On a Sunday afternoon in early February 2004,14,363 spectators jammed into Williams Arena to watch the Gophers defeat Penn State in a battle of nationally ranked women's basketball teams. The echoes of that crowd -- the largest ever to watch the Gophers women -- still stir memories.
"I remember Williams Arena vibrating -- I remember not being able to hear anything out there," said Shannon Bolden, a Gophers sophomore at the time. "It was probably the coolest experience we had at a home game. It was so loud, the fans were so into it, the game was so competitive."
A month later the Gophers went on to their first and only Final Four appearance, losing to eventual NCAA champion Connecticut 67-58 in a closely contested national semifinal. Minnesota averaged 9,800 fans that season and was so close to breaking even on the financial ledger that athletic department officials dared envision a time when women's basketball would give the university a fourth revenue-producing sport, along with football, men's basketball and men's hockey.
It all seems so long ago.
The Gophers finished last in the Big Ten last season, averaging fewer than 4,500 fans a game, and the program operated at a deficit of more than $1.5 million. This year's team started conference play with seven consecutive losses and is 4-11 entering Sunday's regular-season finale against visiting Michigan State. Attendance has taken yet another dip, to fewer than 3,500 a game.
What happened? Interviews with coach Pam Borton, athletic director Joel Maturi, former players, high school coaches and prominent local AAU officials offered theories that focus on coaching, recruiting failures and the cyclical nature of success, especially when the Final Four came on the backs of All-Americas Lindsay Whalen and Janel McCarville.
The program's central figure is Borton, now in her ninth season at Minnesota after succeeding Brenda Frese in 2002-03. Her coaching drew early accolades as she led the Gophers to a pair of Sweet 16 berths sandwiched around the Final Four in her first three seasons.
The start of the downward spiral is easy to pinpoint. Explaining the events that led to it is more difficult.
It began in the 2005-06 season, when a deep, talented Gophers team started 17-4, then lost six of its final eight games, including a first-round NCAA tournament game to Washington. At the end of the season five Gophers quit the team in a span of 13 days, and Borton's coaching style became the focus of an internal university investigation that ultimately cited a communications failure with her players. Details of the investigation never have been released, despite requests by the Star Tribune.
The Gophers were 93-27 under Borton through Feb. 5, 2006. They are 84-79 since, with one NCAA tournament victory.
The five defectors included two of the state's best post-Whalen players: Jamie Broback and Liz Podominick, both of whom would have been seniors in 2006-07. Also leaving were three core players who had just finished their sophomore seasons: guard Brittney Davis and centers Natasha Williams and Lauren Lacey.
"We're still feeling the effects of that, absolutely," Borton said. "I think we were able to patch and band-aid the program to get back to the NCAAs for a while. But those were talented players."
Two years after the investigation, and after getting the Gophers back into the NCAA field in 2008, Borton's patchwork resulted in a contract extension that runs through 2014. The contract paid her more than $547,000 last year and includes a buyout deduced by multiplying base pay times the years remaining on the contract; the buyout currently is more than $1 million.
Maturi said he will evaluate Borton at the end of the season, as he does the coaches of every sport. He remains a staunch supporter.
"I expect her to be back," Maturi said. "She's always been a good coach -- I don't think that has changed. ... I think, like a lot of competitive coaches, sometimes she didn't handle losing as well as maybe she should have. And I think she's done it much better lately, and I think that will pay dividends in the long run."
But the promise of a better future can't mask the present reality.
"It's just a shame that it's gone downhill so bad," said former North Tartan AAU director Bob Myers, whose program sent numerous players to the Gophers and other Division I schools. "I feel so bad. ... I feel like all the effort we put out over the years has gone for naught."
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The five players who left the program five seasons ago mostly have remained silent about their reasons. Only one, Williams, agreed to be interviewed for this story.
Silence appears to be a common trait among former Gophers. The Star Tribune put out interview requests to 17 ex-players, and only three agreed to talk about the program. Those declining included Whalen and McCarville, who received e-mails while playing overseas but said they preferred not to comment.
Borton said she's not sure what to make of the numbers and said she keeps in touch with most of her former players. Maturi said he suspects recent losing seasons have left some former players bitter.
"I do think I know the character of people, and Pam Borton has a good core to her," he said. "She does care about those kids, and I think that sometimes young people don't always respond as well as you would like to some of the criticism, or some of the harshness. ... When you equate that with not being as successful as you would like it to be, then it becomes an issue."
Certainly not all former players have distanced themselves from the program.
"I have been out of college for three years now, but I know that if I needed anything, I could call up Coach Borton and she would try to help me in whatever way she could," Leslie Knight, who plays professionally in Spain, said in an e-mail.
What happened in 2006 to so indelibly divide the program between its glory years and its slide to the bottom of the Big Ten? Williams, who went on to play two seasons at DePaul, described a team in turmoil, saying it became "this group versus that group, cliques. ... It was just not a good basketball climate, so to speak.
"When a coach can't communicate on any level, it kind of makes it tough to keep a team going. Everything became a chore. The fun was out of it."
Bolden, a member of the Final Four team and a senior in 2005-06, said she was aware that "certain players had difficulty with Pam." But Bolden also said that some of the players on that team had problems of their own and that it would be a mistake to blame Borton for everything that went wrong.
"I think the biggest thing is, when you win, everyone is happy; when you lose, people are not happy," Bolden said. "When it started to unravel, I don't think it was one specific thing. I think it unraveled on both sides."
Borton acknowledged that the 2005-06 team was fractured. She said the split was between veteran players who had experienced success and young players who might have been more talented and chafed at having to wait for their chance.
Borton said she learned from the experience, describing herself as "way more patient," and that she has continued to learn during the downturn that followed. Gophers junior Kiara Buford said she has seen changes in Borton in her three seasons at Minnesota.
"I know after last year she worked a lot on her coaching, and I see little things, most of it off the court," Buford said. "The communication between the players and the coaching staff has been great, and I think it's helped us stick together."
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If Borton had any chance to overcome the effects of the defections of 2006, it required a succession of stellar recruiting classes. And that didn't happen.
Some blame her for being a poor judge of talent. Others blame her for failing to attract top in-state talent. Her critics also point out that Whalen and McCarville were already at Minnesota when she arrived.
Tayler Hill, a Minneapolis South alum and one of the state's all-time best high school players, chose Ohio State in 2009 because of the lack of talent on Minnesota's roster, according to her father, Paul. Hill, a sophomore, has been a two-year starter on an OSU team that had won six consecutive Big Ten titles before this season.
"[Borton's] not getting the right kids in there, the top-quality kids," Paul Hill said.
Bill Larson, who succeeded Myers as North Tartan coach, said he believes that after reaching the Final Four, Borton switched her recruiting focus to outside Minnesota.
"They held off [offering] kids, and didn't spend as much time with them as they grew in their freshman and sophomore seasons," Larson said. "They were out scouting kids in Virginia, Texas, California. With girls, especially, recruiting is a relationship base, and I feel they lost that relationship base with our program."
Borton disagrees, saying she signed at least one Minnesota player every year on the heels of the Final Four, between 2004 and 2006. She does believe the national exposure from NCAA tournaments gave her a broader recruiting base, yielding such players as Williams, Lacey and Davis, if only briefly.
Larson said that Borton in recent years has refocused on Minnesota, building relationships that helped her land two prized recruits for next season: Rachel Banham of Lakeville North and Kayla Hirt of Bemidji. And the state's class of sophomores is considered the best in several years.
"To me, [success] gets down to recruiting," Hopkins coach Brian Cosgriff said. "She's had a couple off years. ... But she's got good people coming in, and she's going after the right people in Minnesota. I think she'll get it back."
But can Borton win back the fans? The drop in attendance the past three seasons has been precipitous, from 5,833 in 2008-09 to 4,347 a year ago to 3,476 this season.
Membership in the Fast Break booster club stood at 528 during the Final Four run but has slipped below 400 this season, according to club president Gary Cohen.
One of those who left is former board member Myron Berg, who said he grew frustrated by Borton's recruiting.
"She referred to her program as an elite program [after the Final Four run], and she should have been able to use that to recruit," he said. "She had her chance, a big chance."
Maturi said it's important to remember that even a year ago Minnesota's average attendance was No. 20 nationally among women's teams. He describes the drop-off as going from "the top of the mountain" to being more commonplace. And a 34 percent increase in season-ticket prices after the Final Four, followed by the economic downturn, certainly has affected attendance.
It's also true that with a few exceptions, such as Connecticut and Tennessee, women's basketball programs run at a financial deficit. But Maturi clearly has high expectations for basketball, calling it the "flagship program" for women's athletics.
"No question, it hurts," Maturi said of declining attendance and financial losses. "I think that we have to appreciate the phenomena that was created by the players [in 2004], and the success that we had, and find a way to get some of that back."
