Update: William & Mary beat High Point Thursday night and will advance to face Texas on Saturday night. Tip-off is set for 9:45 p.m. ET from the Moody Center in Austin, Texas. W&M Athletics will host a watch party for the game in Kaplan Arena with doors opening at 9:15 p.m. More details on that and other watch parties are available on TribeAthletics.com/MarchOnTribe.

The spoils of winning a CAA Championship flooded William & Mary women’s basketball coach Erin Dickerson Davis so fast that she was still coming to terms with the implications 48 hours after the victory.  

She waited on Tuesday morning to board the team’s flight to Austin, Texas, for the NCAA Tournament and was presented with another wild thought – Kaplan Arena will have a championship banner hanging from its rafters next season. 

“You just said it, and I covered my face. I can’t believe it. I don’t even know (what to say),” Dickerson Davis said. “I’m not a crier, but I’ve cried more in the last two days than probably the last two decades. It’s just been so amazing, and I look forward to the faces that my team has when they see that banner. I know it’ll be another emotional day for us, for sure.” 

William & Mary made history on Sunday with its dramatic 66-63 comeback win over Campbell in the CAA tournament’s title game, clinching the first NCAA Tournament bid in school history for either the women’s or the men’s teams. 

It earned a 16-seed in the Big Dance and will take on 16-seeded High Point, the Big South champion, in an NCAA Tournament First Four contest on Thursday, March 20 at the Moody Center in Austin, Texas.  

Just as planned 

William & Mary followed an uncommon path to the NCAAs, entering conference tournament season as a No. 9 seed after losing seven of its last eight regular-season games. It faced a gauntlet in the CAA tournament, having to win four games in four days against the likes of top-seeded North Carolina A&T, fourth-seeded Drexel and third-seeded Campbell. 

The veteran-laden team followed the lead of its seniors and heeded the wisdom of its coaching staff to do the improbable. Even in the championship game victory, William & Mary had to overcome a 14-0 deficit in the first quarter and was tasked with digging out of a 13-point hole in the second half.  

“I planned it this exact way,” Dickerson Davis said in a playful tone. “No, it was a process. You never know from season to season. You have an idea of what your season is going to look like. It rarely turns out that way.  

“We had really high hopes for this team, and toward the end (of the regular season) we lost a heartbreaker (in a 59-58 overtime loss on Valentine’s Day) to Drexel, and it kind of changed the trajectory of how our season was going. For us to be able to kind of put the pieces back together; we glued it, duct taped it, whatever it took to put the pieces back together to really accomplish something special.” 

The team followed the lead of their coach, who boosted hopes for the program even before this historic run. Dickerson Davis, affectionately referred to as Coach E, is lauded by her players for her coaching style and tough but personable approach. She honed that growing up on the South Side of Chicago and while serving as a four-year captain at Northwestern from 2005-2009. 

“At the end of the day, she’s always pushing us to be better women on and off the court,” said fifth-year center Kayla Beckwith ’23, M.B.A. ’25. “And then to transition to the court side, she’s tough. She expects the best from us at all times and wants to push us outside of our comfort zone as players because she believes in us.” 

‘Are we quitters?’ 

William & Mary closed the regular season with three straight losses, including a 54-34 Senior Day setback to Hofstra on March 2 before dropping consecutive road contests to North Carolina A&T and Campbell. Those were three of the four teams they would face in the CAA tournament. 

Before W&M’s rematch with Hofstra in the first round of the conference tournament on March 13, senior guard Bella Nascimento ’25 took it upon herself to remind her teammates what was at stake. W&M needed to snap out of its tailspin right then and there if it wanted to avoid flaming out, and Nascimento made that clear with a fiery speech. 

“I was like, ‘Yo, are we quitters? Like, what’s the vibe? Because this is like quitter energy. We need to band together, need to stick together. We just need to play together and play for each other,’” Nascimento said.  

Nascimento’s message rang loud and clear. She led with her words and her play, posting 17 points and five assists in the opening 76-65 triumph over Hofstra. She followed that with 20 points, four rebounds, four assists, three steals and two blocks in a 76-54 semifinal win over Drexel and then poured in 33 points and 11 rebounds, both career highs, in the title game victory over Campbell.  

“She was not ready for this to be over,” Dickerson Davis said of Nascimento, the CAA tournament’s Most Valuable Player. “She hated the way that it was ending. It was kind of spiraling, and they felt like people were quitting, and she literally went to her team, and she called out everybody and said, ‘Is this it? Are we gonna quit? Are we gonna back down? Are we gonna fold?’ And they looked her in her face, and they said, ‘No.’” 

Lead from the top 

Nascimento said her message was an extension of the culture Dickerson Davis and her coaching staff have built in their three seasons in the program. 

“She instills confidence in each and every one of us every single day,” Nascimento said. “Her and the coaching staff, they do not quit. They do not fold. They are not quitters, and we see that. They lead by example with that, and us as players, we see that, and we want to take on that role as well.” 

Coach E credits that mentality to her upbringing. The support that she has received from her family – her parents, Bryan and Kim, can be seen behind the bench cheering her on still – for her success in basketball. 

Dickerson Davis readily admits that growing up, all she wanted to do was play basketball. When she was considering colleges, her mother consistently reminded her about what she thought mattered most. What Kim wanted above all was for her daughter to pave the way for a successful life after her playing career.   

“My mom was trying to explain to me how important it would be to go to a school like Northwestern, and I didn’t care. I was like, ‘But they’re not that good at basketball.’ And she was like, ‘I don’t care if you make one shot, play one minute, win one game, you need to know that this is going to be life-changing for you,’ and I didn’t know that until I got there,” Dickerson Davis said.  

“It opened my eyes to things that I didn’t even know were possibilities. It completely changed my life, and so to be able to give young women that same opportunity to go to a school like William & Mary, to get a degree from here, to have the connections that you’ll have once you leave here is exactly what I wanted to be able to provide to these young women.” 

That’s not to diminish the importance of success on the hardwood. Dickerson Davis has certainly achieved that, leading the team to 18 wins in her first season in 2022-2023, the most by a first-year coach in school history, while also guiding the team to 12 conference victories in each of her first two seasons, matching the most in program lore. 

And then there’s this season, reaching new heights by winning a CAA Championship and punching the program’s first ticket to the Big Dance. It’s a moment that will live on forever and will soon be immortalized high above the court at Kaplan Arena.  

The home of the William & Mary women’s basketball team needs a championship banner, right? 

“It does,” Coach E said. “It’s the only thing that’s missing. Everything else is perfect.”