The clock shows 9:22 remaining in the first half and Amanda Butler has called a 30-second timeout. The Florida Gators are trailing LSU 22-14 and already they’ve committed eight turnovers and they’ve missed three point-blank shots, something that is a cardinal sin against a Van Chancellor-coached team. LSU is allowing only 48.2 points per game so every shot has to count.
As the Gators trot to the huddle, Butler stomps her high heels into the court, claps her hands and screams to her team to move faster. This is only a 30-second timeout, so there is not a moment to waste. The seconds she gets with her team in the huddle are precious.
In the huddle you would think she took talking lessons from Dickie V. Her hands move in synch with her mouth and her mouth is Jimmie Johnson’s Chevy redlining the RPMs coming out of the final turn at Daytona. This is the way it was before the game, it’s that way during the game and it will be that way until the final whistle blows and the Gators have taken their lumps to the tune of 85-71 at the Stephen C. O’Connell Center.
LSU is the eighth ranked team in the nation. They are a team loaded with tall, fast athletes who run the floor and swarm on defense like sharks when there is blood in the water. In many ways, LSU is what Amanda Butler wants the Florida Gators to be.
Butler loves her team. Loves them passionately. She appreciates that they do everything she asks them to do. Dive for loose balls? The girls on the bench would rush onto the floor to leap into the pile if only that was legal. Hustle? They give her everything they’ve got. Floor burns? They lead the SEC. There is no lack of effort.
What there is a lack of is size and speed, the kind of things she can’t teach. The only way you get players like the ones they have at LSU and Georgia and Tennessee is to out-recruit folks like Van Chancellor, Andy Landers and Pat Summit, which is much easier said than done.
Amanda Butler spends every waking moment of every single day trying to build the Florida women’s basketball program into one of the elite programs in the Southeastern Conference. If your team is one of the elites in the SEC, then it’s one of the best in the country. The league has and always will be that strong.
When Butler played for the Gators, back in the days when Carol Ross was the coach, Florida was a very good team that was always that one next level player or one signature win away from joining the elite programs in the SEC. With Ross on the sideline the Gators made the Elite Eight of the NCAA Tournament one time. They never won the SEC championship. The Gators were always good, just not good enough.
Years of getting the Gators so close but never over the top finally took its toll on Ross. An energetic, passionate woman for whom the game is sacred and who cares deeply about her players, Ross coached until there was nothing left in the tank. Finally, she told Jeremy Foley she had done all she could do.
On paper, Foley took one out of the park when he got Carolyn Peck signed on to replace Ross, but that five-year roller coaster ride took the program back to depths it hadn’t seen since Micki DeMoss was the coach way back in the 1980s.
So now it is Amanda Butler’s job to try to get the basketball program up to snuff with the other women’s programs at the University of Florida. The women’s athletic program has produced 17 national championship teams — 10 for tennis, two each for golf and swimming, one each for soccer, women’s track and gymnastics. The volleyball program has been to several final fours and has won the SEC 17 straight years.
Women’s basketball is the only sport that hasn’t produced a championship of any kind unless you include winning the State Farm Classic or a few other Christmas or pre-season trophies. Nobody is more aware of the lack of championships than Butler.
To say it eats at her is an understatement. This is what keeps her up at night. This is why she is relentless on the recruiting trail.
“Yeah, it gets to me,” she said Sunday afternoon. “You’re telling me Billy Donovan can win two national championships in basketball and Urban Meyer can win one in football, and tennis wins one about every other year and all the other sports have one and women’s basketball can’t? I’ll never believe that. It can be done here. It’s going to be done here.”
There is no lack of confidence on her part. If you saw her play when she suited up for the Gators then you know that whatever she might have lacked in ability, she more than made up with in confidence. She wasn’t what you would necessarily call an over-achiever, but she used up her 100,000-mile warranty somewhere around her sophomore year and got by on fumes and confidence the rest of the way.
Butler passionately believes in what she’s doing. She believes she can change the basketball culture at Florida so that players like LSU megastar Sylvia Fowles of Miami will choose the Gators rather than spend the next four years in places like Baton Rouge. She believes that she can convince players like Orlando First Academy’s Krystal Thomas that Florida is a far better place to play college basketball than Duke.
A Mike Miller quote comes to mind here. Back when Billy Donovan was duking it out with Kansas, Kentucky and some of the other heavyweights on the college basketball scene for Mike Miller, one of the two or three best high school players in the country back in 1998, nobody gave Donovan and the Gators a chance. Why would Miller choose the Gators, who were a mosquito bite on an elephant’s butt on the college basketball scene, when he could go to a school with tradition and championship banners hanging from the rafters?
Miller confounded everyone by choosing Florida and when asked why Florida he responded, “Why not Florida?”
Amanda Butler is determined that there is going to be a day — and not one in the distant future but soon — when those elite recruits, the kind that can take a program over the top and to the highest levels are going to be answering, “Why not Florida?”
She needed some of those why not Florida types Sunday. LSU had a 27-point blowout going when the Gators relentless hustle wore the Tigers down and got the game back to respectable status. It was classic Butler. Her team swarmed all over the place, dove for loose balls, threw a few hips and elbows to carve out some space among the taller LSU trees and somehow the Gators made it interesting there at the end.
They could have given up but they didn’t. There was a point when they could have given up but when they looked to the sideline they saw their coach coaching like the national championship was two points from reality.
“If they look at the sideline and you’re not giving it everything you’ve got, how can you expect them to give you everything they’ve got?” she asked. “It starts at the top and you can’t ask your players to give more than you’re willing to give as a coach and as a coaching staff.”
The Gators lost by 14 points but they fought until the final whistle. By the time it was over, LSU felt like it had been in a 40-minute street fight against a team still standing and willing to claw and scratch and bite for another 40 minutes. It was enough to convince Van Chancellor that it might not be all that long before the Gators have a level of talent equal to the level of hustle and heart.
“There’s no question that Florida can win and be one of the nation’s top teams,” said Chancellor, who built the Ole Miss program into a powerhouse before leading the Houston Comets to four WNBA titles. “You’ve got great climate, a great university, great players in the state of Florida … everything that you need to win is here. It just takes the right coach to light the fire and you’ve got the right coach in Amanda. There is no doubt in my mind that she will get the job done here.”
As she walked down the hallway to go back to her locker room after facing the press, Butler gritted her teeth when she smiled. She had a moral victory because the Gators chose to fight to the end but she’s not big on moral victories.
“We work too dadgum hard to give up easily,” she said.
Hard work will never be a problem, nor will recruiting better players. She has a recruiting class coming in that can help get the Gators one step closer. But it will take more than one recruiting class.
“There are great players out there who will have the guts, confidence and vision to see the opportunity we have here and seize it,” she said.
Those players are accustomed to going to places like Tennessee, UConn, Maryland and LSU. She knows it’s only a matter of time before some of them are going to take a look at what Florida has to offer and decide to be a part of something great.
“We have to find those special players who have a championship mentality,” she said. “We’re going to win championships here and we are going to get the players who know what it’s like to win championships and won’t settle for anything less. It’s not can it be done here. It can be done here.”
It’s just a matter of time, that’s all.