Criswell lets go of pressure, ends Chapman career with scoring run

Senior Lucy Criswell struggled on Chapman women’s basketball’s Senior Night Feb. 8, but bounced back by recording more than 20 points in each of her final three games. CLARISSE GUEVARA Staff Photographer

Her box score read zero for nine. Lucy Criswell walked off the floor with only two points to her name in a 65 to 48 loss to Whittier College, having missed all of her nine shots from the field. This Feb. 8 game was Senior Night. Criswell’s family was there. It was supposed to be a triumphant culmination of her Chapman basketball career. Instead, she walked away disappointed.

“Afterwards, I was so tired of feeling like I could be doing so much better and I should be doing so much better and I’m not helping my team at all by this type of performance,” Criswell said. “I was playing so tense. It really wasn’t pressure anybody else was putting on me. It was me feeling scared to disappoint people.”

Last year, head coach Carol Jue noticed that two basketballs, one normal and one weighted, were sitting in one of the team’s lockers, held in place by a lock. She was confused. None of her players would have a weighted ball, she thought. Then, in November, she stumbled upon Criswell opening up the locker.

In her freshman year, Criswell averaged 4.1 points per game, mostly playing center. A former player told Jue while reviewing film that Criswell looked like “a deer in headlights.” Adjustments in the team required Criswell to shift to playing guard more often in her sophomore and junior season, so she began using a weighted basketball to improve her ball handling and shooting.

In her sophomore year, Criswell scored 15.1 points per game and won the Southern California Intercollegiate Athletic Conference Player of the Year Award.

“She never told me, ‘I have these two basketballs,’” Jue said. “You know how they talk about, integrity-wise, do things when other people aren’t looking. And I know a lot of us weren’t looking.”

Criswell, a psychology major, has always had high expectations of herself. She knows it, and Jue knows it too. She overthinks on the court, which makes her hesitate, which makes her miss a couple shots in a row, which makes her get in her head and spiral, which makes her frustrated with herself. It doesn’t help that she’s hyper aware of her statistics – but only when she’s missing.

“She’s harder on herself than I think even the coaching staff is on her. When you’re pressing too hard, you can really mess yourself up,” Jue said. “I wanted to tell her just take it easy. But Lucy is Lucy, and that’s why she’s great.”

With three games left in the 2020 season, the Panthers were already eliminated from the playoffs. Criswell was shooting nearly 10 percent from the field as a senior than she did as a sophomore. Nonetheless, Criswell “came out differently,” she said, in a game against the University of Redlands four days after Senior Night. Chapman lost, but she scored 32 points. In the next game against the University of La Verne, she scored 23. In the final game of the season, she tied a school record for most points in a game with 38 against the California Institute of Technology (Caltech).

“When one of your leaders is in their own head, you don’t know how to play, it’s very confusing. I knew that I had to figure it out not just for myself but for everybody else,” Criswell said. “I think I let go of a lot of pressure that I put on myself, and I played a lot looser than I played, ever.”

The game against Caltech went into triple overtime. With 30 seconds left and Chapman well-poised for victory, Criswell fouled out of the game. As she was walking off the floor, with her friends and family in attendance, it hit her that her career was over. Yet it wasn’t necessarily a sad moment.

“On Senior Night, typically they’ll pull the seniors out with 30 seconds left, a minute left. It was sort of like that,” Criswell said of fouling out of the Caltech game. “(On Senior Night), I was feeling very bad about how I played. So it was sort of like a re-do.”

It was a little bittersweet that she had played so well in her final few games, but couldn’t achieve that level of production earlier in the season. That fact might bug her sometimes, but after some time away from basketball, it sounds like she’s slowly but surely releasing the pressure she’s placed on herself.

“I’m kind of at peace with it,” Criswell said. “I think there’s more I could’ve done and I’ll always feel like that a little bit. Obviously I wish we would’ve made playoffs. I wish things would’ve been a little bit different. At the same time, I think I learned a lot about myself.”