ENJOY YOUR PARTICIPATION TROPHY.

Northern Illinois University's women's basketball team got off to a good start last November, and despite reverting to their usual form during conference play received an invitation to a tournament held at Transylvania University in Kentucky, where they lost three games.

That is the nature of a three round, eight team tournament, one team will finish 3-0, another 0-3, and three each will finish 2-1 and 1-2.  That happens.  The way sailing coaches at Lake Geneva, where future Olympians and America's Cups are always a possibility, describe what happens to the developing sailors who get schooled at regatta is "they learned a lot."

Northern Illinois, maybe not so much.

"Nobody is going to be able to take away the fact that we beat some teams that are still alive in the postseason," said [head coach Lisa] Carlsen. "We had wins against Ball State, Bowling Green and Richmond that are all still in the WNIT. We beat the Mid-American Conference champions Toledo who won their first NCAA Tournament game. That's something this program can hang their hat on. Our seniors have put us in a position of understanding and raising the expectations of this program, along with all they've done statistically, and those are things I'm really proud of."

That sounds like shining up the participation trophy.  If, as the coach has sometimes noted during broadcast interviews, that's a squad of Type A personalities, if the sentiment on the trip back to DeKalb and at subsequent social gatherings is anything other than that they fell short in ways great or small of being able to win more conference games and qualify for one of those other tournaments, the expectations for the upcoming season will be more of the same.

The tournament was the lowlights of the season in microcosm.  Georgia Southern: fall far behind early, never catch up.  I've sometimes heard the coach talking about other teams having "length and athleticism" after something like that happens.  Case in point: two regular season losses to Miami of Ohio, whose season ended on the first day of the conference tournament.  If one can identify the qualities of length and athleticism, one can recruit for that.  It's not as if playing for Miami is a better value proposition than playing in any other Mid-American program, and Miami might offer stronger academics.  (For a quick course in length and athleticism, see Purdue's quick exit from March Madness.  Big man Zach Edey has the length but one of the basketball pundits I dipped into the same night I discovered Matt Walsh has a radio show had Purdue out to Memphis in the first weekend because Memphis had forwards with more maneuvering skills.  So much for sports punditry as Florida Atlantic took care first of Memphis and then of Farleigh Dickinson.)  North Dakota: fall behind, take a second half lead, go ahead by nine in the fourth quarter, then give all of it up and scramble to salvage overtime.  That giving leads away script has been a thing for years, and a previously winless Southern Illinois-Edwardsville carried it off in December, a harbinger of things to come.  Illinois-Chicago: fall behind early, and those kids know how to play defense.

Personnel is policy, and it appears the policy at Northern Illinois is middling mediocrity in the most middling mid-major Mid American.  Not the kind of value proposition to get more butts in seats.