Virginia Hosts No. 8 Louisville on Senior Day

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Feb. 28, 2015

CHARLOTTESVILLE, Va. – The Virginia women’s basketball team (16-12, 6-9 ACC) closes out the regular season by hosting No. 8 Louisville (24-4, 12-3 ACC) on Sunday, March 1 at 1 p.m. at John Paul Jones Arena.

The game will be televised live on the ACC Regional Sports Networks with Tom Werme on play-by-play and Debbie Antonelli providing analysis. Live streaming video will be available online on ESPN3 and the WatchESPN app. The game will also be broadcast on the radio on WINA-1070 AM with Jay James calling the action.

Senior forward Sarah Beth Barnette (Lexington, Ky.) will be honored before the game in the annual Senior Day Ceremony, taking place approximately 15 minutes prior to tip-off.

Virginia comes into the game tied for 10th place in the ACC standings with Georgia Tech, one game behind ninth-place NC State. The 10-15 seeds for the ACC Tournament will all play first-round games on Wednesday, March 4 while the 5-9 seeds receive a bye into the second round and will begin play on Thursday, March 5. The top four seeds earn a double-bye into the Friday, March 6 quarterfinals. Virginia owns the tiebreaker against NC State, but Georgia Tech has the advantage should they end up tied in the standings with UVa. The conference office will announce the official seedings and complete ACC Tournament bracket on Sunday evening. Virginia has lost five of its last six games, with four of those losses coming against ranked teams including Thursday’s 72-70 game at No. 15 North Carolina. The loss against an unranked team in that stretch was a 68-63 overtime game at Pitt.

Virginia had trailed by nine points, 70-61, with 2:25 left in the UNC game, but freshman guard Mikayla Venson (Arlington, Va.) hit a runner in the lane with 21 seconds remaining to finish erasing the deficit and tie the game, 70-70. North Carolina’s Alisha Gray took a shot with one second left on the clock, but missed. UNC’s Stephanie Mavunga grabbed the offensive rebound, taking an immediate shot just before the buzzer to score the winning basket.

After making a season-high 25 free throws and shooting 86.2 percent from the stripe against Virginia Tech last Sunday, the Cavaliers shot a season-low 41.2 percent from the line at UNC, making 7 of 17 attempts.

The Cavaliers fared much better with their field goal shooting, making 50.9 percent (28-of-55), the second-straight game, and the sixth time overall this season that UVa shot 50.0 or better from the field.

Junior guard Faith Randolph (Derwood, Md.) scored 24 points against the Tar Heels, her 10th 20-point game this season. Randolph went 4-of-5 from three-point range, her most-efficient long-range shooting game this season. In the last two games, Randolph is averaging 20.5 points per game, going 14-of-27 from the field (51.8 percent).

Randolph is one of two Virginia players closing in on the 1,000-point career milestone. Randolph comes into today’s game with 973 points. Senior center Sarah Imovbioh (Abuja, Nigeria), who had her 12th double-double of the year at UNC, needs only eight points to reach 1,000. She would be the 30th player in program history to join the 1,000-Point Club.

Imovbioh also has 760 career rebounds, four shy of moving into a tie for 10th place on the Virginia all-time rebounding list with Monica Wright (2007-10).

Imovbioh is 12 rebounds shy of tying Dawn Staley (1989-92) in ninth place. Imovbioh pulled in her 300th rebound of the season at UNC. She is the eighth player in program history to grab 300 or more rebounds in a single season.

Venson hit her 55th three-pointer of the season at UNC, which ranks 10th on the Virginia single-season made-three-pointer tally and is shooting an ACC-leading 39.6 percent from three-point range. Venson has scored in double-digits in each of the last four games, averaging 14.5 points per game in that span.

The series with Louisville is tied 1-1 after then-No. 4 Cardinals downed Virginia 67-55 earlier this season (Jan. 18) at the KFC Yum! Center. Louisville is No. 6 in the latest RPI rankings. The Cardinals have won five of their last six games including a 77-60 victory over BC on Thursday night. Their only loss in that span was a 68-52 game last Sunday at Notre Dame. The Cardinals’ defense surrenders the fewest points per game in the ACC (56.6) and have the best assist-to-turnover ratio (1.3). The Cardinals have three players averaging double-digit points with Mariya Moore pacing the team at 14.1 per game. Sara Hammond leads the team with 6.8 rebounds per game.

The 2015 ACC Women’s Basketball Tournament will be held March 4-8 at the Greensboro Coliseum. Ticket books, which include tickets for all 14 games of the five-day tournament, will remain at last year’s price – $99 each. This is the 16th consecutive year the Coliseum has played host to the event, the most of any venue.