By Bob Allen
In just their second season after moving up to the National Collegiate Athletic Association, the California Baptist University women’s basketball Lancers were Cinderella in this year’s NCAA Division II championship tournament.
Unranked going into the tournament and their region’s No. 5 seed, Cal Baptist rolled off five straight wins by an average of 17.0 points per game. Along the way they ended the nation’s longest winning streak at 33 games, downing Limestone College 85-67, before heading into Friday’s national championship game against California University of Pennsylvania, a No. 1 seed ranked 14th in the country that previously won the national championship in 2004.
The Lancers jumped out to a 12-5 lead in the first four minutes, before California went on a 21-0 run to lead 48-28 at halftime. In the second half Cal Baptist cut the lead to as close as eight before California pulled away, winning by a score of 86-69.
“I think they were maybe a little nervous to start the game,” CBU coach Jarrod Olson told NCAA.com after the game. “We came out pretty fast and we made a run. Then they made a run, and we didn’t do a very good job of responding to it. I think some of our inexperience really showed. We tried some different things, but we just couldn’t quite find the combination to stop it.”
Cal Baptist finished the season at 29-7. During the season the team was led by sophomore guard Courtney Nelson’s 15.4 points per game, but in tourney play their biggest weapon was Darsha Burnside, a 6-foot-6 junior center who averaged 22 points and 17 rebounds per game in CBU’s wins in the Elite Eight and semifinals.
California Baptist competed in the National Association of Intercollegiate Athletics, a 22-conference association that organizes college and university athletic programs for smaller schools. The Lancers applied to join the NCAA Division II in 2010, starting with a candidacy membership that led to becoming full-fledged NCAA Division II members in 2013-14.
The NCAA is set up in three divisions. Division I schools typically are larger, with an average enrollment of about 13,000, and devote more financial resources to support their athletics programs, attracting large media contracts to showcase popular sports like football and men’s basketball.
Division III is for smaller schools enrolling an average of 2,600 that do not offer athletic scholarships. Division II can offer athletic scholarships. Enrollments at Division II schools range 2,500 to more than 25,000, but nearly 90 percent have fewer than 8,000 students.
Division II institutions typically don’t have the financial resources to devote to their athletics programs as heavily as those in Division I. Division II offers a “partial-scholarship” model for financial aid, where student-athletes attend college funded through a mix of athletics scholarships, academic aid, need-based grants and/or employment earnings.
Founded in 1950 by the California Southern Baptist Convention, Cal Baptist reported a fall 2014 enrollment of 7,957 students.
Fans unable to travel to the tournament finals in Sioux Falls, S.D., watched the final games on CBS Sports Network.
“It’s big for the school,” freshman Aidan Apodaca told the Riverside Press-Enterprise at a viewing party at the Community Life Lounge on campus. “We’re such a small school. To be represented on a national level is pretty awesome.”
At a previous gathering to watch the semi-final, religion professor Amy Stumpf told the newspaper that many of the players are in her classes, and she is impressed that they’re taking full class loads, as well as training, practicing and playing games.
“I enjoy it because I know these ladies and I know how hard they work,” she said.