When Jenny Mowe watched the Oregon Ducks women’s basketball team make school history last week at the NCAA tournament, she understood the accomplishment at a level no mere fan could.

Mowe had been there.

She was on the court, clad in the Ducks’ yellow and green, when Oregon very nearly achieved what this year’s team finally did.

The Ducks upset No. 2 seed Duke on Monday to advance to the Sweet 16 round for the first time.

Oregon plays No. 3 seed Maryland Saturday morning at 8:30. The game will be televised on ESPN.

Mowe moved to Baker City in 2007 with her husband, Loran Joseph, who’s a 1998 BHS graduate. Mowe was a star 6-foot-5 center for the Ducks from 1997 to 2001. Oregon advanced to the NCAA tournament in each of Mowe’s four years (she missed most of the 1997-98 season after suffering a knee injury).

In two of those tournaments, 1997 and 1999, the Ducks won their first-round game but lost in the round of 32.

Mowe remembers well how disappointing those two losses were.

But she’s also thrilled by the success of this year’s team.

“I’m super stoked that they finally got there (to the Sweet 16),” Mowe said Thursday morning while taking a brief break from preparing treats at her business, Sweet Wife Baking. “It’s really good to see the program excelling. I’m excited for their next game.”

Mowe, 39, has a connection to Baker City that actually predates her successful college career in Eugene and as a professional in the Women’s National Basketball Association (WNBA), where she played for three years, including two with the Portland Fire.

In 1995, as a high school junior, she led the Powers Cruisers to the Class 1A state championship at Baker High School. The next year Powers finished second.

Mowe said she has followed the Ducks “pretty closely” since she graduated in 2001. She was the 20th pick in the WNBA draft that year. Mowe was the first Oregon player ever drafted in the WNBA, and no Duck has been picked earlier in the draft. (Oregon’s Jillian Alleyne was the 20th pick in the 2016 draft.)

“You always take an interest in the program and what they’re doing,” she said. “You always want to see them represent.”

The Ducks have had limited success since Mowe graduated.

Before this year’s surprising return, Oregon had advanced to the NCAA tournament just once in the past 15 years — 2005, when the Ducks beat TCU in the first round and lost to Baylor, the eventual national champion, in the second round.

Mowe maintained a connection to her alma mater beyond that of a fan with a natural interest in the team whose uniform she once donned.

She remembers coaching at a youth camp in Eugene about a decade ago and being impressed by a spunky little girl named Lexi Bando, who was from Eugene.

“Bando was always a spitfire from the get go,” Mowe said with a smile.

Today Bando is a junior guard for the Ducks.

Mowe said although she was somewhat surprised that Oregon earned a bid in the NCAA tournament this year, she was confident that the Ducks’ third-year coach, Kelly Graves, would eventually succeed.

“Kelly has really gotten them comfortable,” Mowe said.

The Ducks made it to the semifinals of the Women’s National Invitation Tournament last season.

Mowe, who speaks from the experience of having played in four NCAA tournaments, also thinks this year’s Ducks team has an advantage — a lack of expectations and the pressure that goes along with them.

“These kids don’t know they’re supposed to lose,” she said. “They’re just excited to be on the floor.”

Mowe’s situation was different.

When the Ducks advanced to the NCAA tournament at the end of her freshman year, 1997, Oregon was playing in its fourth straight tourney.

The Ducks beat San Diego State 79-62 in the first round, but then Oregon drew perennial national power Tennessee in the second round.

Twenty years later, Mowe can tick off the names of Tennessee’s top players, such as Kellie Jolly and Chamique Holdsclaw.

The Volunteers beat the Ducks 76-59.

Two years later, in 1999, Oregon again won its opening round game, beating Cincinnati 65-56, but the Ducks lost in the second round, 85-70 to Iowa State.

Mowe, a former head and assistant girls basketball coach at Baker High School, concedes that Oregon’s unprecedented success this year has reminded her of the four NCAA tournaments she played in, and the empty feeling when the Ducks were eliminated short of their goal.

“You always think you should have gone further,” she said. I thought we were a more talented team than we ever got to show.”

See more in the March 24, 2017, issue of the Baker City Herald.