This fall will mark 10 years since Missouri announced a seismic change: The athletics department would leave the Big 12 conference and join the SEC. Missouri’s new home has brought the department increased revenue, which has helped bankroll improvements like the South Endzone football facility and new softball stadium. But for virtually every sport, the move has brought new challenges, as well — better competition and more pressure to spend to keep pace.
Over the next 10 weeks, we will be counting down Missouri’s top 10 athletics moments from its first decade as a member of the SEC (which is actually nine years of competition because it took a year for the change to take effect). Note that wrestling, which has spent the past nine years as a member of the Mid-American Conference and will rejoin the Big 12 next fall, wasn’t considered for inclusion since it didn’t compete in the SEC.
For our next entry, we look back to February 18, 2018, as the Missouri women's basketball team hosted No. 11 Tennessee.
Previous Entries:
No. 10: Thomas' one-hitter clinches regional title
No. 9: Cunningham’s ‘flu game’ keys historic upset
In the days leading up to Missouri’s top-15 showdown against No. 11 Tennessee, Robin Pingeton started to figure that the game might attract a larger turnout than normal. With her team riding a four-game winning streak, Pingeton received a few extra ticket requests from family and friends, heard from the ticket office that some groups had purchased blocks of seats, even caught wind that at least one contingent planned to brave the mid-February weather and tailgate before the game.
But when Pingeton peered out from the tunnel, just minutes before her No. 13 Tigers would take the court, the number of people packed into the Mizzou Arena stands still caught her off guard. Pingeton said she felt “overwhelmed by emotion,” to the point where an assistant coach had to pull her aside prior to tipoff and remind her to lock in on the action on the floor.
“Walking out of that tunnel, no doubt a lot of emotions,” Pingeton said. “It was special. It was really special.”
When Pingeton arrived at Missouri in the fall of 2010, she coached her first game in front of 1,207 people. More than eight years later, 11,092 fans filled the stands to watch the Tigers play Tennessee, the most ever for a Missouri women’s home game. The game marked the third time in program history that more than 10,000 home fans showed up to watch Missouri, and the first since 2002. It represented the biggest crowd of Pingeton’s tenure by more than 3,000 people.
It wasn’t just the turnout that provided cause for celebration that day.
Pingeton acknowledged that she was a bit nervous about how her players would react to the environment. While a big crowd can infuse the home team with extra excitement, she said, it also brings added pressure not to let the fans down. Plus, this would be a big game for Missouri regardless of crowd size. The Tigers had beaten Tennessee — for decades one of the biggest-name programs not just in the SEC but the nation — only once since joining the league in 2012-13. No player on the Missouri roster that day had experienced a win over the Lady Vols.
But Missouri absorbed the crowd’s energy and started fast. The Tigers made eight of their first 10 field goals, jumping out to a 25-13 lead by the end of the first quarter. Jordan Frericks, then a fifth-year senior, said she hadn’t paid as much notice to the crowd as her head coach prior to tipoff, but once the game began, the difference in volume was impossible to ignore. The difference from a normal home game was so stark, in fact, that the team had to adjust a bit during one timeout early in the first quarter.
“We’re like, ‘hey, we can’t hear each other,’” Frericks said. “‘We need to be louder, we need to communicate better.’ But it was amazing.”
Frericks helped key the fast start, scoring the first four points of the game for Missouri and six in the opening quarter. The forward finished with 16 points and seven rebounds.
But, as always seemed to be the case during the biggest moments of her Missouri career, Sophie Cunningham played the star. Cunningham, who committed to Missouri as an eighth-grader, talked even before her college career began about generating more interest in the program as one of the primary reasons she wanted to stay home to play her college ball. Now that the then-junior had drawn a record crowd to Mizzou Arena, she wasn’t about to let it down.
Cunningham scored nine points in each of the first two quarters, but her best was yet to come.
“That’s who Sophie is,” Pingeton said. “The bigger the stage, the better the performance. … For her, being a hometown kid and seeing that kind of support and people rallying behind us, there was no doubt she was going to let it all hang out and give it her absolute best. And she absolutely did not disappoint.”
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Missouri led 42-36 at halftime, but Tennessee took control after the break, using a full-court press to prey on Missouri’s primary weakness: ball security. The Tigers turned the ball over six times in the first four minutes of the second half. During the third quarter, the team totaled eight turnovers and seven made baskets. The flurry of mistakes allowed Tennessee to take its first lead of the game, 45-44, with 6:10 left in the third quarter.
But Missouri did just enough to keep the momentum from snowballing out of control. Seemingly every time Tennessee landed a blow, the Tigers answered. Neither side took a lead of more than four points until the final three minutes of the game. Pingeton credited her team’s resolve.
“One of what has made our team special over the years is their ability to lean in for one another and to lock arms and to just stay the course, and that’s exactly how we’ve been able to win some of these big games in the past,” she said. “So maybe we bent, but we didn’t break, and I think that’s huge for our team and something we’ve always been able to hang our hats on.”
Tennessee’s comeback also coincided with the Vols keeping Cunningham in check. Cunningham scored just two points during the first 15 minutes of the second half. But after Tennessee’s Mercedes Russell scored to tie the game at 62 with less than five minutes remaining, Cunningham took over.
Cunningham responded to Russell’s bucket by knocking down a three-pointer on the other end, then letting out a yell and raising her arms, asking for more noise from the crowd. The following possession, after another Russell score, Cunningham got the ball behind the three-point arc again, but this time pump-faked and drove past a defender for an easy layup.
At that point, Missouri’s game plan became simple: Get the ball to Cunningham and let her go to work. Even though Tennessee knew it was coming, she continually found a way to beat her defender and draw fouls. Cunningham drew four whistles in the game’s final three minutes and converted seven of the resulting eight free throw attempts. She wound up scoring 12 of Missouri’s final 15 points, finishing the game with 32. The performance would earn her SEC Player of the Week honors.
“She lived for those moments,” Frericks said of Cunningham. “I just think that in those last moments, she’s one of those players that you can count on.”
Tennessee had a closer of its own who kept the Lady Vols in the game until the end. Jamie Nared scored nine of her team-high 25 points in the fourth quarter. Missouri led by five points with a minute to play, but Nared knocked down a two-point jumper to cut the lead to three, then after Cunningham went 1-2 from the line, she drove and banked home a layup to make the score 74-72 with 18 seconds to play.
Tennessee quickly fouled Missouri’s Jordan Roundtree, who made one of two free throws. Leading by three, the Tigers succeeded in keeping Nared from taking the last shot, but Frericks fouled Tennessee’s Rennia Davis while attempting a three with two seconds to play.
Davis stepped to the free-throw line with a chance to tie the game. The record crowd bellowed. Her first attempt missed.
Davis would make the second free throw, but she had to miss the final attempt intentionally, hoping for a Tennessee rebound and putback. When Missouri’s Amber Smith corralled the loose ball and quickly dished it to Cunningham, the game was all but over. Cunningham made two free throws with less than a second left, then danced off the floor as the final buzzer sounded. Missouri won 77-73.
Before retreating to the locker room, Pingeton grabbed the public address microphone and spoke to the crowd, the majority of which had stayed in place to applaud Missouri’s team. Pingeton thanked the fans for not just showing up, but helping energize Missouri’s fast start and creating a daunting atmosphere during Davis’ late free throws. At one point, she said “I wish I could hug all of you.”
Pingeton has addressed the Missouri crowd a few times after big home wins, and looking back now, she can’t remember if that marked the first time. She said it was important for her to let the crowd know how much it meant to the team to feel supported, and how much it helped to play in a raucous arena.
“To let them know we appreciate them through the highs and lows and to help them understand what a huge impact they make on our program and showing up means the world to us,” Pingeton said when asked why she addressed the fans. “Any time you get an opportunity to just share that kind of moment and let them understand, they’re a huge part of that.”
There are quite a few ways to measure the growth of Missouri’s program since Pingeton took over — and particularly during Cunningham’s career, which spanned from 2015-2019. Missouri’s 24-8 record during the 2017-18 season represented the fourth-best single-season winning percentage in program history. The Tigers’ 92 wins over Cunningham’s four-year career mark the second-most by the program in any four-year span, and the team’s four consecutive NCAA Tournament appearances are its only trips to the Big Dance since 2006.
But perhaps the most important aspect of Cunningham’s legacy, and those who played alongside her, was the ability to rally fans around the program in numbers that hadn’t been seen in 15-plus years. The 2018 win over Tennessee remains the high-water mark for that support. Frericks is grateful to have played a part in that.
“To know that we were able to draw attention to not only Mizzou women’s basketball but women’s basketball in general, I think that’s always so important,” she said. “... I think as a women’s athlete it’s always important to know that you’re drawing different eyes, different people to new experiences of the game, and even young girls who maybe haven’t seen these games or haven’t been that interested in the sport. That is just as important as the bonds that we had as a team and the records we broke as a team that weren’t audience-related.”
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