The King's College Lady Monarchs booked their tickets to a women's NCAA Division III Sweet 16 game this weekend against Emmanuel in Amherst, Mass. But senior forward Paige Carlin, the team's leading scorer (11.4 ppg), already had tickets—to Cancun for Spring Break. This is going dancing in the original sense of the phrase.
Carlin left for Mexico on Sunday, a day after King's College pulled out a 64-63 win against William Paterson to advance in the tournament. Since then, the local paper reports, Carlin's name has been scrubbed from the roster, not that anyone at King's College seems to give a hoot:
[I]t has been learned that [coach Brian] Donoghue, along with Carlin's teammates, were not informed of Carlin's decision until after the fact.
"We're not letting it be a distraction," Donaghue said. "We'll be fine."
And they probably will be. Carlin had seen her playing time cut dramatically during the tournament. She played all of 10 scoreless minutes in her team's comeback over William Paterson, during which another Lady Monarch tied a tournament record with nine three-pointers.
But before we blast Carlin for being a bad teammate, look at it this way: She knows she's not going pro. It's her last year. Maybe she got tired of basketball. At some point, we all make a similar calculation. Do you want to spend your senior spring in flip-flops doing body shots in the Caribbean or do you want to sit on a bench in rural Massachusetts?
The NCAA will be the first to tell you that most of their 400,000 "student-athletes" go pro in something else. Not sure whether they meant foam-dancing in Mexico.
King's leading scorer picks spring break over tournament [The Citizens' Voice]