Oklahoma State Women Lose Tennis Title, Still Win

I started thinking at some point on Tuesday about how it really didn’t matter if OSU’s women’s tennis team beat Stanford to take home its first NCAA Championship. The reason, we can extrapolate, is the same reason it doesn’t matter if you won your B League Quickball title game when you were playing intramurals at Oklahoma State.

That is, the fact that you went on a two or three-week ride with lifelong friends with whom you can discuss that two or three-week ride for the rest of your lives is the actual trophy in lieu of the amalgamation of metal some NCAA administrator hands out after the competition is over.

I was actually thinking about this after I read Zack Robinson’s (the other one) piece on the 2006 NCAA Golf Championships. Here’s how he ended that post:

It is a week we will remember for the rest of our lives.

OSU’s women’s tennis coach Chris Young echoed that statement after his Cowgirls fell 4-3 to Stanford in Tulsa on Tuesday in a match that came down to, well, the final match.

“What a day,” Young told the AP. “For Oklahoma State to be in this position, in Tulsa, to have so many (fans) come support us, just means so much to us. We’re not supposed to be here. But we fought as hard as we possibly could, these girls gave me everything they had, and I think there’s two champions out here today.”

If that sounds like some “it’s 2016 and we’re all winners because there are no losers” BS, it’s not. It’s a real thing. We as a culture value winning titles disproportionally. I’ll ride for that ideology forever.

You see it in golf all the time. Rickie Fowler goes top five in four straight majors and all of a sudden he’s the most overrated player on the planet because he didn’t take home a trophy. What?

What about the utter thrill of being in the mix at an Open Championship? What about the feeling of getting your heart cut out by Rory McIlroy at a PGA? Does it feel good in the moment? Of course not, but those are the tournaments you remember and talk about 45 years from now. Those are moments.

Young continues talking about OSU’s loss on Tuesday.

“Stanford deserves all the credit, I would never take anything away from them,” Young said. “That’s who you want to play; we gave them all we had.”

I don’t mean to turn this into a lecture on the importance of competition, but I think it’s awesome that that team had that experience. So do its members.

“(The crowd) is something I’ll always love about Oklahoma State because we are all one big family,” Katarina Adamovic told the O’Colly. “I can’t be more proud that I choose to come share it with these people.

“It has been great; you share these moments with people that you spend every day for the past couple of years with,” Adamovic said. “We played our hearts out this week. I am so proud to be a part of this team.”

Young capped it off with the quote of the week. A quote he no doubt believes and would never take back. And this is the thesis for NCAA sports. This is why it might be OK that football and hoops subsidize the other 15 sports. This is why one of my buddies texted me on a Tuesday afternoon in the middle of May and said, “Why do I care so much about women’s tennis right now?!”

The answer: Because the people playing it have never cared about anything more in their entire lives.

“Inside, I tried to stay as solid as I could for the kids, but I loved every minute of it,” Coach Young said.

“I’ll remember this week for the rest of my life.”