Rutgers women's basketball coach C. Vivian Stringer stays focused after her team learns its NCAA Tournament seeding Monday night.All across the country, college coaches were furious when they didn’t see their schools’ names pop up in the brackets this week. But it wasn’t the absence of Rutgers that angered C. Vivian Stringer.
It was the absence of any discussion of Rutgers. The name appeared on the screen Monday night, as it has in nine straight NCAA Tournaments, but that was it.
No sizing up the Scarlet Knights' chances. No talk of a Final Four appearance. Nothing else.
"I don't want anybody to ever say 'The Road to the Final Four' and not say Rutgers," Stringer said. "Now they don't even mention our name (as a contender). I don't like that. But it's not enough for me not to like that.
"I have to do something about that."
Stringer is a Hall of Fame coach with something to prove. She turns 63 today, an ill-timed birthday for a woman in her profession. Every year that passes, more of her contemporaries vanish from the sport, tired of the grind that comes with running a big-time program.
She has coached now for 40 years, longer than any active men's or women's coach at the Division 1 level, but that isn't necessarily something she wants to advertise. Success is a positive, but longevity — read: age — can be used by opposing coaches against a rival on the recruiting trail.
But in a 45-minute interview Tuesday as her Scarlet Knights prepare for a first-round game Sunday against Louisiana Tech, Stringer made it clear she has no intention of leaving her office anytime soon.
"I think about it," Stringer said of retirement. "But as long as I have people around me that are as hungry and as driven as I am, I can't imagine when I'd ever quit. I feel like a 16-year-old. I'm up. I'm ready."
Is her team? Four years ago, Rutgers came within one game of winning the national championship. The 59-46 loss to national power Tennessee stung, but with one of the best recruiting classes in the country coming, the moment was supposed to announce her program as one of the elite.
Rutgers won 27 games that year and 27 the next, but dropped to 21, and then 19, and now 19 again. In the NCAA Tournament, the program has taken a similar tumble, from the national title game, to the Elite Eight, to the Sweet 16 and to a first-round loss last season.
The Scarlet Knights had pulled even with Connecticut in that 2006-07 season, but now the Huskies have lapped them — and, for that matter, everyone else. Stringer believes people would appreciate what Geno Auriemma has done more “if we had other great teams.” But wasn’t Rutgers supposed to be that team?
Stringer has built a good program in Piscataway, but to be an elite one, it needs to be a Final Four contender every year. Few teams reach that level. She understands this, and trying to get there drives her.
"If Geno doesn't go to the Final Four, they say, 'Wow, he really messed up this year,' " Stringer said "And I wouldn't mind that. I'm upset that we don't maintain that. People can't expect more of me than I expect from myself."
Few expect this team to make a deep run. There was a point this season when Stringer worried if her tendency to over-schedule would keep this team out of the tournament entirely, but a late-season run has her believing her seventh-seeded team could pull a surprise.
But that's not what she aspires to, of course, because the best programs sneak up on no one. They are the ones everyone is talking about when those tournament brackets first appear.
Four years ago, that was Rutgers. Now, no one is talking about Rutgers, and that eats at Stringer. Forty years into her Hall of Fame career, with no sign of stepping aside, she is the only one who can change that.
Steve Politi: spoliti@starledger.com; Twitter.com/NJ_StevePoliti