The Nicholls State women’s basketball team took the court to warm up before their game against the top-seeded Central Arkansas in the Southland Conference Tournament, and that is all Plaisance needed to see.

As the eighth seed in the tournament, the Colonels entered the game against Central Arkansas as a heavy underdog, but Plaisance said she was confident.

“This was one of my more surreal moments in coaching,” Plaisance said.

The Colonels have been humble all season, but almost too humble according to Plaisance.  All year, she has been trying to light a fire underneath her squad, and she has been looking for a sense of urgency. It would come and go throughout the season, but at the shoot-around before the game, Plaisance said she started getting “goosepimples,” as she called it, and teary eyed.

The team got through with the drill, and Plaisance called the team together. Plaisance described the scene as the roof coming off of the building, and they were the only ones in there.

Plaisance told her team that they could go back to the hotel and wait on the game, but her kids were so fired up that they wanted to complete the pre-game drills. With Plaisance telling them that they could do whatever they want, the team chose to do everything that they would have normally done.

“Coaching is overrated,” Plaisance said. “The X’s and O’s, at least in my opinion, is the easiest part of this job. For me to figure out what a team’s doing and what we need to do is easy, but the challenge is to get the kids mentally and physically prepared. That’s the task.”

What followed the pre-game warmups was the Colonel’s finest performance of the season. Nicholls set a program and tournament record with 14 three-pointers. However, Plaisance said she was not as enamored by the offensive execution as everyone else was, because she expected it.

“The offensive side of the ball sells tickets because that’s all that the crowd knows, but I was not surprised we were hitting all of these shots,” Plaisance said. “We could do that every night, and it’s almost like when we weren’t doing that I was frustrated. I was like, ‘are you kidding me? We can hit these shots!’ “

She said she was pleased to see, however, that her team played a great defensive ball game, and Plaisance said that the team executed the defensive game plan perfectly. They held the Southland Conference Player of the Year Megan Herbert to zero points in the first half, and that was all by design with their plan of disrupting her shots and bringing more pressure working to perfection.

“We went outside of our element,” Plaisance said. “We’re primarily a matchup zone team, and you’re not running a matchup zone against Central Arkansas. We went 100 percent man with some tweaks to it, because we had to identify with some of their stronger players.”

Perhaps the most memorable highlight of the night for Plaisance was in the post-game press conference. Plaisance said she always wanted the opportunity to show not only her core but the reason for her existence on a big stage, and that night she got to do just that.

“I was able to say, ‘all things are possible through the Lord, Jesus Christ’ in front of cameras and microphones,” Plaisance said. “That is something that we said before every game and every practice. That’s very important to me for people to realize that our intentions are to do things right around here.”

As far as what impact this game has on the program, she said that her first emotions and sentiments went to her kids because of everything that they have been through.

“I could be a little biased in this statement, but I have some of the greatest kids in the country,” Plaisance said. “They work hard, they do the right things, and they are not always jumping for joy with some of the standards that I have them work under, but they do it anyway.”

She said that her emotions not only reached out to her kids but the entire Nicholls community, because she thought it was a great win for the University.

“We’re a diamond in the rough down here on the bayou.”