Cal Poly head coach Faith Mimnaugh seemed to join her team in a defensive stance during every possession on Saturday. by Owen Main

On every glance at the Cal Poly bench, coach Faith Mimnaugh was either giving an order to her team, pumping her fist, or in what looked like a defensive stance.

When the final horn sounded Saturday afternoon at the Honda Center, Mimnaugh’s intensity turned to tears and smiles after the Mustangs came out on top of Pacific 63-49 to win the Big West Tournament Championship.

The game was one that Pacific, the regular season champs, could never quite get their arms around. Each time it looked like they had Cal Poly on their heels, the Mustangs got a bucket. Just when it seemed a Cal Poly player was trapped, the double-team would be split, or the Cal Poly player would draw a foul. It was a matter of one team matching the other’s aggression and welcoming the physicality that was sure to come.

Pacific played as hard as they could, generally kept the ball out of Molly Schlemer’s hands, and executed a good game plan. In the the final analysis, though things just didn’t go their way (the same can be said of the Cal Poly men’s team, who lost to Pacific the previous night in the tournament semifinal). Instead, in her 16th season at the helm for Cal Poly, Mimnaugh got her first Big West tournament title. Next week, Cal Poly will go to its first NCAA Tournament since the program moved to Division I.

Mimnaugh reflected after the game on what it took to get the Mustangs to this place. When she started, the coaching staff included just her and one other volunteer coach who also had a job as a sorority house mother to help pay the bills.

“To go from [a] place, where we were two people running this thing, to build the program to this level, it’s just, it’s a lot of work. More than I thought it’d take,” said Mimnaugh after the game. “I think when you’ve been doing it as long as I have and you keep dreaming and you keep pushing and kind of wondering if it was ever going to happen, that’s where the real satisfaction comes in for me.”

Molly Schelemer lets out a Shaq-like scream of joy after a basket late in the Big West Championship game. Schlemer averaged 16.5 points and 12.5 rebounds per game in the tournament. By Owen Main

To get to the game Mimnaugh’s team beat UCSB in the semifinals on Friday afternoon, setting-up a rematch with Pacific. UCSB did all they could to challenge the inside presence of Molly Schlemer, but couldn’t find an answer as Schlemer, the Big West Player of the Year, scored 26 points and grabbed 9 rebounds.

In the championship game, Schlemer’s presence continued to be felt. Double and triple-teamed from the beginning, Schlemer managed only 7 points in the final but managed to gather 16 rebounds, crucial after senior Kayla Griffin went down with a season — and career — ending injury.

While Pacific shut-down Schlemer’s offense, Ariana Elegado made the Tigers pay, scoring 22 points including three 3-pointers. Seniors Caroline Reeves and Nikol Allison stepped in and each scored 10 points as Pacific dared Cal Poly to beat them with someone other than Schlemer or the injured Griffin.

Cal Poly’s defense, a much-improved part of their game this season, held Pacific to 20-61 shooting in the game (32.8%).

Last year was supposed to be the year for Cal Poly. The tournament draw seemed just right, Kristina Santiago was healthy, and all signs pointed to Cal Poly as the tournament favorite. Instead, they didn’t even make the finals, bounced in their first game by an intrepid Long Beach State squad. The loss seemed crushing for a team that was losing a player who was clearly the best in the Big West.

Seniors Nikol Allison (13) and Caroline Reeves (22) had big contributions in Cal Poly’s first-ever Big West Tournament Championship. By Owen Main

Enter this year’s less-heralded bunch. Last season guard Jonae Ervin led the country in Assist-Turnover Ratio, but she was injured coming into the season and there were a fair number of questions marks. Ervin eventually made it back and those question marks were answered by break-out performances.

This year’s team has played better defense and has had break-out performances by Schlemer, a junior, and Ariana Elegado, a talented sophomore guard. While Schlemer earned Tournament MVP honors (16.5 points and 12.5 rebounds per game in the tournament), Elegado also was named to the all-tournament team. It was a fitting way to cap a season where Elegado has been asked to play both point guard and off-guard and be a source of points throughout the year.

The defensive stance by coach Faith Mimnaugh broke only once all game, when senior forward Kayla Griffin, a team leader and Cal Poly’s only player to start every game this season, tore two ligaments in her knee while chasing down a loose ball. Griffin collapsed on the baseline in front of the Cal Poly bench and, while Pacific went the other way, scoring a bucket about 10 seconds later, Mimnaugh’s total attention was on the senior forward, consoling her until the referees finally blew their whistle so that medical staff could attend to Griffin.

“That’s just the type of lady Coach Faith is,” said Schlemer. “She cares about us as human beings, not just her players… . I wasn’t surprised at all. It’s just the kind of thing she does and it’s amazing.”

In a year where a team finally found their identity, a coach not caring about what was going on on the floor may have been all you need to know about this year’s Big West Tournament champs.

See more photos of the championship game and celebration on our Facebook page: www.facebook.com/fansmanship .

Some video is now also up at www.youtube.com/fansmanship.

Cal Poly fell in a heartbreaker on Friday night. By Will Parris – Parris Studios

The fans filed out of the Honda Center into a mild March evening in Orange County. The arena would wait until the championship games the next evening. On the women’s side, Cal Poly would be there. For the men, a long trip back to San Luis Obispo awaited them.

After a game with 18 lead changes and 14 ties, Pacific used a long tip-in from Travis Fulton with one second remaining to upend Cal Poly 55-53 and end their Big West Tournament run.

“Every possession meant so much and it felt like the last four minutes of the game for the entire game,” said 25th year Pacific head coach Bob Thomason, whose final Big West game will be Saturday night. “Cal Poly played great, we played great, both teams playing great defense, both teams playing physical. If it had gone 15 seconds longer, maybe Cal Poly would have hit the shot to win the game.”

Instead, it was Fulton who made SportsCenter’s top-10 and advanced his team one step closer to the NCAA Tournament.

“What you want to do is crash the boards for that last-second tip in,” said Fulton. Crash the boards he did.

It was a game of fits and starts. Neither team built more than a 4-point lead. Both teams missed  opportunities to make shots or execute offensively, defenses of both teams instead ruling the day.

The one offensive player who had any rhythm on either team was Tony Gill. The junior transfer from Roseville, CA did his best Kevin Pittsnoggle impression, stepping out beyond the 3-point line and knocking down big-shot after big-shot late in the game. Gill finished with 20 points, shooting 7-8 from the field including 4-4 from long-range.

“The coach did a great job of calling specific plays, a lot of pick-and-pop stuff, and the guards were able to get off the screens efficiently and get me the ball so the opportunity’s there and I just tried to make the best of it,” said Gill.

For the Mustangs, re-creating the home magic that saw them go undefeated at Mott Athletic Center proved to be a tough task in the Honda Center. Both coaches seemed to think the game could have gone either way after it was over.

“Sometimes I guess the basketball Gods look at a guy who says he’s got 25 years and it’s his swan song and if that game is maybe 39 minutes long or 41 minutes long, maybe we get it but it’s a 40 minute game and that last possession, that last bounce and that last tip-in goes to them and it’s a great opportunity,” said Cal Poly head coach Joe Callero.

Cal Poly was led by Chris Eversley, who scored 12 points and pulled down five rebounds while battling a cold. Senior Dylan Royer chipped in 10 points and three rebounds in what is probably his final game for Cal Poly. According to this story in the Tribune, the Mustangs still have a shot at going to one of the “lesser known” postseason tournaments after posting an 18-13 record while winning the most Big West regular season games in school history.

Royer had a shot come up short in Cal Poly’s final possession.

It’s kind of a blur at this point, so many lead changes and ties throughout the game,” said the 5th-year senior from Los Osos. “It was a tie game, we had the ball, I thought we had a decent possession, missed a shot, I couldn’t get the rebound, but we were definitely confident in our defensive abilities in that last possession. The guy made a great play. There was great defense on the first shot and, you know, Fulton made an incredible falling-down shot. Gotta give credit to him. Not much else we could do.”

Fellow senior Chris O’Brien seemed like a man on a mission in the second half for Cal Poly, willing himself to the paint to keep the Mustangs’ offense moving. O’Brien netted 11 points — all in the second half — and pulled down 5 rebounds.

For a Cal Poly team that has talked all year about assist-to-turnover ratio, the Mustangs were stymied by Pacific’s defense, which took away driving lanes and forced Cal Poly’s facilitators to try to score. In his last game against Cal Poly, Thomason coached a gem. Cal Poly had only 8 assists as a team and 10 turnovers.

“They do a great job preparing, and you have to be real patient,” said Thomason. “You’ve just got to grind, and even though we don’t like it that slow and that grinding, if we didn’t accept it and feel good about it, we weren’t going to win the game. You can’t be irritated about it because that’s what they want you to do.”

Most of the fans were gone. Back to their hotels or homes — those clad in orange ready to come back and do it again twice the next day. Instead of Cal Poly fielding teams in both the men’s and women’s final, the team from Stockton in their final season in the conference is going out with a bang.

In the mostly-empty parking lot, after all the press conferences and post-game responsibilities had been satisfied a tunnel of green, gold, and brass materialized. So did the Cal Poly men. It was only the second game the band had seen the men’s team lose all year. Echoing across the mostly empty Honda Center parking lot, it was also one of their biggest cheers.