Landmark win for Bruno, DePaul

Just as he was about to answer a question in a post-game news conference Thursday, Doug Bruno's cell phone rang.

The ringtone made reporters chuckle. It was what else? the DePaul University fight song.

Bruno, the head women's basketball coach at DePaul, probably felt like singing that tune over and over again. It was, after all, a great day to be a DePaul Blue Demon.

Just moments before, Bruno and his Blue Demons put the wraps on the program's biggest victory in school history. We're talking 37 years of basketball here.

Thanks to hot shooting (59.6 percent) and a relentless pressing defense, DePaul stunned visiting Stanford and perhaps much of the world of women's college basketball by rolling to a decisive 91-71 victory over the Cardinal.

Stanford (6-1) is ranked No. 2 in the country in the ESPN/USA Today coaches poll and No. 3 in the country by the Associated Press.

The Blue Demons have never beaten a team ranked higher.

Make no mistake, DePaul has had some wins over ranked teams, such as No. 3 Louisiana Tech in 1996, No. 7 Southern California with Lisa Leslie in the early 1990s, as well as South Carolina, Washington, Western Kentucky, Florida State, Marquette, Rutgers and Notre Dame.

But none of those wins has been so thoroughly, well, thorough.

“There's no question there is an excitement that comes with a win like this,” said Bruno, who was thrilled by the performances of Keisha Hampton and Felicia Chester, who led the way for DePaul with 27 points and a career-high 24 points, respectively. “If you're a coach, you can't do this job without being excited and energized anyway, and I always try to be that every day. But something like this energizes you and excites you even more.

“This is a great win for our team now and it's a big-picture victory, too. It just shows that what we tell recruits will happen actually does happen. It's good for them to see that.”

It's not like this is a total eye-opener, though.

DePaul frequently has a presence in the national rankings and, at 13-1, is ranked No. 22 by the Associated Press and No. 25 by the coaches. From year to year, the Blue Demons also represent themselves well in the rugged Big East, widely considered the toughest league in women's college basketball with power teams such as Connecticut, Notre Dame, Louisville, West Virginia, Pitt and Marquette constantly looming.

“Of course, a win like this is going to get us more respect,” Bruno said. “But it's not like we're walking around thinking that we're second-best to anyone in the first place. We're not recruiting like we're a stepchild, we don't play that way, and we don't carry ourselves that way either. We expect to get victories like this.”

The Blue Demons, however, didn't quite meet expectations the last time they faced Stanford.

It was just last season, almost a year to the day, that the Cardinal handed DePaul a 36-point beating (96-60) in Palo Alto.

But, according to Bruno, who is now in his 25th season at the helm and has the court his players play on named after him, that was the beginning of the beginning for this group of Blue Demons.

“I don't think what happened (on Thursday) could have happened without what happened last year in Palo Alto,” Bruno said. “We had our lunch handed to us, but it put us on the path we're on now.

“We were out there in December and we had a tournament in Las Vegas afterwards. So we didn't come home. We were on break from school so we stayed on the West Coast, did some sight-seeing in San Francisco the Golden Gate Bridge, Fisherman's Wharf, Alcatraz, all that. Then we drove to Vegas.

“It was a 12-day trip, longer than what we've taken on trips to Europe. Our players got very close. That trip did a great thing for team-building that has carried over to today.”

The Blue Demons, who went on to beat No. 6 Florida State at that tournament in Las Vegas last year, were also highly motivated by the Stanford loss, and that carried over too.

“That loss really showed our players what they need to do to play at that level,” Bruno said. “I think it has motivated them every day since.”