been working hard to get where we’re trying to go.”

Rice said he’s seen a change in work ethic this season, even while he posits that this year’s team is actually younger than last year’s.

“The majority of them got better, but we got younger,” he said. “I’m hoping that the experience that those young ladies went through last year can help these other young ladies that came behind them.”

Rice described how the game changes between regular season and postseason: “When they came back this year, they know right now that this is the regular season, this is the steps toward the tournament so we can get better. Well, they’ve gotten better.”

In a long season, he said, it’s important to keep players motivated going into each game, even though the team is bought in on working toward a national title.

For Bey and the rest of the Tigers, the motivation to win is second nature — Benedict outscores its opponents by an average of 75 to 57.5.

“We know what our goal is, we’re all on the same page,” Bey said. “We all want to accomplish one thing and that’s the championship.”

Whether she was referencing the SIAC championship or the NCAA Division II championship may be in question, but not to coach Rice. His team might work in the shadows of championship teams on larger stages, but it doesn’t diminish what his Tigers have accomplished and might be ahead.

“We don’t get a lot of news, but that’s OK,” Rice said. “That’s another thing that I think we’re going to have to handle is dealing with success. News people are going to come around and we’ve got to learn to handle success.”