Lyles excited about playing ‘best of the best’ as FGCU women enter 11th NCAA tourney
- Rick Weber
- Athletics
- Contributors: James Greco & Nick De Castro, Photos
5 – minute read
This isn’t Chelsea Lyles’ first rodeo. She has been on the bench as an assistant coach, recruiting coordinator or associate head coach for the Florida Gulf Coast University women’s basketball team in 10 NCAA Tournaments.
But this time, it’s different. When the Eagles face the Oklahoma Sooners at 2:30 p.m. March 22 (ESPNU) in Norman, Oklahoma, in the first round of the NCAA’s Spokane Regional 4, Lyles will be The Boss. With that comes greater cachet but also greater pressure.
“Oh, yeah, it’ll be way different,” she said with a chuckle. “It’s just more responsibility and a lot more decisions that are going to have to be made throughout the game. It’s probably going to be a little bit more nerve-wracking as a head coach than it is as an assistant. But I have a lot of faith in this team and the staff, so I’m excited about it.
“In the coaching tree, you work your way up from assistant to coordinator to associate head coach to eventually the head coach,” which Lyles became in November. “There’s always something new, and you’re taking on a bigger responsibility, a bigger role, and you’re having to learn to have more of a voice. And so it’s a step. The ladder always required a little bit more, but obviously the head coach step was a lot bigger than any other one.”
And yet, she handled the transition like a grandmaster chess player, manipulating the board, out-scheming her coaching opponents and forcing them into awkward checkmate situations.
Another successful season
The Eagles had started the season with two losses — about a usual season’s worth in six days. Then the legendary Karl Smesko, the only head coach the program had ever known, left to take over the WNBA’s Atlanta Dream. Lyles was quickly elevated to replace him and took off running.
The Eagles lost just one game after that. They rolled to an 18-0 regular-season record in the Atlantic Sun Conference and won their ninth straight ASUN Tournament title, and Lyles was named the league’s Coach of the Year.
It was all very, well, FGCU-like.
“I honestly cannot take the credit for it,” she said. “I have an amazing staff that stepped in and did a really good job as well. They all had to step into new roles and new positions. And then the players — we have a lot of veteran leadership. We have a lot of players who just kind of took over a bigger leadership.”
So it wasn’t as easy as it looked from a distance?
“You’re just trying to figure it out on the go,” Lyles said. “Most coaches get hired around this time of year (in March), and you have time to hire a staff, figure out what you want to do offensively, defensively, all that. For me, it was like, ‘You’re hired,’ and three days later, you have a game.
“You have a certain way that you do things on game days as an assistant coach and as a head coach. It’s totally different, the preparation that you have to have. There were definitely a lot of difficult times, and you question a lot of the decisions you make. But you just have to literally let things go, learn from your mistakes and move on. Because if you dwell on it too long, they impact the next day, the next practice, the next game. So I had to learn very early on that you have to let things go.”
No. 14 takes on No. 3
That includes not-so-insignificant things like their NCAA Tournament seeding.
The Eagles, 30-3 and riding a 23-game winning streak, were projected by ESPN bracketologist Charlie Creme to get a No. 12 seed and play No. 5 Kansas State on a neutral court in Oxford, Mississippi. Instead, the NCAA Committee gave them a No. 14 seed and sent them to the home court of the nation’s No. 3 seed, with one of the nation’s top players in Raegan Beers, an all-SEC center averaging 17.5 points and 8.9 rebounds per game.
The Eagles are accustomed to being under seeded — as evidenced by their NCAA Tournament record for being the winningest No. 12 seed. But this was a blow.
“One of my mentors texted me and said, ‘Nobody’s happy with their seed,’” she said. “You know, nobody thinks they have a good matchup because every tournament team is good. You know you’re playing the best of the best.
“We’re no strangers to feeling like we got under seeded, and you can’t complain about it. You’ve just got to move on. You can’t change it. So you’ve got to make the best of the opportunity. And we’re going to try to get our team as prepared as possible to compete and play well in this game. We want our team to believe they can win, no matter what.”