Around the time the St. John’s women’s basketball team lost to Villanova and Marquette by a combined 39 points in February, head coach Joe Tartamella had a question for Kadaja Bailey.
A fifth-year senior, Bailey hadn’t played in an NCAA Tournament her entire collegiate career.
Momentum from the Red Storm’s 13-0 start, which allowed them to temporarily tack a top-25 ranking next to their name, had started to slip away.
So Tartamella asked Bailey a question: “What do you want your legacy to be?”
Her response materialized across the Red Storm’s next game, a 69-64 win over then-No. 4 Connecticut, which directly led to St. John’s (22-8, 13-7 Big East) clinching its first NCAA Tournament berth since 2015-16.
Bailey scored 20 points in that Feb. 21 game against the Huskies, and Jayla Everett, a graduate transfer, added 17.
The past and the present of the Red Storm had meshed together.
An at-large bid that was “not a fluke for them” followed, Tartamella said Monday from Taffner Field House.
“It was the last chance for [Bailey] to really show she could be a winner,” Tartamella said, “and I think she did that. … I don’t know if we’ll see another one like her in the way that the landscape is now, but just for someone who’s been loyal, someone who’s grown up here, someone who’s matured tremendously here, it’s exciting to see her have this chance to be out there [in the NCAA Tournament] as her final chapter.”
When the Red Storm face Purdue on Thursday in the First Four (7 p.m.; ESPN2) at Value City Arena in Columbus, Ohio, it will mark their fourth NCAA Tournament appearance under Tartamella, who started with the program as a graduate assistant in 2002.
“Obviously, you always dream about making the tournament, seeing your name across the screen, and that’s been the main thing for us this year,” graduate-student forward Danielle Patterson said. “That’s what we’ve been saying around the locker room, just keeping the main thing the main thing.”
St. John’s had positioned itself for a potential at-large tournament berth in 2019-20, but the event was canceled when the season suddenly stopped because of COVID-19.
Two losing seasons that “lacked emotion” followed, and were tough for Tartamella to watch.
He needed a spark, and his solution included recruiting three transfers.
There was Everett, the former four-star guard who had played at Pittsburgh (she was dismissed from the program) and New Mexico.
There was Mimi Reid from Mississippi and Jillian Archer from Georgetown.
Each became a starter for St. John’s, averaging 15.8, 5.7 and 7.3 points per game, respectively.
Tartamella called them “three home runs,” and after the last two campaigns, he wouldn’t settle for anything less.
“We have a great group of girls here, and I think that’s something that’s changed,” Patterson said. “We all want the same thing for each other, and we all want to win and we all want to have fun doing it. So if we’re on the right track and we’re doing that, we’ve having fun, that’s when we see the most success.”