Embracing the Parity
Ben Kane
The lights will dim.
The crowd will go silent.
All eyes will go up to the sky at Kaplan Arena.
For William & Mary, it’s a day to celebrate, yet a constant reminder.
Over the past 10 years, teams from seven different schools have been crowned CAA Women’s Basketball Champions. With the 2024-25 CAA Championship banner set to go up into the rafters for the Tribe, the monogrammed piece of fabric serves as a constant reminder of just how difficult it is to repeat in this conference.
“We know what we want,” William & Mary Head Coach Erin Dickerson Davis said.
“We know what we’re working towards, and we know the experience that we need to be able to do that.”
Since 2018, when Elon went back-to-back, no team has won two consecutive championships in the CAA. With tough competition from top to bottom, combined with the ever-changing landscape of college athletics, the idea of ‘repeating’ is becoming increasingly fictional.
What makes it more difficult is the unpredictability within the conference.
“Within this conference, these numbers [seeds] are just that - numbers,” Towson Head Coach Laura Harper said.
“I don’t want to play anyone in our conference because everybody in this conference can beat you on any given day,” Charleston Head Coach Robin Harmony said. “You take somebody lightly, you get a lesson.”
Charleston, North Carolina A&T and Campbell all placed inside the top 160 of the NCAA NET rankings in 2024-25.
Who’s missing from that top-three list? Defending champs William & Mary, which ranked eighth in the conference with a 263 rank.
Flashback to 2024 when Drexel won the title, the Dragons were fifth amongst CAA teams in the NET. When Monmouth won in 2023, the Hawks were seventh.
It’s tough to think that the past three champions were ranked so low at the end of the season, but when you look at their seeds in the CAA tournament, things look a little clearer.
The ninth-seeded Tribe was the lowest seed to win a title in conference history, while the two before that were both seeded seventh.
“We were the ninth seed in the tournament," William & Mary junior guard Cassidy Geddes said. “There was just a lot of potential we left during the regular season.”
“I still feel like an underdog going out there to prove that this wasn’t a fluke.”
There’s talent all across the conference that is primed for a breakout campaign. The 2024-25 season saw Charleston set a program record with 25 wins, while North Carolina A&T claimed the regular-season title in its third year as a CAA member. Campbell and William & Mary won their first postseason games in the WNIT and NCAA, respectively.
So when the lights go dim and the crowd goes silent, the Tribe can look up at that monogrammed piece of fabric and soak it in for a moment - but then it’s back to work.
“It’s extraordinarily hard to do [repeat in the CAA],” Dickerson Davis said.
“But that doesn’t mean it’s not possible.”