35th Anniversary - Feature 8

Special Feature
Written By Josh Katzowitz

Tajama Abraham sat on the top floor of the Marriott hotel, and she could look around the room and see why she should commit to George Washington. The steam emanated off the plate in front of her, so she could smell the reason why. She could feel it on her face, and yeah, she could taste the reason as well.

"We were sitting there, stuffing our faces, and we thought, `This is nice,'" she said 16 years later, laughing at the thought of what was entering her then-teenage mind as she took her recruiting trip to GW before the 1994 season.

Bright lights, a nice view of a city, plenty of hot food - all that's standard in the middle of a recruiting trip. But what happened next isn't so normal. The high school seniors, with food still entering their stomachs, glanced at each other. And they knew.

They knew this could be a special group.

"We gave each other that look," said Tajama, now known as Tajama Abraham Ngongba who became the top player in George Washington's history. "We thought, `This could be it.' We stayed in touch after that visit. But we knew that weekend that we were going to make it happen."

Four years later, the Colonials - thanks in large part to Abraham and fellow GW Hall of Famer Lisa Cermignano, Colleen McCrea and coach Joe McKeown - had accumulated a 103-27 record, four regular-season conference titles, a Sweet 16 appearance in 1995 and an Elite Eight berth in 1997.

"It was a team that I felt was right there; they just needed that piece," said Abraham Ngongba, now the head coach at Radford. "They were telling me that our recruiting class was the piece, and that was cool. We all came in the same weekend, and we got to meet each other. I already knew what those players could do. I had seen them play. You could be like, `Wow, I don't think I ever saw her miss a shot in AAU.' After that, we knew George Washington was right on the brink of making something happen."

1998 Rhode Island Men's Basketball Team advanced to the Elite 8

Little did she know that it wasn't just George Washington women's basketball on the brink. It was the entire Atlantic 10 conference.

Yet, in some ways, the George Washington's women's basketball team began to open eyes.

"When you look at Xavier and Temple and George Washington, we were starting to defy (the notion) that we were mid-major," Abraham Ngongba said. "We were beating those ACC teams and SEC teams. So what does that make them?"

Soon after, other sports began to see success. In 1997, five men's basketball teams (Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Saint Joseph's, Temple and Xavier) made the NCAA tournament, a first in A-10 history. The next year, the Rams came within a minute of making the Final Four while six conference teams that season won 21 or more games - an unprecedented feat in A-10 history.

Musketeers soccer standout Amanda Gruber led the nation in regular season scoring in 1997.

UMass softball pitcher Danielle Henderson, one of the most dominant strikeout pitchers in NCAA history, was awarded the 1999 Honda Award as the nation's best player after leading her team to the College World Series in 1998.

In 1998, three A-10 men's basketball players (Rhode Island's Cuttino Mobley and Tyson Wheeler and Xavier's Torraye Braggs) were taken in the NBA Draft.

During the 1997-98 women's basketball season, Duquesne's Korie Klede and George Washington's Noelia Gomez were named Kodak All-Americans.

In 1997-98, UMass gymnast Jill Fisher earned All American status.

George Washington's Tajama Abraham Ngongba

Even the A-10 Television Network got into the act in 1997, winning its third Mid-Atlantic Emmy award in three years in the "Live Sports Coverage/One Time Only Special" category.

The list goes on.

"As we've moved into recent years, (A-10) women's soccer has become pretty darn good," said Xavier athletic director Mike Bobinski. "Men's soccer has been pretty darn good. Enough schools have made a commitment. Dayton in volleyball has become really good, because they made a big time commitment, they did well, it felt good and they've continued to make that investment. It's much more global now.

"The mid to late-90s was absolutely the catalyst for that. If we never achieved those successes, it would be far less likely to try to think about going beyond the flagship sports of men's and women's basketball. Now, we've had this other success, we need to think about these other programs that show the strength of the conference in a broader basis."

But men's basketball was still important, and led by Temple coach John Chaney and UMass coach John Calipari, the A-10 began to make big dents in the NCAA tournament. St. Joe's coach Phil Martelli took notes, and a decade later, their ambitions helped shape how the league's teams scheduled their non-conference opponents.

"One of the things that people in our league watched and studied was the selection process (for the NCAA tournament)," Martelli said. "When the selection process talked about playing road games, we were playing road games. When's the last time you talked about 20 wins getting you into the tournament? That's not the measuring stick anymore. It's scheduling, who you play and how you play them. Somebody in this league recognized what was going to be important to the committee. Back then, you could watch Chaney and Calipari, and you could admire them and see what they were doing with playing all those big games."

The momentum of those teams from more than a decade ago continue into today's 21st century squads. And to think, much of it began when a few high school girls, sitting on top of the world, were filling their bellies at a breakfast buffet inside the Beltway. A few basketball players who not only changed the culture in their team sport at their respective university, but the kind of special squad which helped jump-start the A-10 conference you see today.

"I don't think we understand the magnitude of what we did at that level," Abraham Ngongba said. "We didn't get it, but it was something pretty remarkable and it was something pretty special."

Previous Feature|Next Feature