3/9/2021 basketball Edit

Raina Perez joins the ranks of the Wolfpack's Heroes of March

Tim Peeler

The Wolfpacker contributor

What makes basketball’s postseason so special, even in the unusual times we are currently living, is the emergence of unsuspecting heroes.

Add NC State women’s basketball player Raina Perez to the Wolfpack’s list.

In Sunday’s ACC championship game in Greensboro, the fifth-year graduate student had the ball in her hands, ready to pass it to superstar junior center Elissa Cunane to let her take the potential game-winning shot against top-seeded Louisville. Cunane was open for a split second, then double-teamed by Cardinals.

The 5-foot-4 Raina did what Heroes of March do: She seized the chance to be remembered.

NC State Wolfpack women's basketball guard Raina Perez — Perez made the game-winning shot vs. Louisville with 2.1 seconds left. (Ethan Hyman/News & Observer)

Her jumper just beyond elbow fell through the basket with 2.1 seconds remaining, giving head coach Wes Moore’s team its second consecutive conference crown, a program first. The Wolfpack women matched the back-to-back titles the men won in 1973-74 and can match the three straight titles won by the 1954-56 teams with a repeat next year.

That Perez stepped up with such a shot is both remarkable and re-March-able. Last year, the Phoenix, Arizona, native had never even heard of NC State. She was busy leading Cal State-Fullerton in scoring and earning Big West Conference Player of the Year honors. Four years ago, she was a freshman at Northern Arizona.

When Moore called over the summer to see if she might be interested in extending her career to replace reigning ACC Championship MVP Aislinn Konig, Perez didn’t know anything about Moore’s program until her little brother got excited and said, “Call him back, call him back.”

To me, Perez has earned her way into a robust collection of Wolfpack basketball postseason heroes.

Sure, Cunane might be the next workhorse superstar like Chasity Melvin, who carried the Wolfpack Women to its first Final Four in 1998, or David Thompson, the two-time national player-of-the-year who took the men to the school’s first national title.

But just as it was Summer Erb and Tynesha Lewis who helped dispose of second-ranked Old Dominion in the regional semifinals in 1998, Perez will be remembered for putting the Wolfpack Women in position to advance, the way sophomore guard Terry Gannon did when he stole the ball away from towering Virginia senior Ralph Sampson in the 1983 ACC men’s championship game or the way sophomore forward Lorenzo Charles did when he stuffed home Dereck Whittenburg’s missed shot in the NCAA title game.

She’s a hero the same way junior forward Larry Worsley was when he came off the bench as a sixth player in all three games of the 1965 ACC Tournament. The Pack upset Duke in the title game, and Worsley became the first non-starter to win the ACC Tournament's Most Valuable Player award.

Perez’s play was one of good position, good fortune and good timing. Though she hadn’t made a shot since the first quarter, both she and Moore had confidence she could make the jumper she took to win the game.

The fact that she has only been with the program for a short while is even a plus. The first thing that popped into my head when Perez’s shot went down was the name Mike Giomi.

He might be a forgotten one-year player to some, but he was a one-year Hero of March in 1987, when head coach Jim Valvano rescued him from Indiana coach Bobby Knight’s doghouse and gave him a shot at redemption. He spent three years with the Hoosiers; at one point Knight yanked his scholarship and Giomi paid his own tuition to be miserable.

Unlike Perez, he had to sit out a year before he could play, but when he did join the lineup, he had an impact in scoring and rebounding. His lasting legacy, however, was being in just the right position in the 1987 ACC title game, when the sixth-seeded Wolfpack had to play top-seeded and second-ranked North Carolina.

In a hard-fought contest, the Wolfpack stayed close and made all 14 of its free throws, the final two by Vinny Del Negro with 21 seconds remaining. Giomi was a perfect 5-for-5 from the field, and Chucky Brown had 18 points and 10 rebounds.

Yet in the final seconds, when Carolina had the ball with a chance to win, it was Giomi who smothered the final rebound of Ranzino Smith’s errant shot to secure the Wolfpack’s second ACC title under Valvano.

It’s was an all-time underdog play, by an underdog player that no one expected to be in that position — kind of like Perez in Sunday’s title game.

That’s what Moore loves about coaching the Wolfpack, who brought up Valvano’s “Never Give Up” mantra in his postgame press conference. He’s not concerned that his team might not be a No. 1 seed in the upcoming NCAA Women’s Championship. He’d rather play with a slight shadow of being an underdog.

“I don’t mind flying under the radar,” Moore said. “At NC State, it seems like we kind of do that a lot.”

Tim Peeler is a regular contributor to The Wolfpacker and can be reached at tmpeeler@ncsu.edu.