LOUISVILLE, Ky. (WDRB) — There are coaches who would sell a cousin, a golf membership and half a summer vacation for the right to open the NCAA Tournament at home.
Jeff Walz got it and reacted like a man who had just been handed a slightly cursed heirloom.
Yes, the Louisville women are hosting Vermont in their NCAA Tournament opener Saturday at noon.Â
Yes, they are a No. 3 seed. Yes, the first and second rounds will be played in the friendly confines of the KFC Yum! Center, where the seats are familiar, the rims are friendly and the crowd will arrive wearing red ready to rumble.
And yes, Walz has decided his team is checking into a hotel anyway.
Louisville | Kentucky | Indiana | Eric Crawford
Not in Nashville. Not in Knoxville. Not in some anonymous airport Marriott where the ice machine groans all night. No, Louisville will go to a hotel in its own city so Walz can make a home game feel like a road game.
This is either genius or the kind of thing a man cooks up on one too many late-night drives home from a loss.
Probably both.
"Now, with the way we've played at home this year, I'm not sure it's good," Walz said, which is about as close as a coach gets to saying his team has been treating its own building like a haunted house. "So we will actually make this a road game."
Of Louisville's seven losses, five have come at home. The other two came on neutral courts. In other words, the Cardinals have spent this season behaving like tourists in their own living room.
So Walz, who has been doing this long enough to know that March is less a basketball tournament than a three-week exercise in nerve management, has decided to take away the slippers and the sofa.
He wants key cards. He wants bed checks. He wants his players to wake up and feel like this is a business trip, even if the trip requires little more than a left turn and a traffic light.
It is the sort of move that sounds funny until you think about it for a second, and then sounds exactly like the sort of thing a coach ought to do when his team has gone 27-7, earned a top-16 seed, and still managed to make home court feel like an unsolved riddle.
Louisville will open against Vermont, which is not coming to town to admire the local bourbon selection or the skyline. The Catamounts are 27-7 themselves, winners of the America East, and have taken eight of their last nine. They are the kind of team every high seed insists it respects, and every high seed should. In March, every team has a sermon and a suitcase. Some also bring upset ideas.
Walz, to his credit, was not interested in any of the silk-stocking nonsense that can creep into Selection Sunday. He was not talking like a man polishing a seed line and admiring the bracket. He was talking like a mechanic who heard something in the engine and wanted the hood up immediately.
He said Louisville spent the past week looking at the ACC Tournament championship game loss, a game he said his team "should have won" and "gave away." There are coaches who prefer not to disturb the crime scene. Walz dragged out the tape, pointed at the fingerprints and made everybody look.
Then he went to work on the part of basketball that decides whether March becomes memory or misery: the last three minutes.
End-of-game situations. Special situations. Who goes where. Who does what. Who keeps their head when the crowd is losing its own. Louisville has spent the last several days drilling those moments, because close games in March do not ask whether you are talented. They ask whether you remember your lines when the stage catches fire.
And if there is one thing Walz knows, it is that his program has reached the point where success can start to feel routine to the people living inside it.
That is dangerous.
"The opportunity to host and be a 3-seed," he said, "it's nothing to look past. You look at it and think it's normal. It's hard. What we've been able to do here for 19 years is pretty damn hard, but we've made it look easy."
That, right there, is the coach's dilemma in a successful place. Do something often enough and people start treating it like mail delivery. Another March. Another bracket. Another top seed. Another banner to hang if all goes well.
But Walz has seen enough tournaments to know that March is no place for assumptions, and home court is no use to you if you treat it like a recliner.
So Louisville will go to a hotel. The players will pack bags for a game in their own city. They will leave home in order to appreciate home.
Laura Ziegler, who is about to experience her first NCAA Tournament, sounded entirely on board.
"We know it's a business," she said. "We've got to win games. Focus on the game. I love that we're staying in a hotel, because we play so well on the road."
That may be the most revealing line of the night. Louisville has become a team that likes to put its shoes on somewhere else before coming back to play.
Fine. March has seen stranger things — coaches who wore the same tie through six straight wins, players who refused to change socks or step on logos before tipoff. Compared to that, a hotel across town is practically science.
Maybe it works. Maybe the Cardinals walk into the Yum! Center on Saturday feeling less like hosts and more like invaders. Maybe that edge matters. Maybe the whole thing is silly.
March often is.
But Walz is not coaching for applause lines. He is coaching to survive and advance.
Louisville's address this week will still be Louisville. Its mindset, Walz hopes, will be somewhere else entirely.
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