Davidson women’s basketball canceled NCAA-hopeful season early. It was the only way
Elle Sutphin sat frozen, speechless. Charlize Dunn felt her heart break. Davidson head coach Gayle Fulks took a timeout to reset, then stepped into her team’s huddle, linked arms with her teary-eyed players and asked them what they wanted to do.
She didn’t know what she’d hear.
It was a Wednesday night in John M. Belk Arena. Senior Night. Davidson’s penultimate regular-season game against Atlantic 10 foe George Washington. By this point in late February, the Davidson women’s basketball program was down to seven healthy scholarship players. Five had suffered season-ending injuries. Some had re-aggravated old ones. Only one of the Wildcats’ four seniors, Maddie Plank, was healthy enough to play on her Senior Night.
Still, though, March Madness was in the air. Davidson had jumped out to its best start in program history (12-1). The Wildcats had a win over Duke to their name. They were poised to earn the program’s first NCAA Tournament appearance this year — to hear their school’s name on ESPN’s Selection Sunday show; to have their celebratory screams caught on video and broadcast to the world; to give the sports fan the goosebumps and gall to ask: Could Davidson be this year’s Cinderella?
And on that February day, against George Washington, Davidson competed according to plan. Plank did, especially. The lone healthy senior had 12 points and was “having one of the best games of her season,” Fulks remembered. She was playing, as she was known to do, with “such joy and such fun and such love of basketball.”
With just over two minutes left in the third quarter, Plank got a steal. She brought the ball up the court. She settled the offense. She called for a left-side ball screen. She attacked. A whistle blew for a defensive foul. And then, as Plank was collecting her body, her knee went out from under her. She crumpled to the floor, in front of her home crowd, in front of her own bench. A trainer rushed onto the court, talking Plank through her pain. Silence flooded everywhere else.
Davidson took a timeout. So did George Washington, out of courtesy. Plank was helped to the locker room. And then, about five minutes of real time later, there stood Fulks, in front of all of her bruised and broken players, asking them if they wanted to finish the game.
“I wasn’t sure, to be honest with you,” Fulks recalled to The Charlotte Observer. “I was not sure they would or they wouldn’t with how traumatic it was.”
The team opted to finish. For a moment, all seemed OK. Plank eventually tightened on a black brace and somehow jogged to the team’s bench. But she never re-entered the game. Her injury, the team would later learn, was season-ending, too. The Wildcats lost, 45-40, and before leaving the court, Elle Sutphin, one of the team’s out-of-commission seniors, wondered if this was this group’s last game.
“I had that thought just because of numbers,” Sutphin said earlier this week. “And you have other situations in women’s college basketball just because of numbers, so we have less than that right now. This could go either way.”
Two days later, Davidson made the call to cancel the remainder of its season.
“It was the only decision,” Fulks said.
Davidson season end ‘a bit of relief’
The news broke on a Friday, the first day of March, the month of college basketball. The Wildcats’ year ended at 18-8. In a statement, Davidson athletic director Chris Clunie said “the physical, mental and emotional toll of this unfortunate and injury-riddled season has brought us to this point.” Fulks provided a statement, too. So did Atlantic 10 commissioner Bernadette V. McGlade and others.
It all became a national story.
Never before, after all, had a Davidson program canceled the remainder of an athletic season because of an injury crisis (non-Covid), according to archived records available to The Observer.
Other programs throughout the country had faced similar issues. Take UNC, which has battled backcourt attrition all year. Or take TCU, which held open tryouts to fill out its roster when injuries wreaked havoc in February. They each found ways to go on.
Davidson, however, couldn’t. They’d added two walk-ons, seniors Mallory Justis and KP Peterson, the leading scorers in Davidson intramurals, Fulks said. They agreed that as long as seven scholarship players were healthy, they’d play — and that at one point meant canceling two games during the season, hoping players with rolled ankles could return for the future.
Calls to recruit regular students to play, on the campus of Davidson with under 2,000 students, were infeasible. Calls for other athletes for other sports were understood but infeasible all the same. Those athletes have obligations to their current teams, preparing for their next season and such. And even still, Fulks said, thrusting those players into an uncontrolled situation like a live game after not preparing for it isn’t physically safe: “We had a ton of kids get injured who had been doing all the work, and gotten prepared.” When Fulks put in her walk-ons, she said, it was only when the team was running out the clock.
Fulks reiterated that the team had exhausted every option before choosing to cancel the season — something no one wanted to do.
“Friday was just a really hard day, a lot of emotions, a lot of sadness — but also, I would say, a bit of relief,” Fulks added. “Our team just experienced so many hard things, and at this point, they’d gotten to be traumatic. I knew we just weren’t in the right head space to move forward. It had gotten to that point. ... It was a hard decision. The sadness is understanding that, ‘Hey, some of those girls aren’t going to be able to play basketball again.’ Some of them are ending basketball on kind of a bitter note.”
Davidson’s promising season
To understand the bitter ending, you must first understand the promising beginning.
Everyone has a different point of when they knew the Wildcats would be good. Fulks knew at the end of last year, with the players she had coming back. The players figured it out on their preseason trip to Spain. And the team dared to say it out loud after its four-point loss to UNC: “Guys, we’re really good,” Fulks remembers telling her team in that postgame locker room. “We’re not great yet, but we could be great.” Two days later, Sutphin woke up and told her roommate, Dunn, that they were going to beat Duke. She was right.
Trouble lurked, though. Before the season began, Davidson lost two scholarship players, Sallie Schutz and Tomisin Adenupe, to injuries. That number doubled against George Mason in January, when freshman forward Sylvie Jackson and fifth-year guard and leading scorer Suzi-Rose Deegan went down. A month and a day later, Dunn, the Virginia Tech transfer and one of the team’s three players averaging double digits, went down with a torn ACL against Loyola Chicago.
Dunn had never been injured before — not even something minor, she said — and remembers a strange, helpless feeling wash over her as she watched the game on a TV in a corridor in the Loyola-Chicago arena. She also said she remembered her coach, Fulks, getting ejected and having to watch the game alongside her, the two of them yelling at the hallway TV, listening to the crowd erupt a few seconds before they saw a play happen, watching Sutphin score a late go-ahead bucket to steal a three-point win.
That game, Dunn said, “felt like it represented more.” And it did. It showed that this group could stay together, could finish out games. But then came George Mason, when Issy Morgan twisted an ankle and was out for a few weeks. Then came Rhode Island, where Sutphin rehashed another injury.
Then came cancellations of two games, enough time for Morgan to return.
But then came George Washington. Another fall. The last one.
Then came the decision from Fulks and her staff.
Fulks said she made the decision without polling her players. “I knew what I felt on Wednesday,” she said, adding that she didn’t want to place any burden or blame on her players for making a decision of this magnitude, one that affected so many people. Still, players say when they met a few days before the announcement, Fulks made a final temperature check of the room.
“She asked if anybody disagreed with this, and no one did,” Dunn said. “We all knew it was the best thing for us to do right now. It wasn’t a survey or anything, but we all kind of understood.”
‘You kinda feel robbed’
Last week, Davidson basketball got a break. It was Spring Break, technically, something the team usually doesn’t take advantage of since it’s during conference tournament time. But many players also took a break more broadly — from the rumors circulating on social media, to the news about their program, to everything.
One of the beauties of college basketball is that, in normal times, every story ends on its own terms. Players end their careers one of two ways — on a win, cutting down nets, etched in glory; or on a loss, a sad yet merciful option, where closure comes in the form of farewell speeches and “we left it all out on the court”-type platitudes that spin this enterprise around.
That didn’t come that Covid year, in 2019-20. And for these players, on one of the most talented Davidson women’s basketball teams ever assembled, closure failed to come again.
Players are still optimistic about next year. Talking to them reminds you of the resilience of college athletes, the cheery joy of the players on this team, specifically.
Still, there’s sadness.
“We got to do a season, but I think your goals and aspirations are still there,” said Sutphin. The redshirt senior recently announced that she’s staying at Davidson for another year, her sixth year in college, to chase those same goals. “I think it’s hard, because you feel robbed a year even though you played.”
“I think our team feels like they could’ve belonged,” Fulks said. “And that we were an NCAA Tournament team. We had the talent, and the toughness, and the togetherness to be there.”
On Friday, after being interviewed for this story, Sutphin and Dunn exited a conference room and walked into a hallway in John M. Belk Arena. To the left was the Davidson home court: The place, this year, where so much happened — where the decision to cancel its season — the only decision — was ultimately confirmed.
Instead of picking up a basketball, the two players filed into the training room and got some treatment, the only way back.
