A Jeff Walz-led women’s basketball program won’t have two things: practices for longer than two hours — “I don’t have the attention span to do that,” he said — and short Christmas breaks.
Getting five days off for Christmas causes his Louisville team to lose a day of practice, but Walz doesn’t mind. The U of L coach learned the importance of rest and reset while he was an assistant at Maryland. One year, the team had a quick turnaround between games during the holidays, which prevented center Aurelie Noirez from going home to France.
By February, Walz said he noticed a difference in Noirez, which he attributed to homesickness and not getting to reset by being around her family at Christmastime.
“It was like, oh, my God, we would have been better off having her miss that game on the 22nd, go home on the 18th, see her family, get a chance to be at home and then come back refreshed,” Walz said. “That’s kind of when I learned, OK, it’s great to get practice time in. I love it. But, I’d rather have kids come back refreshed and excited to be here. So, that’s when I took that approach, and we’ve been doing it here ever since.”
Walz’s strategy has proven successful for the Cardinals. They have a knack for peaking toward the end of the season and making deep postseason runs. Currently first in the ACC standings and projected as a No. 3 seed in ESPN’s latest bracketology, No. 12 Louisville (18-3, 7-1 ACC) will look to keep the trend going with a loaded final month of the regular season.
Staying in first place won’t come without its challenges, though.
With 10 games left to play in the regular season, the Cardinals are scheduled to face four ranked teams. Because of home-and-home series, six of those games will be top-25 matchups. Louisville had five top-25 matchups the previous 21 games. Three of Louisville’s upcoming opponents are in the top five of the league standings: 23rd-ranked Syracuse is second, fifth-ranked N.C. State is fifth and 18th-ranked Virginia Tech is third.
The 10-game slate begins with the Orange at 7 p.m. Thursday at the KFC Yum! Center. U of L then plays at N.C. State in a Monday night matchup before hosting No. 16 Notre Dame on Feb. 8 and going to Syracuse on Feb. 11.
Over the last 10 years, Walz has led Louisville to a 58-15 record and never has lost more than two games in a season during February. That winning mark has propelled the Cardinals to two trips to the Final Four, six trips to the Elite Eight and eight Sweet 16 appearances. Louisville also has won an ACC Tournament championship and at least a share of four regular-season conference titles (Louisville and Notre Dame were co-champions in 2018-19). The Cardinals are the only program that has advanced to the Elite Eight five consecutive times and are eyeing their sixth appearance this season.
“Over the past 15 years, I’d put us up there with just about anybody,” Walz said. “I think we’ve had some teams that people didn’t expect us to go as far as we have. It’s really important to get your players to believe they can do more than what everybody else thinks they can.”
Louisville guard Merissah Russell has been part of four Elite Eight and one Final Four appearances. Russell said she often has thought about the Cardinals’ ability to peak at the right time. When asked about it, she called Walz “an evil genius and mastermind” and credited him with motivating players to be at their best during the most important time of the season.
“He just knows how to push buttons that you don’t even know that you have in you,” Russell said. “… We want to get better. We want to play hard for each other. So that’s why you see such a great change and a great increase in our abilities over the season.
“You want to peak around this time. We want to do really well with the later stretch of the season. I think we’re doing so right now.”
Reach Louisville football, women’s basketball and baseball beat writer Alexis Cubit at [email protected] and follow her on X at @Alexis_Cubit.