Reusse: Gophers legend Janel McCarville bringing world experience to high school basketball

STEVENS POINT, WIS. – This is a city of more than 25,000 people with one public high school. The district also serves smaller outposts in the region and is known to all as SPASH, as in, Stevens Point Area Senior High.

Janel McCarville’s address was Custer, a dot on the map 7 miles from Stevens Point. “Three bars and a post office, that’s Custer,” she said.

McCarville, now a member of the SPASH Athletic Hall of Fame as a basketball player, was recruited for the University of Minnesota by coach Cheryl Littlejohn. “Cheryl was on me from the get-go, the first major school to offer me,” McCarville said. “I appreciated that.”

Littlejohn was not around to be rewarded for her confidence in McCarville. Littlejohn was fired at the end of the 2000-01 season and replaced by Brenda Frese (then Oldfield).

“Brenda called me and said, ‘The scholarship is still yours,’ and I said, ‘I’ll be there,‘” McCarville said.

Frese would stay one season and head for Maryland. McCarville would be in the middle of a four-year run that still stands unchallenged as the most unforgettable for Gophers women’s basketball in its half-century.

McCarville would leave Minnesota as the WNBA’s No. 1 draft choice to the Charlotte Sting in 2005. She would play 11 seasons in that league; three of those with the Lynx, including the 2013 championship.

More dramatically, she played internationally from 2006 to 2016 in Slovakia, Russia (Moscow), Italy, Turkey, Poland, China, Turkey again, and then went to Stockholm in 2017 with urging from Gophers teammate Kadidja Andersson.

“I was the MVP there in 2020; started coaching, too, and finished in 2022,” McCarville said.

After this world traveling, she’s back on the family hobby farm outside Custer, living with her father Terry, and collecting $5,000 to serve as the head coach of the SPASH Panthers.

“That’s not bad,” McCarville said. “That’s double what I was collecting to coach the junior varsity when I first got involved with our girls program three years ago.”

A week ago on Saturday, I was in Stevens Point to watch McCarville’s team take on Eau Claire North for a regional title in Division 1 (the largest for Wisconsin schools).

McCarville issues the players a three-ring binder to start the season that’s part playbook, part guidelines, part motivational messages. It can be expanded as new plays and defenses prove effective.

The Panthers had gone 10-0 to win their conference. They were the No. 1 seed in the region. At noon on this Saturday, there was a shootaround and a film session featuring a North game.

McCarville pointed out strengths and weaknesses. “One, 3 and 20, those are the shooters,” the coach said. “They want to shoot.”

The pregame includes McCarville selecting a player to go a white board and draw up the action on a play the coach has selected. This day’s victim was Leah Awe, a freshman with a big future, but seemingly shy.

Her teammates hooted gently at Awe’s predicament. She came close enough to drawing it accurately to get mild approval from McCarville.

Jada Seubert is a sophomore guard and being recruited by Big Ten-level teams. What’s her opinion of this coach with a big-league background?

“I do like the hard coaching she does because it comes with encouragement,” Seubert said. “It’s positive — fix this and it will be all right.”

Lindsey Weiler is a senior and also will be playing college basketball. “I really like her,” she said. “Even if you do something wrong, what you’re told will be constructive.”

McCarville is known for more than being the co-star with Lindsay Whalen on the Gophers’ 2004 Final Four team. She is known by all as one of the great characters to come through Gophers women’s athletics in this century.

McCarville was known to bum a car from a teammate — Kelly Roysland included — for a postgame trip to Mystic Lake to play some cards.

This was mentioned to Whalen on Friday and she said: “Janel does like playing cards, but not quite as much as basketball.”

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Thus, this is the pregame ritual for home games for McCarville and her three male assistants — Joe Seubert, Joe Titus and Dan Wierzba:

A card game, in the equipment room, requiring four folding chairs for the participants and another in the middle to serve as the table.

“Simple game: Seven Up, Seven Down,” McCarville said. ”Cards coming out."

Two games, light taunting, McCarville keeping everyone’s total, and happily winning the second game.

Wierzba, the top assistant, had asked for a minute earlier and said to me:

“When I first heard Janel was going to be the head coach, I thought, ‘No. 1 pick, played all over the world … she’ll probably think she’s too good for this.’

“That was 100 percent wrong. Janel is fantastic. From the low-level player to the top player, she is working to make her a better player, and better for their life in general.”

The Panthers put McCarville’s positive attitude to a test in the first half vs. North. They were outscored 14-2 in the final four minutes to fall behind 37-25 at the half. The final 30 seconds included SPASH missing five shots within 3 feet in a 15-second sequence.

McCarville remained outwardly calm. Then, with great defense led by ball-hawking freshman Awe, the Panthers came back for a 67-60 victory.

That outward calmness at halftime was mentioned to the coach later.

“Doesn’t do any good to go in the locker room and tell players, ‘You’re terrible,‘” McCarville said. “What I said was, ‘They played as well as they can that half. Does anyone think that’s as well as we can play?‘”

It wasn’t. On to Division 1’s Sweet 16 on Thursday night went the Panthers. They lost 75-72 when Appleton East’s Ella Sweeney — another highly recruited sophomore — banked in a 35-foot shot at the overtime buzzer.

“It was a tough way to go out,” McCarville offered by text. “Our girls really competed.”