CLAIRE ZUGMEYER Sophomore forward Sarah-Gayle
Swanson struggles to pass Pepperdine players in the
Bruins’ victory over the Waves Sunday.
By Jeff Agase
Daily Bruin Staff
Who are the Dayton Flyers? Where did they come from?
The answers to these questions might take an elitist Bruin fan
by surprise.
The Flyers (17-5-0) who, yes, are in Division I, come from the
Atlantic 10, where they went 11-0 and plowed through the conference
tournament to clinch an automatic berth in the NCAA playoffs.
They landed their Saturday 1 p.m. date with No. 3 UCLA in the
third round at Drake Stadium by busting out of a bracket where West
Virginia was the host and a high seed.
“They had to beat some good teams to come out here,”
UCLA head coach Jillian Ellis said. “We’ll be preparing
for them like we would any ranked opponent.”
Wait, the name sounds familiar. Isn’t Dayton the school
that loses in the first round of the NCAA basketball tournament
every year?
Yes, the only time most Bruin fans have heard of the Ohio
Catholic school has been when it was on the losing end in the first
round of the Big Dance.
But Dayton head coach Mike Tucker doesn’t expect the
Bruins (19-2-0) to dance circles around his team. His Flyers have
won 15 straight and Tucker isn’t planning on changing his
team’s approach in its biggest match of the year.
“For the past three weeks, we’ve been very
consistent in how we’ve prepared and coached for
games,” he said. “At this point in the season,
we’re not going to change how we go about playing.”
But seriously. Dayton?
“I’ll give my team the same information I always do,
a lot of which is about respecting the opponent,” Ellis said.
“I will tell them they are conference champs and that they
have won 15 straight.”
They are kind words from a coach whose team is heavily favored
to advance to the quarterfinals for the second straight year and
should wear down a smaller, less athletic Flyer team.
And then there’s always the pesky 25-game UCLA home
unbeaten streak that Dayton will have to snap.
“In the past, we would be intimidated by that, but not
anymore,” Tucker said. “For a program like ours,
it’s a matter of earning some respect.”
For a program like UCLA, it’s a matter of dropping another
hopeful conference champion on its way to another Final Four.