Lady Raiders' title was a win for all of West Texas
Thirty years ago this past week, on the first Sunday in April, Marsha Sharp's Lady Raiders won the first NCAA championship in a team sport for Texas Tech. A city and a region swelled with pride when the Lady Raiders beat Ohio State 84-82 in the championship game of the NCAA Tournament at the Omni.
Reporting back here in Lubbock, I described the scene this way at the time:
"Moments after the clock ticked off the final seconds in the April 4 title game, the Tech campus turned for several hours into a mecca of celebration with Memorial Circle at the hub. Drivers flipped on their headlights in mid-afternoon, honked horns and leaned from open windows to slap hands with passers-by.
"Police officers erected barriers along the major streets bordering the campus as the peaceful revelry stretched into the wee hours of the following Monday morning."
The triumphant Lady Raiders were welcomed home the next night at Jones Stadium, Sharp and her players decked out in matching green jackets, driven down the tunnels onto the stadium floor in four limousines. We estimated at the time 35,000 to 40,000 fans turned out.
The people who were there will never forget that scene.
It's an achievement that still resonates to this day and always will, not merely because that particular group of Lady Raiders represented Texas Tech and did it in a Texas Tech way. The Lady Raiders weren't the top seed in their region that year. Stanford was. They made the Final Four, but they weren't ranked among the nation's top four teams in the final poll by The Associated Press. Vanderbilt, Tennessee, Ohio State and Iowa were.
Of more importance to how the team is remembered, though, is where the players came from. The hometowns of nine of the 12 players and all four members of the coaching staff were within a 220-mile radius of Lubbock. They had grown up either on the South Plains or the adjacent regions of the Panhandle or the Big Country.
The national title mattered for a school, but carries lasting importance to this day to an entire region. It would be hard to quantify, but surely no small number of young girls were turned on to basketball, either as players, coaches or just fans by what Sheryl Swoopes and her teammates accomplished in '93.
The evidence is all around us.
Lubbock Christian University, West Texas A&M and Wayland Baptist all have had nationally competitive women's programs on a year-in, year-out basis, all with rosters that look a lot like Marsha Sharp's did 30 years ago. Nowadays, Krista Gerlich can't win a national championship with rosters built primarily from West Texas high-school players. But Division II and NAIA programs can.
To be clear, that didn't originate with the Lady Raiders' title team.
Wayland Baptist teams from 1948 to 1982 were inducted into the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame in 2019. The Flying Queens were the trailblazers. In their programs is where Sharp got her start, playing two years on the Wayland junior varsity in the early 1970s and then becoming the Queen Bees' coach under Harley Redin.
Jump ahead to 1991. That spring in Austin, the girls' basketball teams from West Texas won all the championships at the state tournament: Amarillo Tascosa in Class 5A, Levelland in 4A, Tulia in 3A, Abernathy in 2A and Nazareth in 1A.
No girls in Texas played a better brand of basketball than the teams in this region. The Lady Raiders took it to another level. Even though the program took a precipitous fall after 2005, the title team inspired a generation whose influence is seen in the gyms and arenas of West Texas still.
This article originally appeared on Lubbock Avalanche-Journal: Williams column: Lady Raiders' title was a win for all of West Texas
