As a high schooler in Steubenville, Ohio, Sylvia Crawley welcomed North Carolina women’s basketball head coach Sylvia Hatchell into her family’s home. A skilled preps player, Crawley was nearing a college decision and listened closely to Hatchell’s pitch.
“She was going to recruit kids like me to win a national championship,” Crawley said. “And she said, ‘I know I sound completely crazy because we’re dead last in the ACC, but I’m not going to stop until it happens.’”
That vision turned into a reality when Crawley was a senior, as the Tar Heels defeated Louisiana Tech, 60-59, in the 1994 NCAA National Championship on Charlotte Smith’s game-winning 3-pointer at the buzzer. Twenty-five years later, UNC honored the program’s only group of national champions with a weekend’s worth of events that culminated during Sunday’s game against Virginia. Crawley, now an assistant coach at UNC, planned the reunion, and sat down for an exclusive one-on-one interview with The Daily Tar Heel on Feb. 11.
DTH: What do you remember the most about the National Championship season?
Sylvia Crawley: We only lost to one team, which was Virginia – twice. So, now that I’m a coach, I can see how our coaches felt, like in order to win a championship you have to be very mentally tough. And to be mentally tough, you have to overcome adversity, and that makes you tougher, and tougher and tougher, right? But we would blow teams out by like 30, 40 points. Everyone got to play, so they set a rule: If we got out-rebounded by opponents, we had to run what we now call “victory sprints.” Back when I played it was called "suicides." They changed the name for obvious reasons. You had to run a victory sprint for each one we get out-rebounded by.
So my most vivid memory of that year is we played Georgia Tech. We won the game, but we got out-rebounded by 23. So we had to run 23 victory sprints plus practice. They had garbage cans at the edge of the court … we were throwing up, we were crying, we were clapping. We had to say, 'Box out, rebound!' the whole time we ran. So, to survive that practice, it took a certain level of mental toughness.
DTH: You eventually overcame Virginia, defeating the Cavaliers in the ACC Tournament championship game. How big was that win?
SC: We went out there, and we played an incredible game and we could feel it. Virginia was looking like 'What is going on?' because they felt confident … not that this would be a breeze; they knew we were coming after them. But they thought, 'We’ve beat them twice, we’ll beat them again.'
So we won the ACC Championship; we cut down those nets. That was the worst thing they could have ever let us do, get those scissors and cut that net. Because once we got a taste of a championship, and how that feels with the confetti and the hats, we weren’t going to stop there. So we knew then we’d never lose another game. I knew I would never lose another game in a Carolina jersey.
